Years ago, when I was just starting to get into fandom, I found this one work that resonated with me in particular, which I just couldn't put down despite the rather long length. In fact, it might have been the first long-form work I made it through. I followed it for months, and caught up right as the major story events were beginning to unfold. Waiting a month for the first update, I reread the entire story once again in excitement after the new chapter came out. Then I waited for the second. And waited. For months, before I finally resigned myself to its Irish goodbye.
It was a year and a half later before I received an update on this fic, which I had left behind but not forgotten. Anticipating a new chapter, I was ecstatic. But that giddy glee quickly faded upon the realization of what the update was. The author, discontented with the quality of his writing, had made the executive decision to kill the fic in its current form and rewrite it from scratch. That project lasted all of two chapters before it, too, was canned. And that was it.
That whole story was a slightly long-winded way of saying that I've also experienced the frustration of a fic being abandoned, and the sadness when you realize it's never going to be finished. Which is why it pains me to say that I may be doing that to those of you reading this right now. In the fall of 2021, several life events transpired to eat up enough of my time to stop me from writing - well, that's not entirely true. I'm sure that if I had the same passion for this work as when I started, I could have found the time somewhere to keep it going. But therein lies the crux of the issue. Passion.
Frankly, I've not had any motivation to work on this fic for a multitude of reasons. Weighing most on my mind would be the truly abysmal state of the first several chapters. I originally wrote this story to get back into creative writing, with a kick of sudden inspiration and not much else. Unfortunately, I think it shows. The prose is weak, the pacing is too fast, and most direly, the characterizations are extremely flat. I especially hate how little I develop Cathy and Sahara before their deaths, especially because their sudden character development makes it clear that they're about to bite dust. And even for those still living, perhaps three feel at all fleshed out. I want the roster to consist of soldiers you care for, and right now, I've given you no reason to for the majority of them.
To give some background, this story came directly from an AAR I had done for an actual XCOM 2 campaign, filled with custom characters based on a group of friends. The original conceit for this fic was threefold. Firstly, develop a compelling range of operatives, all loosely based on real people but moulded by their situation and environment, and grounded in realistic emotion. Secondly, write engaging, plot-driving, and meaningful action scenes as a proof of concept that a fight scene can be rich in descriptive and physical imagery and complex in its narration without being a waste of the reader's time. Thirdly, fashion a story roughly along the beats of an actual campaign of which I had an AAR written up.
Ultimately, I don't believe the fic lived up to any of these three fully. The first was always halting, the third began to fade as I pursued my own direction with the narrative, and the second, though perhaps the most successful, was also the most prone to exhaustion, as one can only write so many urban combat encounters before they all begin to feel a bit samey. I think it was when I wrote the car chase that I realized I'd fundamentally lost the XCOM-ness to the story. By itself, this would have been fine, and simply an evolution of the tale, but combined with a first 20k words that displeased me and burnout from trying to conceive of creative ways for aliens and humans to shoot each other, I couldn't find it in me to progress, especially when life handed me a golden excuse.
Yet despite all this, I don't want to give up on the fic. I still feel like there's a story to tell here. I'm just not sure I can tell it, at least not right now. What I'll promise is this. I'll make a good-faith attempt to try and figure out if I can create a next chapter worth reading. If I can, and I find some spare inspiration somewhere, I'll continue to release new chapters while retrofitting and potentially adding new chapters in the early sections to flesh out everyone. It'll balloon the length of the fic from around 150k words, which was the initial goal, to perhaps double that. But given the scope and number of characters, that might be necessary to satisfy my expectations for the work.
No guarantees, though. I very well might find, looking back, that it's going to be unsalvageable. But if you found something engaging in my writing, then I do have something I can promise. I've got at least one or two fic ideas currently brewing, and hopefully I'll be releasing the first chapters soon. They won't be much like A New Phoenix, and aren't set in the XCOM universe, but I hope if you choose to follow through you'll enjoy them. Until next time, this is TheMysticDreamer, signing off.