Dear readers,

This seems so strange to do. I know that a lot of you have waited a long, long time for chapter 14 of After the Fall and I know that I will be disappointing you with what I am about to say to you.

For all that time, the last two years, I had every intention of continuing on with this story, I really did. I had the plot for each chapter planned out from the very beginning so it was only a matter of filling gaps and adding meat to the bones.

To give you some idea as to why I have not written in so long, because it has been a long time for me, well over a year since I worked on any of my novels including this one, I can tell you that my life became very distracting and then very hard for a long time.

You see, you might remember I added something in an author's note a long while ago mentioning the fact that I had met a man who had begun to distract me from my writing. I know that not many of you will be all that interested in the intricacies of my life, but for those of you that are, I will tell you that I fell in love with this man very hard, and what made it all so time consuming was that he was not in love with me. To him, I was the best friend. I actually always used to say to him that I was the Hermione to his Harry, he needed me but not in that way. I was just the best friend, bookish and nerdy and bossy and a little too intense. He liked girls like Ginny, fabulously thin and svelte and athletic and bubbly and strong and endlessly happy and positive... All these things that I really wasn't!

Of course, he didn't know what any of that meant because he hadn't read Harry Potter (I FUCKING KNOW RIGHT) so it went right over his head.

This time was very hard for me, because though I had known betrayal and heartbreak I had never experienced unrequited love before and I didn't know how to deal with it. In the case of the former, it's very easy to be angry in one's pain, but in that case of the latter, who is there to be angry at apart from oneself? Every part of me wanted to walk away and leave him alone, get along with my life. But he was the closest confident I'd ever had. He really was the Harry to my Hermione. He understood me better than anyone I'd ever met. He was my best friend. So I felt completely torn up over whether I should stay or go...

We ended up travelling around Australia together (a bit drastic I know). During our journey he'd started talking about this music festival he wanted to take me to and he kept telling me that he just knew he'd meet his soul mate there, that she'd find him and so it was imperative that we go. Because he just knew his one true love would be at this festival.

You can imagine how this made me feel.

To cut a long story short here, it turned out to be me. There was a moment between us at this festival, far too magical to put into words within such a limited space. Think of Draco seeing Hermione after having taken the Zeitei Otrava for the first time. It was something sort of like that. It was a quintessential happy ending really. He realised he loved me and I was able to confess that I loved him too.

We just sort of tumbled into our life together after that.

I fell pregnant and miscarried. We grieved our loss deeply and it almost tore apart our relationship because we were both so low and hadn't yet experienced one another like that. When we finally began to pull ourselves back into the light and find happiness together again, we discovered that I had fallen pregnant almost immediately after losing the first (hot tip girls, apparently our bodies are super fertile after losing a child).

So we had a baby, a little boy.

I know, I know, none of it was planned, and all in so short a time. It was not our intention to have a child and we were careful but... the universe seemed to have other plans for us. It's been hard, it really has. And being a mother for the first time is just... wow. At first I couldn't write because the post pregnancy hormones made my brain all foggy and useless, and then I couldn't write because I had this little being, my son, crawling all over me at every waking moment and I was far too busy being so totally in love with both my son and my partner.

I would receive your reviews and messages and mean with all my heart to write back, to continue on with the story but there just didn't seem time.

Then, a few weeks ago, inspiration hit in the dead of the night and though I knew my son would make things difficult, I also knew I had to begin writing again.

I have been very happy with my life, though it's been hard, but there has been a constant hole where my work used to be, my passion for writing. I knew that it would come back someday and I accepted that and, well, now it has.

So I went back and reread the Harry Potter books, the whole series, followed by Victim of the Fall and After the Fall, with the intention to reinvigorate my passion for the story and begin where I had left off.

But, I'll be honest, in doing that I realised that my view of the world has been so altered, how I look at myself, how I experience my spirituality, how I interact with the people around me, that I no longer feel involved with Hermione and Draco as I had written them.

So I am deeply sorry to say that I will not be continuing on with After the Fall. This will be the final chapter. I am so sorry, I know how patient many of you have been with me. I so wish I could finish it.

But my mind is made up, there will be no convincing me otherwise, it is time for me to move onto something better. And when I tell you what that will be, perhaps you will be mollified. You see, when I read Victim of the Fall again, I found my mind very much ignited with the passion for the story itself and the vision I once had for it, but I was also aware in a way I had not been before how many mistakes I had made in regards to the technique, the plot, the characters, the emotional expression.

Honestly, reading it through again I found Hermione's life so thoroughly full of drama that it was difficult to continue to feel for her. Every three or so chapters I'd written her as having some sort of huge emotional breakdown. It's not that I think the idea of having regular upheavals of that kind is wrong or silly, some of us really do experience our lives like that. But I felt that I had not written it properly, that I could do it better with the knowledge I now have about myself and the world.

So I'm going to write it again. That's my plan. Some things will be the same, some will be different. The plot will inherently be as it was... perhaps. I don't know until I finish really.

I know that many of you will say, just as my partner has been, that I should just do something new, perhaps something of my own, get back to my novels that lay unfinished and untouched. To that I would respond that I am just following feeling and taking inspiration where I can find it. And right now this is all I want to do. I feel like this is a part of the writing process that us authors need to become well acquainted with. When it comes to fanfiction there's a huge benefit in that you receive constant feedback on your work but at the same time, as you're posting chapter by chapter, there's not much room for drafting and re-evaluating.

So perhaps you might consider that this version of Victim of the Fall was the first draft and you are all my editors. Now we will move on to the second draft, which will be better.

I will leave this version up on for those who feel attached to this story and begin posting the new one soon. If you don't wish to read it, I entirely understand.

To round this off I would like to say that the reason I have chosen to share all this with you, information that is perhaps not entirely relevant about my life, because all of you who were with Victim of the Fall from the beginning were there for me when I was very alone, had no social life, completely cut myself off from the world and my friends to write, and you made that time a time that I cherished. In essence you made my days happy and inspired. Though we did not know one another and did not speak really outside of the story, you were my closest allies and friends through that time.

Thank you.

I hope that this next journey will be just as rewarding.

With all my love,

Desdemona