Hello, everyone. This is inspiration-arts. I know that this might frustrate some of you, but I'm re-vamping this story again. It's been five years—five years!—since I've updated, but from time to time I see alerts and reviews for this story. I know that I do have a following, small as it might be, and I'm sorry for keeping all of you waiting for so long.
I would go ahead and continue with the story as written, but here's the thing: I've changed. A lot. When I started this story, I was in high school. Now I've finished my second year of college. I've done a lot of growing up, and it's pretty safe to say that I've gone from child to quasi-adult! And that's a good thing: how can a child understand love and romance? How can a child write about the nuances of racism, sexism, and homophobia in the 1970s? As I've grown I've experienced the pain and humiliation that comes with having to deal with racism and sexism, and I've experienced the misery and confusion that comes from realizing that I sometimes really hate myself because I'm a black woman and that although I've experienced prejudice I have, on some level, internalized homophobia, ableism, etc. But because I've confronted those feelings, at least a little, I can write about them and give you characters that actually seem like real people. And all that aside, my writing's much better now! Yay!
To be honest, I started writing Mixed Messages because I thought that Kip Pardue was hot and I wanted to see him make out with someone that looked like me. And that's fine! But now that I'm older, that's not enough. I want to give all of you the story that I would have loved to read when I was younger: a well-written story with human-seeming characters that undergo a real conflict and come out on top. I can't say that this story will come out soon, but I'll restart it by mid-August at the latest. And to put in a shameless plug for another story, I'm working on a Samurai Jack fic that I'm posting in a month or so, so watch out for that while you're waiting to be entertained! As I said, I'm in college, so I can't promise that I'll update every week, but I'll do my best. Thank you for your time, and thank you so much for choosing to support a story that I'm sure you all thought was dead. It means a lot.
Sincerely,
inspiration-arts