Completing Merge is an awesome feeling for me. It was by far the biggest project I've undertaken, at nearly 100k words. I've never done NaNoWriMo or anything of the sort, and my early forays were more short stories, or at best novellas. Like 12 years ago I was actively posting works on the Pokémaster forums (which is apparently still going, holy cow), and I finished a Pokémon medieval fanfiction novella of about 20k words and a short story of 6k words, and another Pokémon/Cardcaptor Sakura crossover fic of about 20k words (though never finished that one). The writing in those projects was terrible, though. Too much telling, not enough showing, and ye gads, the sentence structure and pacing was awful.

Then a while later I took some creative writing classes in college, and that helped a fair bit. Learning a lot more about meter, diction, flow, and more of the technical skills helped immensely, but there was still a little je ne sais quoi missing from my style. I started Merge a decade ago around that time, too. Got about ten chapters in and then stopped. Ten years later I got back into writing, and decided, dammit, I'm going to finish Merge. I liked the concepts, but I rewrote it as a furry piece, as well as applying my more mature self to the work. Even though I wasn't actively writing fiction for those ten years, I'm amazed at how much my style had changed in that time just by getting older, wiser, and more mature. Well, older, perhaps :)

To be fair, looking at the first chapters of Merge and my last few chapters, it's clear that I've improved still since starting the project 8 months ago. Which kinda rankles me, because consistency... or lack thereof. But whatever, it's internet published for free, not going to stress over it too much. Just hopefully I can apply the lessons I've learned and tools I've found to continue improving.

Anywho, future projects! My previous journal asked folks if there were specific characters from Merge they'd like to learn more about, and I've gotten Axel's history and Laura's job as primary points of interest, so perhaps I'll write a couple short stories there eventually. In the meantime I've been playing around with a magic cyberpunk-esque dystopian future. Probably just another short story, but if I like the characters or the setting enough, maybe a series of shorts may be in order. At least I'll have some free time this weekend to finish it off. Also probably a couple more erotica/smut pieces in the future too, because those are fun :)

And that's where I'm at! Basically, expect more stuff soonish!