#after all my irl friends but one left in other cities thus becoming long distance ones *sobs*

[katyspersonal]

Bro... I have this customer I learned to recognize despite her not appearing all very often, because she has really curly hair and recognizable face (very cute one). And like, I swear, whenever she spots me amongst the staff she gives this most genuine, most bright smile and her eyes actually shine with joy o_o' There is just something about the way her face changes when she happens to get her packages from me (I work at the post office)

And in retrospective I was not very attentive about the fact, but today she also asked me what my name was and pointed out something about feeling happy whenever it's my shift or something...? I kind of wonder whether she actually likes me, I swear this is the most puppy eyes look I've ever seen in my life ._." I mean if true that'd be awkward because I sworn off having relationship for a good while (for both poor mental health and spiritual reasons), but this feels flattering. Like, I can't even really articulate how much of an ego boost this feels like ._.

[cloud8andahalf]

I wanna ramble.

If you kept reading expecting something you won’t get much. I seriously am just rambling about how one of my stories Embers started and has grown. So, I started this book when I was 15 and it started through multiple reasons. First reason being I had a cool dream/nightmare that sort of interested me enough that I thought “hm, maybe I can write something based off that”. I honesty think this was the first story I did that with. I do it with a lot of others now. Anyway, had a dream about this huge corporate building and I was with a couple of friends and we were hacking into computers for some reason that I don’t remember and it ended with me getting the shit beat out of me by two other friends who weren’t so friendly in this dream, but they were cool irl. That was the dream and then shortly after having that dream I went to band camp and well in high school my friends enjoyed these silly stick figure comics I drew which featured me and all my friends doing absolutely ridiculous things and one of my friends, Marty, always died. It was different every time, but it was guaranteed that he died and would later resurrect. So on the way to band camp my friends asked if I was working on another comic. I wasn’t and I wasn’t really wanting to draw at that point and I had this story idea in my head and it was sort of like this lightbulb moment. I never traveled anywhere without some sort of paper back then so I started writing down my friends names and what I was going to call them in the book and created a rough outline for what I wanted the plot to be about. Each of my friends got a character and the only thing that I really knew for sure that was going to happen was that at some point our characters were going to break into some corporate like building and Marty’s character was going to die. Those were the only for sure things. Overall I believe I started with ten characters for sure and it quickly grew to about 19 within a week or so of thinking about it. All except for 4 were based off people I knew. So the story focused around Shiloh, Sen, and Rose who were siblings by choice and not by blood. They were the storytellers in this post-apocalyptic world where there’s only one city left on earth. At this point this city was called Salvatio. The three main characters, and their friends, lived in the slums of the city. If you were born in the slums you weren’t allowed to leave until you were sixteen, which all of the characters except for 3 within this slum house were allowed to leave as they wished. All except 4 of them had jobs either in a coal mine or a factory. James and Shiloh were chosen by Sen to spy for his golden plan to take over the city’s government. Sen, and the rest of them, believed they were treated unfairly by guards and the Lord of the city. So while all I wrote for this version of the story was up until a few riots in the slums started by a character based off a kid I knew. It pissed off Shiloh and I hit a block on where to go. I knew the ending which was supposed to be set in motion by James getting killed and the main characters and their friends breaking into the Lord’s Tower, finding 3 long-lost thought dead friends, and then killing Lord Tobius after he tells everybody that Shiloh was actually originally born in a rich sector of town. Shiloh or Sen kills the Lord, and Shiloh thinks she sees a tree in the distance over the very large walls of the city. It was going to end something like that with a sort of cliffhanger ending of them leaving the town and nobody knowing if they’d really survive or not outside the city in the wasteland. That version was what I had for about twos years or so. Then I decided to go backwards and think about ‘okay how did these kids come to live/be born in the slums of this city. Why are they there and how’d they get a house?’ What happened was that the 3 long-lost thought dead characters named Hatch, Leola, and Keemi suddenly had more than just revolutionary reasons for leaving twelve little kids alone in a house. I had a bunch of other characters pop into my head that I just killed straight out in a huge riot that I had already had as part of Shiloh, Sen, and Rose’s backstory since that’s the riot where they found each other and became a weird little family. So now I’ve got these new characters and I’m sort of falling in love with one of the characters Spencer and I’m thinking, what if he wasn’t dead? Then I’m thinking, what if none of them were dead? What if not everybody lived in the same house? And then I’m thinking more into details of why should it end in a cliffhanger? I know for a fact that tree was dead. Nuclear war just happened. So a lot of things change. None of my original characters are now working and I add a bunch of older characters and some younger. Hatch, Leola, and Keemi become slightly bigger jerks through doing this, but I would later give them a little sympathy for ditching their family and friends to restart life under fake IDs. I also changed the entire atmosphere of the slums. It changed from barren trash heaps into something that looks a lot like the water area of the slums in Jak 2 (because that’s what it’s based on). But there is now the characters who live in the Safe House, a total of about 14 or 16. Of the original twelve there were eight still in the Safe House. The other four were moved. Aubrey and Lanie were given a parent and lived in a house on the other side of the slums. Xavier was given a shitty past and was homeless. James lived in a broken sewage pipe and was very happy about it. As I revamped main characters I also changed two later characters into super geniuses. Much like adding Spencer had been in hope of adding a little dry humor, these two also were changed in hopes for a bit of humor in a book that was growing very depressing. Cat and Renny were these two kids who had excelled in academics to the point of graduating high school at fifteen, getting through college in two years and landing jobs as researchers for the Lord by the time they were eighteen. All their coworkers found them obnoxious and they decided to live up to it. They quickly become friends with Shiloh and James who got jobs at the tower under fake names/pasts to be a handyman and a janitor. The slums also got a new set of rules. Those born in the slums didn’t technically exist in city records. Which meant that those born in the slums couldn’t get jobs outside the slums. The slums was also called Sector 0 and was originally meant to be a place for prisoners. People started having children there and pretty soon you have those who are numbered prisoners and those who were unlucky enough to be born there. The city didn’t differentiate between the two. They were all locked in there no matter what. Ed, who was an added character to the safe house, found a way out of the slums through a broken sewer grate and uses it to his advantage to get food and later on get his friend/love interest a safer job than the mines/ working for the underground market. Anyway I revamped the story completely, changed settings, characters, even made Lord Tobius less stereotypically evil and made his uncle more of a dick instead. I added an entire second part to the book and I took out some of the silly things from the original story including some smaller characters and some that were originally huge roles became very small. Such as the character Brona who had been added only to keep with friends who had been in that original dream I had. I also added a character who has become more and more important as I’ve worked on the book. She was only added because a friend asked to be added in my book and I figured why not I’ve got somewhere she can fit and thus Maruxa was born. The book stopped being just me focusing on friends changing the world for the better and more like a bunch of young people starting a revolution and having to live with the consequences of what they’ve done in the second half. And also took some ties of things I was going through in real life such as losing friends and growing distant with those you were once super close to. The story has become a focus on the world not being in black and white, but I also added them going out into the wasteland because I wanted them to see that the world was healing as well. At this point I change the name of the city from Salvatio to Avalon because I thought it was more fitting. I create a small town unknown to those in Avalon called Haven which is about 600-1000 miles away. I can’t remember the exact math. I keep the old title I had given the book though and make the title a little more obvious to how it ties into the book by literally having the characters call themselves “Embers” as their revolutionary group name. From the time I started tearing apart and rewriting and editing and rewriting and tearing it apart again at 18, it’s been about five years that I’ve been working on this newer version. I haven’t started the book again, not for lack of trying. I have yet to find a beginning that I like. I know the ending, which is still a sort of cliffhanger thing for the audience to decide what happens. I know these characters in and out now. Except the villains who still are kinda weird. Now since I started Embers eight years have passed and I obviously don’t see it the same way I used to. I’ve decided to kill a lot more characters than just James. Though the fact that James has to die is very concrete just because I have to keep that gag in my life even if I’m the only one who will ever see it as a gag. Of course, I’m also very aware that I may never finish this book. It was originally a nanowrimo thing that got me to write the first draft, but now I’ve got hundreds of pages telling me who these characters are and dozens of scenes of what will happen with them, but I can’t grasp the things that I really want in the book which is something to lighten a really dark mood. Maybe at some point I’ll find it, but yeah, this has just been a very long rambling about my story. I like it.