Hey, guys.

Um…so, wow.

Yeah.

Excuse me a minute. This could take a bit.

You, uh, might want to turn away and read My Immortal or something if you don't like sappy stuff. Just a thought.

It's been a while. To say the least.

A lot of you…well, I'm going to be frank here, I don't know exactly what you guys must be thinking about me right now. I imagine it probably involves a lot of pitchforks, death threats, and unkind descriptions of my mother, but I'll get to that later.

To be honest, me coming back on here was an accident, pure and simple. For all of 2009, and, let's face it, most of 2010 as well, I forgot that FF ever existed.

I've been on this site longer than I'd care to admit, and usually, when somebody quits, it's rather sudden. A few authors I knew, bless them, left this way. There was always an "aha" moment, a sudden spark of intuition coming down on them with the force of a thunderbolt, screaming "what the fuck are you doing with your life?"

And then they left.

Frankly, I kind of almost wish the same thing had happened to me. In retrospect, I realize that as much as I want to tell myself otherwise, I never really intended to quit and leave everything hanging. Truth be told, the identity I'd cultivated on FF at that point was nothing short of a twin brother, a dual persona I was all too willing to slip into in order to relieve myself from the pressures of real life.

I am told a lot of fanfic authors do this, but I digress.

My exit was anything but sudden. If anything, you could say it's still going on up to this very minute, and this note is a kind of clumsy attempt at closure. When I said I forgot FF existed a couple of paragraphs above, that's not entirely true. I did truly forget about it for several months, but every once in a while, I'd log on to my account, just for the hell of it, like the old times where, the morning after I'd posted a new chapter of Revolt or something, I'd race red-eyed to the computer to see how many new reviews I'd garnered overnight. Kind of like a visit from Santa or the Easter Bunny or something.

The difference here was that I didn't want to read the reviews anymore.

I wish I could pinpoint a reason- any reason for why I stopped updating for a long time. Perhaps it'd be easier for me- and for all of you- to come to terms with this whole episode if that were the case. Sadly, things are never that simple.

For a long time, I told myself it was writer's block. I kept telling myself and everybody else that until 2008 turned into 2009, and 2009 turned into 2010, and then I realized I couldn't really say that anymore without losing what little self-respect I had left. I'm ashamed to admit that that's always been a favorite scapegoat of mine, but I defy you to find another person on this site that doesn't operate the same way. Show me one, and I'll show you a liar. Or a better writer than I am, at any rate.

I can say that because, looking back, I realize that's what I was while I was writing: a big pathological liar building a pyramid out of my own spider-silk falsehoods, never knowing that my end wasn't a question of if, it would be a question of when.

(See, I can actually make up decent sentences now.)

The "accident" I referred to above was actually a series of accidents, a long butterfly-effect chain of individual links that converged into the confession you're reading right now.

The first thing that happened was that I played the video game Trauma Team. (I know this seemingly has nothing to do with the story, but bear with me for a moment here.) I've always been a great fan of the Trauma Center series, even if it is fiendishly difficult to the point that there is a slight Wiimote-shaped dent on my bedroom wall to this day. Trauma Team was a slight step down from the series, in my opinion (no more GUILT? Goddamn it, Atlus), but it was still a very good game, and it planted a seed of an idea in my mind.

Normally, when I get ideas, they turn out to be Bad Things, but I'm unsure how to rate this particular one. After you finish reading this, I'll let you judge for yourself.

The second thing that happened was that I went to college in a pretty big city in the midwestern region of North America. College is usually the "aha" catalyst and the death knell for all but the most dedicated fanfic writers. I would blame college for this whole thing except for the fact that 1) that's a load of bullshit, and I knew it, and 2) I was already lying to myself about the writer's block thing, and I didn't need another alibi to juggle.

I almost had my "aha" moment when I got off the plane and stepped onto campus. I probably should have had it half a year earlier, when I got my acceptance letter in the mail, but I was still in a writer's block haze (and I now realize I can't use that term without feeling a little icky inside).

I was 18 then. I was an adult, about to be born again into the oft-quoted real world, and as far as I was concerned, fanfiction had no place in the realm I was about to inherit. I had other things to worry about, bigger fish to fry. Revolt was nothing more than an open-ended footnote in the second or third chapter of my life; it was something I could tell my grandkids about decades from now, just to get them to say how stupid my generation was. Posting stories about a game on the internet. Puhleeze, Grandpa.

I would probably still be thinking that to this day if I hadn't walked in on one of my floormates reading Harry Potter fanfiction on this very site.

In such a situation, most people would hurriedly Alt-Tab and pray that the other person mistook the blue-white layout for Facebook or some other site, but said floormate, for better or worse, is a hardass. He doesn't give a shit what other people think. (A lot of people in college are like that.)

"Dude, you read fanfiction?" I tried to put as much derision on the last word as possible, ignoring the hypocrisy crystallizing in my stomach.

He looked at me as if I'd just misstated the Banach-Tarski paradox.

(He's also a math major. Math majors are serious hardasses.)

"Yeah." His answer was as nonchalant as if I'd asked him to calculate the tip on a restaurant check, or something. "What? It's a good story."

I decided not to tell him that I was an author on the site, or that my crowning achievement was writing over half a million words about a Korean MMORPG that everyone played for a couple of months in middle school and then left for Starcraft at the earliest opportunity.

I nonchalantly pretended to read over his shoulder for a couple of minutes, then left.

(As it turned out, the Harry Potter fic actually was a good story, but that's neither here nor there.)

The third thing that happened was that I went on FF- for real, this time- and decided to send a personal message to a certain someone.

If you've been on FF for any significant amount of time, you always find one author that you absolutely idolize- the first author who makes you think that fanfiction is not all complete garbage, and that there might actually be something in them besides a lot of blatant Mary Sue-ing and love scenes insulting to the sexuality of all organisms on Earth.

(After typing that, I just got the half-heartwarming, half-horrifying thought that for a lot of people, I might be that author. In which case I have to say: sorry for being a crap role model.)

For privacy reasons, I will not reveal the identity of my idol author. (That, and the fact that if you ever read one of his fics, it will make everything I've ever written look like tauntaun poo.) I will, however, tell you what I wrote to him. I've never told anyone else this, either, so besides him, you guys are the first to hear about this.

I told him that I loved his work. Really loved it. Loved it so much that if they ever build a machine to anthropomorphize text, I would be the first to make love to his stories. (Okay, I didn't use that exact phrase, but that's roughly what I was trying to convey.) I told him that I originally started out on this site as a foul-mouthed preteen who used too many poop jokes, but after reading his work, I was convinced that fanfiction was as worthy a medium of art as anything else.

I also told him that I'd written my college application essay about his fanfiction, and that I'd got into my dream school because of it.

Yeah.

I wish I were making this up.

After I'd finished pouring out my guts into the little sickly-blue text box, I clicked the send button. There was a moment where I thought "Hey, this could end up being a Really Bad Idea", but at that point, it was a bit late for regrets. Plus, I was counting on the fact that most authors never answer their private messages, using myself as an example.

I did not expect him to write back.

I also did not expect him to offer his sincere congratulations and well-wishes, instead of asking me to get bent.

I won't get into everything he said, but one thing in particular resonated- that he didn't write for blood, guts, or glory. An anonymous office worker at some design or animation company, he wrote because he wanted to- because he saw the joy in it- and inspiring others to do so was about the highest validation he could hope to achieve.

He ended by telling me to never stop writing, and wished me a happy school year.

After that, I opened up Word and started writing about Trauma Team.

And that's how I ended up back here.

As a writer, it's always fun (and necessary, I would argue) to read things you've written earlier in your life to see how much you've improved since then. For me, however, the process was so cathartic that it almost hurt, and after reading one old story, I was afraid to read the rest.

I tried, though.

Besides noticing that FF completely ruined my formatting and section lines, I realized that the progress I've made as a writer, as small as it may be, was nevertheless exponential in regards to where I started.

There is a lot of shit I've written that I'm not particularly proud of, which is all the more painful because I know that at some point, I was naïve enough to believe it was good enough to publish, good enough for me as a good writer.

When you read your own writing, it isn't just words and grammar that you absorb. For better or for worse, it's a powerful tool for mental recall, and when you read these things, you remember not only the words but your state of mind when you wrote them, and what possessed you to arrange them in one way and not another. That, in particular, made me realize something unpleasant, but it was something that I know I have to confront if I want to advance as an author.

A lot of my earlier works are- there's no getting around it- bad. They would be perfect poster children for reinforcing all the negative stereotypes that give fanfiction much of its stigma today. There are things I've written that literally made me cringe, things that made me say, out loud, "What were you thinking when you thought this was a good idea?", and then I'm quiet because I know the answer. Incidentally, if I ever read the phrase "like a hot knife through butter" again, I think I will throw up in my mouth a little.

Being an amateur writer isn't a crime, though. This is the reason I don't believe in flaming, even if my first instinct is that the guy really deserves it, because rogue and rouge are not the same damn thing; everyone, and I mean, everyone (except my idol writer, of course) has room for improvement, and most people on this site do not consciously set out to write a bad story, so you cannot honestly blame them. However, when I reread my own works years after writing them, there is something that makes me wince more than any bad grammar could.

Arrogance.

When I reread my stories, I couldn't help feeling the ego was so thick, oozing out from between the lines, that you could probably cut it with a knife if you tried. This holier-than-thou attitude is one of the few things I've genuinely despised about fanfiction, and realizing that I was guilty of it the whole time only twists the knife further.

This isn't more evident anywhere than in Revolt, and all the sub-stories it spawned. You could say that I let all the fame go to my head, which some reviews actually did note. I suspect a lot more people would have said this, but were too polite to. The Irrelevant Intercept "filler" chapters I did are the worst offenders by far, which are, upon closer inspection, basically huge rants about my oh-so-criminally low review-to-hit-ratio and how everyone who complains about my writing style and my non-canonicity can take their complaints and shove them up their capes. I'd put some excerpts here, but it makes me feel uneasy just copying them, let alone pasting.

Suffice it to say I was a bit of a jerk, and it shows.

You might say I stopped writing Revolt after Chapter 26, but really, I stopped writing after the first filler chapter- really writing, without regard to blood, guts, or glory. I wasn't writing for myself anymore, I was writing for a huge monstrous amalgam of my own desire for fame, expecting reviews like payments on stock dividends. When I said reading your own writing is the perfect memory recall device, I mean it. There are parts I literally remember rushing through, or borderline plagiarizing from another source, just to meet the imaginary deadline from my own greedy subconscious. Some scenes- in the later chapters especially- are just patchwork, like Frankenstein made text, where you can just see me trying to hold the plot together like a patient in a psych ward. I'm not particularly proud of them either.

I think I realized this myself, subconsciously, when I wrote the fake previews for Chapter 27 of Revolt and tried to pass them off as stories. Yes, they were good for a cheap laugh, which I kind of needed, but all they were were futile attempts to stave off a deadline that I knew in my heart I couldn't make, because my heart wasn't in it anymore. I no longer had control over Revolt at this point. Instead of the innocent epic I'd wanted to write, it had become a hungry thing that I had to feed, corrupted by my own desire.

It probably goes without saying that I had no plans to write Revolt II, either. That was another lie.

The thing that really got to me when I was rereading Revolt were the characters' death scenes. Every time I read myself killing a character, I almost cried- not because the scenes were sad, but because reading them years from now made it feel like I was milking their demises for a cheap upsurge in reviews.

Which I guess, deep down, amidst all the author's notes and yells to review more, was what I had been aiming for all along.

After I killed Ascion, I had to stop reading.

I wish I could say that it's just a story about MapleStory, big deal, get over it, but that would be a slap in the face to everyone who's ever written a story about MapleStory, and everyone who's ever written fanfiction at all. Just because it's about MapleStory doesn't give you the right to slack off because it's not about Final Fantasy or something, and just because it's fanfiction of all things doesn't give you the right to slack off because it's not a "real" story.

Besides, it wasn't just any story.

It was Revolt of the Archers.

Okay, folks, we're going to take a quick five-minute intermission to let you recover from the unsafe levels of melodrama you've just been exposed to. Get up, maybe take a drink of water. Go for a stroll. Read a story- a real one. Loljk. But seriously, do take a breather. That can't be healthy for you.

Ready? Right. Let's move on. The best is yet to come.

You can imagine how much I wanted to read the hundred or so reviews I'd amassed over the years, after wading through so much of my own hubris. I can't tell you how many times I moved my cursor over the number only to jerk it away, promise myself I'd do it later, and go on Facebook or something. The prospect literally made my stomach turn. No points for guessing why.

Eventually, though, I realized I was just being a coward. Besides, there was no way I could let myself publish this thing without doing so.

I had to do it in an empty room, though, because I kind of expected that my eyes and head would explode from the rays of hate emitted by my computer screen, and I didn't want to make a mess.

That was not what happened. After the fourth page or so, I cried.

Just a little.

I swear.

I know that might not be the most flattering thing to make public on the internet, but going from rereading through all my previous faults, to reading about how much people loved the story in spite of them, wanted me to continue, still had their bloody faith in me even after all those delays, those fake-outs, and my running away because I just couldn't take it anymore.

What a mood whiplash that was.

You guys are fucking awesome. Even the death threats for not updating were supportive in their own way. Just amazing.

I wish I could have given you better. Yes, all of you, even you guys in the back row there.

You deserve it.

There are some parts of me that say I never should have written Revolt, that it was an example of fanboyism completely gone off the deep end. Like the classic mad-scientist-monster movie, it got too big for me to control. I was destroyed by my own creation. I tried to bite off more than I could chew. Name your cliché.

But ultimately, I don't regret it. I do regret turning into a giant review-monger and grinding out chapters like an overworked soap opera machine, but I don't regret writing Revolt in the first place.

When I first reread the story- the first few chapters, before all that filler crap and sub-stories and previews that never came to materialize- I saw some pretty sloppy writing that I'm a little bit ashamed of.

But I also saw a soul struggling to emerge, a spirit wanting to fly free and plant the seed of a fourteen year-old boy's imagination, a voice that demanded to be heard by someone.

A lot of people have told me that I've inspired them to write their own Maple stories. That, if anything, is probably the most gratifying, even more so than the reviews that tell me I'm awesome and I deserve a castle made out of Zakum Helms. I finally understand, maybe, how my idol writer felt when I wrote him that message a couple months back telling him how he'd inspired me in the first place. Maybe it isn't about blood, guts, and glory after all.

Maybe fanfiction, and writing, is about something more.

One more thing I made myself do before I let myself publish this is play MapleStory myself, just one more time. I thought I'd forgotten my password and PIN a long time ago, but lo and behold, when I went to the Nexon web site just for kicks, there was an option that told me I could reset my password and PIN.

What did I have to lose?

I turned on my old PC and began to download the game client. While I did so, I had a cursory look around the interwebs about how much the game had changed these past years. I wanted to see if it was the same world I remember whiling away my middle school hours in.

I wanted to see if it was the same one that inspired me.

I only skimmed the relevant pages, but as far as I could tell, there was a thing called a Big Bang, and a bad guy called a Black Mage, and a lot of new islands, and a lot of new, "corrupted" classes, with guns, panthers, robots, and the like. And you could get to level 30 within a day, if my friend (who is almost as much of a sucker for this stuff as I am) was to be believed.

It's probably not an accident that my first thought was "This sounds like a really bad fanfiction." I should know.

As it turned out, my lovely old PC made the game nearly unplayable, because MapleStory is not quite as fun when it takes you all of 5 seconds to press the space bar and use Strafe, during which some level 150 guy with a spear twice as big as he is comes up and nukes the entire map with something that looks like it belongs in an episode of Gurren Lagann. That, and apparently the Big Bang screwed up every single map in the game. Yeah. Finding my way around Henesys was a treat. Still, I did find the Stone Golem Temple, so that's something, I guess.

I don't want to say that, like me, MapleStory lost sight of what was important somewhere along the way. Perhaps modern gaming culture is as depraved as people say it is, and that MMORPGs like this one are nothing more than a diversion for children to curse at each other, idling their time away all the while.

Or perhaps there are people still out there: people who, even as they mash their keyboards to oblivion as they struggle for the next level or the next scroll, look deeper, and realize that there might be something within.

Nexon did at least one thing right, though. They kept the music for Ellinia.

Like before, it was beautiful.

All this time, I've left the biggest and most obvious question for last: will I ever, perhaps, get around to finishing Revolt?

I don't know.

Perhaps it would be easier for me if I simply said no, but at this point, I've come to realize that Revolt is not just about me anymore. Whether I like it or not, it's become too big for that, and to kill it off would bring me closure only at the expense of others.

Looking back at what my fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen year-old self wrote so long ago, it would be criminally easy to make something up; to finish with a penultimate revelation, a massive, decidedly noncanon final battle, some more penultimate revelations, and an ending in which everyone may or may not live happily ever after. That would not be impossible to do.

The problem is, I don't want to do it.

My old demons are whispering over my shoulder: They'll be happy with whatever you throw at them. Hell, they're fucking pissing themselves that you're alive at all. Just do it and put everyone out of their misery.

What I would really like to do is rewrite Revolt; to make it the story I meant it to be, before the cliches and the filler and the months of ignoring constructive criticism I should have listened to instead.

Half a million words.

It would require nothing short of hard, unrelenting work, and perpetual strokes of brilliance to pick up where the holes in my plot left off.

It would require me to search deep down within myself to find the passion I once held, find it and bring it back to the surface, polish it like a gem.

It would require countless hours- hours of my adult life, not in a childhood where I had hours to spare.

In short, it would be a hell of a job.

But again, it would not be impossible to do.

To everyone: thank you, so much. You've been a great crowd.

-Kal Ancalas, 12/29/10