Hi, I'm Winter'sFangirl! I'm a big fan of Rick Riordan's books, Disney movies (BEAUTY AND THE BEAST and MULAN are my babies), The Selection by Kiera Cass, Under the Never Sky by Veronica Rossi, Incarnate by Jodi Meadows, Defiance by C.J. Redwine, Divergent, and The Fault in Our Stars. I'm addicted to tumblr, twitter, and Pinterest. Also, Avatar the Last Airbender (and Legend of Korra) and Once Upon a Time are the best ever. You should watch them.

cookies for all!!! (:)

Hi. So, a slightly more in-depth explanation of my unusually long absence.

I would first, however, like to note that this is not entirely an apology. I'm going to apologize for the laziness I had in October, but after that things got out of my control. And, as a nod of respect to myself, I am not going to apologize for something not entirely my fault.

I really haven't meant to to gone this long. Every day, I reminded myself that I needed to write, I needed to update. But then life happened.

November and December were really really hard. My grandmother, with whom I was VERY close (she practically raised me until I was six), died a few weeks before Thanksgiving. It was sudden, yet so expected. The timing was sudden- we thought she'd been tired from radiation on her brain, but the cancer had spread to her liver and she was shutting down. The doctors couldn't do anything, so they called in Hospice and sent her home.

She was dead three days later. We were all in the house- my mother, aunts, and cousins- and I was in the room when it happened.

Arrangements had to be made, people had to be called. That week was hard- there were so many funerals that weekend that they had to schedule it for a Monday, nearly a week after the date of death. There was a shortage of flowers, and things at home were tense and borderline disaster.

There is normally a grieving period where it's okay if a person 'checks out' on life and responsibility. I didn't get that grieving period. I had college finals and a ten-page paper to write, and high school finals and a five-page paper to write for those. Everything I'd put on hold for a few days was due, and I had to complete those along with everything else I had to do normally. It was stressful, and I cut out a lot of things I liked to do- playing piano, writing, reading- to get everything done. Amongst it all my depression crept back, a dull gray curtain trying to suffocate me. It was borderline black for a while, and I wanted a way out. Life wasn't getting any better, and it wasn't getting any worse. I spent a lot of time in my room, because I couldn't go out and act like everything was okay.

Only in the past month or so have I begun to come out of the funk I was in. I started listening to a lot of music, different than what I normally listened to. In the middle of January, I started reading again, and during the last week of the month I sat myself down and forced myself to write.

I'm still not doing well, not by a long shot. But I'm going to finish this story. I started it with the death of a grandmother, and I'm not going to stop just because I lost another one.

So, with school and everything, updates will not be regular. I'll try for a chapter every three weeks or so, but it all depends on how those weeks have gone.

I do have the next chapter started, and the final epilogue done. It's working the characters and the story to that point that's difficult.

Thank you to everyone who has left a review or a message, really. I've read them all, and they mean a lot. They make the okay days good, and the cruddy days okay. So thank you all for that