No, this isn't another chapter in the saga of I've Never Told Anyone Before.  This is a heartfelt apology and the reason that another chapter will take awhile to get written.

            Let me tell you a story.  I'm a teenager who's well-behaved (in real life, that is; online, I'm a shounen ai fanatic), and my parents are insanely protective (and biased as well).  Due to their protectiveness, they're sometimes a lot snoopier than they ought to be.  This isn't helped by the fact that our Internet browser keeps a comprehensive history complete with screenshots; also, I'm required by—well, by rule—to keep all of my computer disks next to the monitor.

            So one day I returned from Drama practice to find an outraged mother waving a website's ten-page-odd printout at me.  "What the hell is this?" 

I grabbed it and slowed the frantic movements down enough to read my shoujo ai disclaimer and then the opening sentences of I've Never Told Anyone Before.  As I later found out, she'd checked the browser's history and discovered it, knowing only that I'd visited that site, presumably to read the story.  I thought at the time she'd gone through my disks and found it. 

So what's the first thing I said?  "But, Mom, I don't write things like this often!"
            All hell broke loose; she was absolutely livid.  Catching her precious daughter reading such trash was bad enough; finding out she'd written it was far too much for Mom.

The "heated discussion" (remember, she had me cornered by the door) wound up with me racing into my room while she screamed up the stairs, "You've revealed you're a lesbian!"  (No, I'm not—I'm not even bi.)  Mom also forbade me to read anything (since I obviously got sick ideas from it), write anything (since everything I wrote was obviously porn), or use the Internet (since I obviously only went to porn sites).

When I went to school next day, I angrily revealed all of the above to my four closest friends, Binc, Augmentia, Tafai, and Radiaki.  However, I changed the shoujo ai to shounen ai, for four reasons: I have written shounen ai, Mom could have discovered it as easily, Mom would have been equally irate, and finally because I definitely didn't want them to come to the same conclusion Mom had.  (Embarrassingly, they did have to have the meaning of shounen ai revealed to them, since although they're all programmers and frequent Internet surfers, they didn't know that snippet of 'Net Japanese.)

But they came up with a wonderful idea.  I have a Palm (Vx, if you're curious) and so does Binc (M105).  Using their idea, I could write anything I wanted (namely, this, and other shounen/shoujo ai) on the Palm, then beam the file to Binc during school.  Once she was home, she would use her cradle to upload the file to her file-sharing program.  (I have a cradle and the same program, but it's too risky to leave any evidence on my home computer.)  She would then e-mail the HTML file to my Web-based e-mail account, [email protected].  At school the next day, thanks to the media center's DSL connection and short staffing, I could grab the attachment from my e-mail account, save it to the C drive (hard drive), then quickly upload it here to FanFiction—hopefully all of that before the librarians noticed I wasn't doing research.  I'd then delete it from the hard drive, and go on my merry way.

Confused?  So was I, the first time I heard their plan.  It doesn't really matter, except to note that that way is how this piece was written/uploaded, and to inform you all that this is  a very timely maneuver (since I'm nearly always caught by the librarians before I can complete the job).

In short, it will be quite some time before the actual Chapter Three of I've Never Told Anyone Before is written or posted here.  But do not despair, please!  To amuse me—I mean, yourselves—you can e-mail me, or you can direct your friends here, or you can review this story more, or ::hint hint:: you can check out my other stories on FanFiction and review them, of which another is Tamora Pierce and another is shoujo ai.  (I can suit your every pleasure. . . .)

Hope to write more soon, and hope Mom un-grounds me from the Internet at home, reading, and writing soon!  (You wouldn't believe how bored it's possible to get.  I've taken to art, which, despite Tafai's and Augmentia's hopes, is not my strong suit.  It's Lark/Rosethorn art, too—if anyone tells me a good hosting site, I can ::crosses fingers:: scan it at school, and upload it there so you can all see.  Anything else?  Oh yeah—long live anime!)

Sincerely and sorrily,

            Liana Goldenquill