Hi everyone! It's been a long six years hasn't it?

I started writing Just a Game when I was 15 years old and I'm 22 now! Even long after I posted the final chapter, people have been leaving very kind and thoughtful notes for me to read, perhaps never knowing if I would ever actually see them. And I did! Sometimes months later, sometimes years later, but to everyone who took some time out of their day to leave a review or a favorite, I truly appreciate it.

There were many times over the years that I looked back at this story and thought about deleting it. I've grown a lot as a writer (or so I hope!) since my days in high-school furiously hand-writing chapters in notebooks during my most boring classes, just to get a head start on what I would craft when I got home that night. And I looked back at some of these chapters sometimes with quite a bit of embarrassment – over the way I handled some of these characters, how I wrote them, and the admittedly rather convoluted story I was leading them through. Every time I looked back, I always thought I could do so much better.

But that's ultimately the point! I got my start writing in fanfiction. When I was very young, I would daydream constantly about new stories for some of my favorite characters and their worlds that I loved so dearly. I started with self-inserts featuring myself and Nancy Drew, the Harley boys, moving on to rather nonsensical crossovers from everything from Maximum Ride, Animorphs, the Hunger Games, and even heckin' Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron. Then came the Avengers, a movie I saw maybe five times in the theaters in 2012. I was so inspired, by the story of heroism and coming together against terrifying odds, and Marvel became a fantastical way for me to escape some of the struggles I was going through in my actual life.

Without fanfiction, I don't think I ever would've begun my journey as a writer. I tried many times from middle school to high school to craft my own original works, and these were always failures. There was something both comforting and addicting about being able to take an established cast and world, craft a new story, and then put it out in the world for people to read and love as much as I did. That feedback not only provided the motivation I needed to continue writing these stories, but also the motivation I needed to just continue writing. Just a Game and all the other fanfiction stories I wrote were not and were never going to be my best works – but they laid the foundations I needed to practice, learn, and grow.

When I graduated high-school, I went on to study film at university. I learned a lot there too – from the scripts I crafted for class, from the novels I labored over with my best friend, and from my classmates and professors who taught me to think about story crafting in entirely new ways. And I continued to learn from fanfiction too. I never read nearly as much as I used to, but every once and a while after a particularly great film or book, I'd venture back and find something truly extraordinary. A labor of love, written for free, by other people who loved these works just as much as I did.

Every time I thought about deleting Just a Game, I would remember one of my favorite Avengers works. I really wish that today I could remember what it was called, and who it was written by. It was a story I had saved in my bookmarks on my laptop back in high-school, and it was a story I would constantly return to – even uncompleted – just to read some of the previous chapters and re-experience what they had made me feel the first time I had read them. But one day, unexpectedly, the Author deleted it. And not just that story, but every story they had written, which was very devastating to me at the time.

I don't know the reasons this author had for deleting their works. Maybe they were embarrassed, like I was sometimes, when looking back. Maybe they were trying to break away from fanfiction and move on to something else. And whatever reason they had it was 100% their choice to decide what to do with their own works!

But I was always disappointed. And even today, I wish I could take a trip back down memory lane and revisit some of those stories. When I thought about deleting my own works, I would think about those works, and how disappointed lil' 16-year-old-me was at the time, and I would hold off.

Now enough time has gone by where I can look back at this story with fondness. A little embarrassment sure - I was so very proud of this story at the time! But I remember it not for any particularly brilliant storytelling on my part, but from what I learned from it and what it inspired me to do with my future: continue to write!

I figure very few people these days will ever reach the end of Just a Game to read this rambling little author's note. But for those of you who do, I want to thank you for all the time you spent on it. It's kind of a mess, but I hope it was a fun mess!

And for those of you who are writers yourself, I hope that you never look back on what you've created ashamed. I promise eventually you'll be able to look at it, laugh, and appreciate it for the step it was in your journey! We are always growing and learning. Every time you sit down and put words on paper, the world becomes a better, more creative place, whether you share those stories with other people or not!

And write those fantastical self-inserts! There's nothing wrong with loving a story so much that you want to be part of it too. Write those 100k coffee-shop AUs and 500 word drabbles! By god, the world could use some fluff these days. Strange crossovers? I bet you're not the first person to wonder what would happen if these characters all met. And original works? I know it's hard - trust me I do - but keep pushing! One day you'll look back and be shocked with how far you've come.

And all of those stories? I encourage you - beg you even! - to share them, if you feel comfortable. You might never know it, but there's almost certainly someone out there who will read your story and enjoy it just as much as you.

Above all else, keep writing everyone! Without a doubt, the world will be a better place for it.