This Message is dated 4-22-03

My Dear Readers:

Clearly I am ashamed of myself. This is the first time in MONTHS that I have checked my review bin, nay, touched my author's account, and I am red in the face upon finding that so many people have been banging on my door for so long just to read another chapter. I had no idea that people would ever get that attached to my stories — so I am very surprised and grateful at this huge response.

You see, I've been holding up my fanfiction sprees (yeah, Verok, go figure) for quite a while. Not that I don't like writing fanfiction anymore — it's just that I've realized, way back while it was still 2002, that this was a form of art that was both energy-consuming and time-consuming. Unlike people who write original stuff and publish it on the book market, fanfiction authors write about ideas that people already have created — so that no matter how phenomenal of a writer he or she is, they'll never, ever get any form of return beyond web popularity. This is what I realized, and this is what caused my fanfiction Muse to dry up into a raisin.

The reason that I took up writing fanfiction was that I loved the creations of other authors (no, really, and you people too?) — and because I couldn't come up with any original material. If I ever made up something myself, the other problem was, I never liked it enough to write about it. But for the past few months, I've been rumbling, and now I do have something original on my hands, and something I like. Now I'm writing furiously and, since I the crazy author want to get it copyrighted and sent to a publisher for possible review, I withheld it from FictionPress.net. The work is titled "In Veritas", Latin for "In Reality", and as I planned a three-book series, the subheading for the first one is "Carnival of Death". (By the way, my friend swears she's already heard of a published title like that, so if you can, please do help me with this. The title isn't final at all, so you can also drop in your suggestions. If you are so crazy with curiosity, I might even choose a few people to beta-read my proto-draft).

Even though I'm caught up in my "project-project" right now, after seeing all your reviews I'm so sorry about my neglecting you peoples that I want to continue this story just to make up for what I did. And I will put my Muse back into water to replenish herself. See you all in a few days, no?

Verok comes back