Important Notice - My Second Chance: 4.2.2018

Hi everyone,

I'm going to keep this concise and to the point. This is not a chapter, and, if you came from my chapter list, this is probably not the chapter you wanted to read. If you came here from somewhere else, well, then you likely know now what I'm going to express: The Reapers has officially gone under construction for an indefinite amount of time and when it comes back, it will not be the same as it was before.

My friend and collaboration partner Mpart and I have decided to no longer collaborate together. It wasn't an easy decision to make, but that's an unfortunate part of growing and life. Mpart is a very good writer, and her stories can be found here. I encourage you to check them out - they're great!

Mpart and I always had hypothetical conversations on what we would do if we ever split our collaboration, but never had we worried it would come to fruition. She's given me full permission to carry on with her characters but I... just... can't. This is not her giving me any stipulations or anything of that sort, it's really just a personal thing.

I look back at the Reapers and I see a fantastic start to a good idea with a lot of poor implementation. For a very long time (these past two years) as I've evolved and built up my 3 other stories, I've been in a sort of denial about the Reapers. The ideas I wanted were there but they just... weren't thought through. I didn't have all the skills then that I do now... but I was ok with that because I wasn't going to just up and start a rewrite just because of some minor missteps I made. I saw it as an awkward part of growing, and I was determined to keep trucking forward.

Then... major plots started changing... hugely. I kept finding myself going back to tweak old chapters, to clean them up and make them more concise. I would do this over and over again until they hardly resembled themselves. I did this for me, because as much as I love writing for others, I write for myself the most and it was more important to me to enjoy what I write rather than write something that fit what was already written.

It eventually drove me AWAY from this story because the plot got so convoluted. In a way, you readers never got to see how convoluted things got, because Reapers was not the convoluted part - it was all my OTHER stories trying to factor in. Timelines weren't adding up, things didn't make sense... and for any of you who know me personally (or just read my stories on the regular) you know how much painstaking thought I put into each detail in every chapter, in every picture.

I kept trying to come back to this story, but I kept just feeling this sickness in my gut. I kept thinking that I was failing all my readers, that I wasn't writing well and me constantly changing the storylines was driving away readers... and it probably did. Yet I kept doing it anyways because I couldn't write the story that I had started - it wasn't what I wanted. The ideas I had weren't thought through, and I wanted more for my stories. I wanted Reapers to more closely mimic my style in Nightingale or Willow... my finesse there. Reapers suddenly became the child of mine that I was ashamed of because all I saw was plotholes and work.

Mpart held the reigns on a lot of characters in Atalan, and while a majority did not interact in my stories... several did very deeply (Thanatos, Fate, Nyx, and Phil, to name a few). Writing them out just wouldn't be possible given the storylines and my need for cohesion in my stories. So while I know I have her permission to carry forward with them (and I greatly appreciate her kindness in that regard) I've come to the realization that this is the clean slate I've wanted for a very long time.

I understand the repercussions of doing this, and I know that many people will write me off because I'm throwing away all the hard work I've put into my Reaper chapters. I even imagine some of you will start up reading with me again and will maybe not like the changes or direction I want to take the next version of this story into. While I sincerely hope that isn't the case, I completely understand.

I'm taking down all of my old chapters for the Reapers and instead linking each chapter to this note (hence why the start may be very confusing if you did not come from the chapter list). I already have planned out the first few chapters and I can't even begin to express to you how much more excited I am to approach this story again. I want to emphasize that my excitement has nothing to do with my collaboration ending, but rather that I didn't realize how deeply Reapers was bothering me until I realized that I could take this as a second chance.

I'm getting so excited to start posting again and when I do I'll be announcing them again to all the platforms I usually do (Boolprop, Tumblr, and soon the Sims forums). I do have a few readers who I send messages to on Carl's, and if you're reading this (please, I hope you are) and would like to continue following this story despite all this change and movement, send me a message and let me know. If I don't hear from you, I'll assume it's a 'no' and I respect that completely. I don't want to keep cluttering up inboxes though given everything.

So to summarize: I'm rewriting the Reapers you see here, it's going to be different and I'm looking to launch it before the end of April. It's busy season for my classes so I'll have to cut myself some slack, but I still hope to give you SOMETHING by the end of April - be it a prologue or chapter 1 or whatever I decide to do. I'm hoping to breathe a new life into a story I love so much and I hope that I've conveyed myself well enough to those who read this.

I thank you all so much for your support in the Reapers previously. Your comments were heartfelt and it moved me that so many cared for my story. I hope I can do that again, but I respect if people don't want to deal with the drama of having to sort through all that I've written in the past and how it may conflict with what's written in the future and how different things will be. I'm also sorry because I know with certainty there are some readers now who are just "catching up" to my more recent chapters and I almost feel like I'm betraying you by changing things up like this.

Either way, I really want to show off what I can do, and I want to do that without all the loose ends I accidentally planted for myself before.

Thank you for your time and support.

Love always,
Livvielove