My writing journey used to be pretty strong, but it came to a screeching halt a while ago.
I used to write a lot of relatively scrappy fiction stories that were never shared with anyone before moving onto Pokémon fan fiction. Those past novels were mostly fantasy, and I'll admit some of them got a little weird but were at least good for experimentation purposes and allowed me to test the waters. Most of them were lost, but they weren't really worth keeping anyway, as most of them never finished and I couldn't figure out where to go with them.
I wrote a small few Pokémon fan fiction stories before Trial of Juno, but it was ToJ were it really took off and ended well. Since that finished, I haven't been able to pick up writing again. I come up with great ideas, but most of these ideas just end up as an RP because coming up with characters isn't one of my strong points (so when other people come up with the characters, it honestly makes my work easier). Hence, that's why I got more into RP writing and hosting than novel-writing.
I think the big turnoff for me was finding out how difficult, time-consuming, expensive, and luck-dependent it is just to get a book published from my own research and reading personal experiences of published authors who made it clear they didn't think it was worth it. I really want other people to get the opportunity to read my stuff and I would love to see their feedback, but getting it out there is very difficult without getting stuff published. I have read a LOT of published stories that I thought were junk and personally knew I could do much better, but publishing stuff is just too hard. As much as I'd love to hold a paperback copy of a book I wrote with my name on it and awesome cover art right in a bookstore, it just feels like one of those things that's never going to happen. I just don't know anyone who works for a publishing company, and it seems like unless you do and have close friends in that line of work who can help you sneak past the chopping blocks, getting your stuff through the door will be too hard.
I honestly don't know when I'd pick up writing again. But I guess the situation with publishing is what drove me to write fan fiction in the first place, as I figured since this stuff can't get published anyway, no need to care about using copyrighted material and trademarked characters. But yeah, I found doing it in the form of RPs kind of makes people need to read it in order to participate. Most people seem to really like my RPs, so that's pretty much the place I've settled into.
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