In the beginning....

I was feeling nostalgic the other day, while poking around in my archive files, and I came across the original 3K-word start to 1 More Chance!, back when it was just an idea for a romance story I was fooling around with, another throwaway one-shot of "just another something" to get me back into writing.

It was amusing to see the similarities that those few off-the-cuff pages had to the final product...but it was also very interesting to note the drastic changes that I'd made, by the time I'd plotted 1MC into a more large-scale tale. (Not "epic." My story is not "epic." Long, involved, hopefully resonant. But saying one's own story is "epic" is conceit beyond barriers.) It was really just a by-day exploration of how the characters had changed from being teenagers lost in a maze of relationships between each other...but there was so much between the lines that I had just glossed over...!

I sometimes wonder what would have become of my writing if I had just left that story as "2020 Visions" (because it was going to be set in 2020, nearly 10 years after the game; yes, I know it's a stupid title), and never written 1 More Chance! Maybe my tastes would have gone in a different direction. I doubt I would have gone back to Fanfiction.Net or deviantART for just a one-shot that, in hindsight, was sophomoric at best in its plot and characterization, and that might have been a shame. I've learned so much over the course of writing this story, and I'm excited to learn more: about my heritage, and looking at life from different perspectives, and getting into the heads of a few more characters.

I like to think that my interpretations of the characters have grown from what they were in the beginning, even of 1MC. Almost a year has passed for these individuals, after all, and some of them have changed dramatically over that time. I'm not sorry for what I did with any of them (well, except for maybe Kuma...Kuma will never be the same for me again, now...and the character has more changes coming!). But I do often wonder if I'm alone in my consideration of what happens after.

That said, I can't imagine anymore not caring so much about these characters and their lives, and their families' lives. That's one of the main reasons why I want to keep writing about them, even if it doesn't show up here or on one of the fandom sites. I just can't put my pen down from their stories.

I think I knew that even back when I first started scribbling out that 2020 story. But - just like my characters are sometimes guilty of the same thing - I didn't realize what I was getting into.