Oof… this fic has been a journey…

It was started in… 1999 sometime, I think, maybe earlier, and it shows. The beginning is clumsy, unbearably cheesy, and Lina and Zelgadis are both wildly out of character. I mean, really, Lina being afraid of lords and ladies for any reason? *snort* Please. There’s also a certain flavor of the romance books I was heavily reading at the time.

But like I said, it was a journey, and the experience was good for me. I began getting better… slowly… over time. It was always fun for me to write.

The story made itself up as I went along, though, which I seriously regret now. I let the story do what it wanted, and while sometimes it worked, other times it didn’t, and I wish I’d wrangled the story in other directions. The story was never meant to be more than ten chapters long, and instead became this long, complicated… thing. Still, it was a learning experience, and I definitely learned from it. I’m glad I wrote it, no matter how silly I think the story is now.

Eventually the story took a turn where I could stop the story at. I introduced the Yume Kingdom. “Yume” means “dream” in Japanese, and at the time I thought it incredibly clever and appropriate. Where else could Lina and Zelgadis go but a Dream Kingdom? (…..)

Then I began getting away from the roots of the story, and completely forgot some of the earlier things I’d said, and had to hastily patch together the plot holes I’d unwittingly created.

The tentative ending I’d been kinda sorta working towards went up in flames, however, about this time. Originally, Zel’s parents were going to be mean, evil people, and he wasn’t going to have a brother and sister. I’d always planned to make him the Heir Prince of the Yume Kingdom… but then his parents wrote themselves as nice and concerned people… and I had to create another bad guy entirely, because they obviously weren’t going to work anymore.

About this time, when everything was beginning to resolve itself nicely, two things happened. One: I began getting seriously depressed. Two: I had no idea how to really resolve the story. So I stopped updating the fic, and my website, while I dealt (or rather didn’t deal) with my personal problems.

Three or four years later, my problems were being worked through and I was feeling happier again, and the depression I’d been working under slowly lifted. I won’t go into details, but suffice to say, I checked the site again, saw that people had continued to ask me to finish my fics, and started working on a MAJOR overhaul.

Then I eventually got back to finishing those long-forgotten fics that I’d left in limbo for so long.

It’s why there’s a major jump in writing styles from one chapter to another, although I did try and mesh a little…

This time around, I created an outline for the ending in advance, and stuck to it, so it wouldn’t get away from me. As such, I was able to actually *gasp* end the fic!

And here is the finished fic. ^_^ I hope that the wait was worth it, and if not, I do apologize to all faithful and not-so-faithful readers.

So enjoy my journey in learning about the craft of writing. If you have any comments, please feel free to email me. =3

--Ashvolt