Writing this particular chapter was difficult for a lot of reasons. As people following me on Patreon or Twitter know, this month was particularly rough for me. I experienced a death in the family and it made the final week of this month, when I was supposed to finish up this chapter, particularly difficult. The death wasn’t out of nowhere and I’m doing okay, but it kind of rattled me at the time. This may lead people to say, “Ah, no wonder you only finished this chapter now,” but hilariously, between this and a commission piece I’m working on, I actually wrote over 25,000 words for my writing this month. I’m actually more productive than I have been in the past. Unfortunately, the death took out the critical last week of the month when I thought I was ahead of schedule. Life happens.

Another reason I found this chapter difficult was because of my tendency to let comments affect me. While I’ll sometimes accept but politely ignore the recommendations of comments, every comment affects me, because these are people commenting on a world unfolding in front of them. Sometimes I’m happy because people and I are on the same wavelength. For example, the last chapter has a comment asking to hear from Adam’s parents, and I only read that comment after writing a scene with Adam’s parents in it. That was fun, and I liked that we were on the same page there.

But other comments affect me in a negative way. Due to a lot of inexcusable behavior on her part, a lot of readers have understandably turned against Nicole. To me, this makes her scene towards the end of the chapter a lot more real. Even since the breakup, I knew that the church scene was going to exist, but it took on a much realer feeling when I realized Nicole wasn’t just explaining her perspective to Adam – she’s basically pleading to the reader not to hate her, and that’s sad. Heartbreaking, for me at least. I don’t know what Nicole represents to me, but she’s probably the character I feel the most for empathetically, and I felt a deep sadness when I saw comment after comment talking about how mean Nicole is, and not one going, “I can’t imagine what she’s going through, I hope she feels better soon.” The story is literally about Nicole being suicidal, but people are more interested in what she’s doing. As someone with depressed friends, I can say two things: one, I don’t blame people for fixating on what she does to others first before considering her own feelings; that’s very human. Number two, even though Nicole is a character, people do this all the time with depressed people.

Nicole is right, people see depressed people as just sad people. They often don’t see that depressed people are destructive to those around them, and very aware of this destruction. This is awful, since it just compounds the devastating effects of being depressed. It feels like everyone you associate with, everything you touch, turns to ash. I wanted to provide Nicole’s angle, and it’s almost poetry that it’s clear a lot of readers will be blindsided by disliking Nicole’s behavior. Maybe some of you will see her more sympathetically. Maybe some of you won’t care and still will want Nicole out of the picture.

Another difficulty is that Consequences has a lot of characters. Arguably too many. I know there’s no objectivity to writing stories and that it’s all feelings, but I’m aware that I’m trying to cram just a few too many perspectives into one story. Every chapter is almost guaranteed to leave someone’s perspective out of things, and ever since chapter four or so, writing Consequences has been a juggling act. Fun fact, Consequences was supposed to have 2-3 more main characters, and even though I hate “deciding” how my stories will go, I decided to axe them from the story. In hindsight, I’m so very glad I did.

The last difficulty is very simple: time. Again, I thought I had a whole other week to finish what has turned into the last scene of this chapter. The incident affected me, I needed to take time off, and I paid my own consequences for that. Originally, the chapter was supposed to be a few scenes longer, but I already went over deadline as it was, for the first time in a while. I didn’t want to elongate that, or make a pattern. So, I released it today, and will likely just write the next few scenes later today or tomorrow in the eventual next chapter. There are those that say, “take as long as you want, we’d prefer quality over meeting deadlines,” and that’s very sweet, but unfortunately, you don’t speak for my whole community, and when my chapter wasn’t posted on the deadline it had, four patrons pulled their support. People want these chapters on time. I’m bound to that. It’s the game I chose to play. I can only write with the regularity I do because of my Patreon support, so I can’t afford to slow down. I can only afford to become more diligent, or risk losing the frequency with which I upload in the first place.

The good news is, as I alluded before, another commission piece is nearing completion. Hopefully, next month will see multiple pieces from me. I sure want that to be the case. And please, if you have any respect for me, do see a little bit of sympathy for even my worst characters. In a weird way, they’re human beings too. I’ll talk to you all next week.