Today (well yesterday now but who really cares) was an interesting day. I managed to get basically nothing done which even for me is a really incredible accomplishment. Since I figured I was in the business of letting people down and breaking my own rules, I thought tonight would be a good night for something I've put off doing for a long time because I decided I was never going to do it.

None of you will get the joke but this is the sixty-fourth Princess of Dreamland.

She doesn't exist. 

It's a metaphor. 

I literally used the lighting from my computer as the actual lighting and then shaded for it even though the dark bits under her don't match up with that at all. Incredible.

You would not believe the type of high-quality work I produce after midnight. We're almost on par with that colossal doodle dump from who knows when (self-deprecating rim shot).

Well since no one is awake and I'm ignoring all of my messages, I was going to talk for an extended time about myself like in that one segment I keep bringing up but literally no one is interested. 

TIME FOR BONDING WITH CHRONA. Y'ALL GET TO LEARN ABOUT MY LIFE. STICK WITH ME HERE BECAUSE I'LL PROBABLY RAMBLE FOR A GOOD HALF HOUR. 

SCRATCH THAT I FINISHED IT. IT TOOK ABOUT TWO HOURS AND I THINK THERE ARE MEANING-ALTERING TYPOS IN HERE. GOOD LUCK.

(There's going to be a lot of profanity later on and I'll probably delete this whole chapter the second anyone reads it but I mean I just have to get it out somewhere so have a thing) 

I was going to just sit down and write to the Beatles or something but it's really hard to write things while listening to certain music and I have no idea why. I think the problem with music with lyrics is that it has to fit the exact ambiance or it just throws you off and colors your thoughts. 

It might be helpful if I'm talking to Oakstar on Clash (trust me my thoughts are colorful enough when I have to speak with him) but outside of that it always throws me off when I'm writing stuff like this, which is dumb because I shouldn't really be writing this at all. It's midnight, I'm going to regret literally anything I put down, and here I am treating Wattpad like Facebook or Tumblr where you just post your incredibly vapid thoughts and people will upvote it but never actually confront you about your problems or offer support.

I also just realized that no one here knows who Oakshit is, which is amazing. To explain how I wasted the last three years of my life:

 Basically Clash of Clans (no, this is NOT the app with the naked Scottish woman, it's the other village-fighting pay-to-win app that has no reason to exist) is a large timehole for manchildren and twelve year old guys to spend an infinite amount of time on money on accomplishing absolutely nothing. A bunch of warriors roleplayers have set up in the recesses of the app (you can make 'clans' which give you these great private chatboards) about three years ago and the community is absolutely flourishing. I was one of the earliest members of the younger clans, and I later founded my own clan with friends. All the other clans from three years ago (our founding date was October 22, 2013, so maybe not quite three years ago but still) are dead now and since I spent a lot of my time on there becoming a dominant power in the interclan 'space' at gatherings and moonpool meetings, everyone knows my name and almost all the clans mask how jealous they are of our general stability and incredibly not-crappy roleplay by continuously comparing themselves to us and using statistics that mean jack shit to cover up for how little they actually RP or do anything productive.

Almost all of the flaws in the roleplay clans can be summed up as follows:

-continuous fandom references.

-not even roleplaying Warriors.

-letting drama and online dating get in the way of accomplishing anything.

-literally being run by twelve year olds.

-incredibly repetitive, obnoxious RP.

-the only people running clans are narcissistic, self entitled assholes with incredibly large egos.

Basically Oakstar is the sixtieth person to claim that all we need is a pact to unite all the clans in peace. He did this by bullying children into submission, creating a clan where almost every member is an incredibly dumb follower who thinks Oakstar is the second coming of Jesus, and framing almost all of his problems on an incredibly good friend of mine because he doesn't want to admit that his leadership style is incredibly flawed and that he has no right to tell a bunch of older, more experienced leaders what to do just because he has more trophies (which for the thousandth time... has nothing to do with how good your clan's roleplay is?). He also lied several times to a friend of mine who is still beating himself up over even getting involved in it and yeah I don't like him very much.

Then again, I really don't like very many people on the app. I'll come on to roleplay, sure, but I used to really enjoy being in character there and just being around people who generally respected me because in real life I have maybe ten friends and almost no redeeming qualities and now even being on there just makes me feel... angry and kind of hollow. 

It's not the people. It's not the places. It's just me.

I don't really know why but the only thing I can think of is hormones. It has to be something ridiculous because this year was going really well for me, too. Just before July I was writing an incredible amount of words, I wasn't having any real social issues, and everything in general just seemed to be going alright.

So then July came around. I went to writing camp with someone who I hadn't seen in person for two years (with another one of my closest friends to boot) and then I had an incredible amount of time to lie around and enjoy myself. 

Well, I wasn't really happy there either. I was better, sure, but I can't count the amount of times I literally got up and just kind of left to go sit on the hill alone or something stupid because I didn't feel like I belonged in conversations. I made no lasting friends and the few people I've tried to contact have basically said nothing and I guess I haven't talked much to the friend since I've left, either.

I had some serious personal issues while I was there that didn't help, a ton of stress hit me like a brick when I got back, and I started getting this tooth abscess the last week of camp and had to leave twice to go to the dentist and then the doctor because I honestly thought I was going to die.

It wasn't even anything serious, either! I wasn't even in pain but that didn't stop me from ending up curled on the floor sobbing because I thought I had symptoms for some complication of tooth issues because I can't stop compulsively googling shit that just makes me feel worse about whatever situation I'm in. Dear GOD let me just tell you that if you ever get sick you should FUCKING NEVER look at Google stuff because you will scroll down those results and if you are anything like me you will click on all those links and they will terrify you.

I mean what the hell was I even thinking?! It was a fucking dental abscess and I texted my friend up and told her that I was legitimately scared which was an even dumber move because then she was worried about me over nothing.

I was lucky though because I thought the abscess was my fault because I used to eat ice all the time to cool myself down (because I don't give a shit about my body, I don't care about the negative consequences to my actions, and I hate myself) and apparently it was just my wisdom tooth coming in from the side like the fucking bastards all of my teeth are. I was really pissed about this because I thought they already pulled my wisdom teeth the last time they put me under and fucked my mouth up but apparently those were just the OTHER molars. 
I was really paranoid about that too (this was last May), because according to Google if you ask someone a question while they're being drugged up or directly after they wake you back up post-surgery they have to answer truthfully.

My parents have absolutely no idea what questions to ask me that would get a good response because they sure as hell aren't going to ask 'Honey, are you secretly running several social media accounts that we don't know about so you can post the garbage writing you can't submit to contests online and get a bunch of pats on the back for having terrible priorities?', they're going to ask 'So (Chrona)... do you have A BOYFRIEND?!'.

This is especially hilarious because I'm actually dating someone and went to homecoming with him and they're still insisting we're basically friends. 

I mean I guess it's true but still geez you have no idea guys

Well. I did just read up through a lot of this and it looks incredibly paranoid and shallow which is just about where I am right now. I think being up at 1 AM in the morning does that to people but it also removes your filter which is nice.

I'm actually kind of pissed that I didn't get started earlier because I planned out a dozen or something mental drafts of things I legitimately wanted to tell people or things I've already said and I've already forgotten all of them. 

I was really busy finishing up a TV show which I do believe is the... second... adult TV show I've ever binge watched. Both of them have been animated because I don't really watch anything with real people because I respect the craft more, I don't watch much TV in general, I believe there's a lot more creative potential with animation, and I'm an incredibly lazy person who refuses to push my personal boundaries.

(This totally left me out of the huge Superwholock rush of seventh grade, back when I was friends with like thirty something fangirls who co-existed in this huge friend blob, and I didn't care then and I especially don't care now.)

Anyhow, I'm not naming any names, but it was one of those shows that really gets you attached to the characters and then repeatedly hits you in the gut over and over again relentlessly, then walks away while holding up a tactful middle finger in your face. In fact, I think this might have been the most thorough gut punching I've ever received from any show because this show barely ever lets you up, either. It's just continuously cynical but I was hopelessly in love with all the characters so I watched the whole thing in two nights.

I want to write like that so badly it hurts.

I want my writing to feel. To breathe.

When I finished The Gardenkeeper's Daughters and was incredibly angry at how it turned out in comparison to The Cities Have Fallen (which no one can read without spoiling my other books, which was an incredibly dumb mistake), I realized that there's only so good you can get at weaving the prose itself without getting better at the art. You can give your readers all the masterful descriptions of landscapes or all the flowery bullshit you want, but if you're inevitably saying nothing and we come away from it not caring about any of your characters or what we learned from their story, you've done... literally nothing but waste your reader's time.

Sure, I got better as a 'writer' in a year, but I actually wanted to strangle Aislyn by the end of The Gardenkeeper's Daughters and Gash is still the single wettest piece of white bread to ever be an incredibly disappointing character. On the other hand, Rena, Gale, and Indy, who exist in a pathetically flawed and cliched story, are still my favorite characters and from what I can tell from the fourty-ish people who actually bothered to read it, they strike a chord with a lot of people as well. 

To link back to the above, I personally believe when you have not just a powerful narrative but particularly flawed and intricate characters, they will basically write the story. They will care for the novel as well as you care for them, and there's a life, energy, and tragedy that just exudes from every bit of the show I watched and well... it hurts.

It's weird because even as the characters are screwing up remarkably badly in the show mentioned above, you still feel that weird first-season thing. It happens in books too- sometimes the characters explicitly hearken back to it. We all know that wonder when you first get introduced to a world, the first great triumphs of our heroes, the first petty squabbles that look laughable compared to the challenges in later books. It's something you hold with you when you read or watch the rest of the work but often it's something you also carry on into the rest of your life because for a second things are okay, you're there, and you're just reading along with the characters, enjoying the energy of a setting that's eventually going to be utterly destroyed by the end.

Strangely enough, you can kind of feel it in real life too. There are always those moments that feel nostalgic even as you live in them, those few times with friends where no one is arguing or fighting and you eventually end up remembering your whole time in that group as whatever the high points were, even if they were few and far between. 
They're not the 'first seasons' of anything though. You never know when they're going to come or go and you rarely realize that something precious is being destroyed until you can look back on people you used to care about years later and feel deeply remorseful... or maybe just feel nothing at all.

I've spent a lot of the last year looking for something or someone. Maybe it's moments like that. Maybe it's a person. Maybe I'm just looking for an audience. Maybe it's a reason.

I don't know. I don't know what I'm doing and I feel sick or hopeless ninety percent of the time and unbearably perky the other ten. I leave long and obnoxious comments on people's work or PMs when they're feeling down and every time I'm like "god please don't hate me for this" because the second I look back on it I realize it's absolute shit and I was either hardcore projecting or I said something incredibly generic or irrelevant.

The other thing that this show made me realize is that everyone in my life is probably too good for me and everyone who could help me never gets my rants anymore because I don't want to talk to them and everyone who does get my rants is probably sick of my shit by now.

To all the people still putting up with me for some reason, I love you. Thanks.

(No but seriously my friends are way too good... one of them actually made a pinterest board with my art and never told me... there are a bunch of cute captions and everything 

it's literally the sweetest thing I've ever seen and she links it all back to me...

she's also probably reading this and if so then this is definitely going down

love you if you're out there but seriously why are you reading this)

Oh yeah I'm also going to the beach on Thursday

Our beach house has been one of the things in my life that is practically unchanging and is in ways an anchor for me. We usually take a family trip and a friends trip which never involves my friends because I "change friends too much" which is a fancy way of saying I'm not friends with the people whose parents my mom is friends with anymore. I'm generally okay with this because sometimes I just want to be as far away from myself as possible and not being around anyone I know helps with this.

It also generally ends up with me either being pinned for things (that's nothing new) or being locked in a closet (and/or locking someone in a closet but hey that's on them) but I think as a sophisticated and mature adult who only occasionally involves herself in gender-based child gang wars I can handle a few closets and the continual slow but steady burn that comes with being far too old to act like a kid any more because bluh bluh society, bluh bluh everything is perpetually terrible once you reach a certain age and everyone will mock you if you stay on your smartphone but everyone will hate you or berate you constantly if you try to act like a kid or an adult when you're not either anymore. 

I don't care because any place where the kids are basically independent of the adults and I get to roleplay and make up games for younger kids is somewhere I'm in my element and I only have so many years left where I'll be allowed to do anything of the sort. Whoops.

Personally the family trip has always been the bigger deal, especially because I get to stay with all my cousins (of which I am the oldest) for a solid week and there's a very intricate set of traditions and inside jokes that we all share. The atmosphere never really changes and so when I go there it always feels like coming back home to the same year, over and over again. It's... comfortable.

Like everything I love, it's one of the things I'm paranoid about: people always say that the entire beach area is going underwater soon. It's the type of thing that you don't want to believe but you can see houses out in the surf and we always have to drive over new bridges in between the shrinking landmasses. I think it's going to drown with my childhood. Sometimes I have dreams about giant waves rolling over the sand dune and slowly eating at the poles of the house. Sometimes I have dreams I'm on the beach when the wave happens and I run right into it, headfirst.

This year since I'm not going there,  it's wormed its way into my writing and a lot of my conversations. I wrote multiple pieces on it at camp and I felt incredibly guilty because here I was, in a place made for writers, and all I could think about was a family vacation that shouldn't even matter half as much as it does. 

I think that was when I realized that if I couldn't be happy at that camp, I was probably never going to be happy anywhere.

I guess there's no comfortable way to segue to any other topic I particularly wanted to talk about, I've already said plenty people are either going to see and then regret seeing because I wrote it at 1:30 (why am I still up) or probably never look at.

Bye.