And another one bites the dust. I'm sure that at least someone out there remembers the catastrophe that was last year-- this book shook my belief in my own future as a creator, and the frustration and pain it caused me were the point at which I realized junior year wasn't going to be any better than sophomore year. Fortunately, I can claim that senior year has been, as it's been a year primarily characterized by me coming to terms with things before I have to put them away forever or me amending old mistakes. I would call this aborted catastrophe a book an 'aborted mistake', but for some reason I believed that finishing it up would be better than leaving it to die like other old projects. A NaNoWriMo to me is a kind of pact with myself towards self-improvement, and breaking that promise in its fourth tender year seemed like a mistake.

So I finished. 

Coming back to this story in twelth grade was a weird experience, and as a result, this book isn't quite a first draft but isn't a second one, either. The prose is a little more refined towards the beginning than a first draft and a little less than my better projects at the end. I'm still proud of the settings and overall atmosphere, but there are also some things that I could come back to. I think all in all it's what I can consider a solid effort, albeit one that collapses near the end. It'll probably be the middle child of my stories forever, outshadowed on either side, but like Roses and Thorns or Braver Than Our Demons, its isolation gives it a certain kind of self-fulfillment that TSBS and other heavier stories don't have due to their reliance on other books in the series. Still, like BToD or RaT, the themes that characterize Omnia: karma, prejudice, and the forging of a personal identity in a society that wants to lay claim to your personhood (or doghood I guess) are still there. This definitely isn't how I would have chosen to develop Omnia if I'd been given a choice but I'm still happy it's become something. 

... it gets harder to write these every time I do it.