MIDNIGHT DAZE IS BACK!!!!!

 By this, I mean the version of it that was always meant to be. LONG story.

I've always talked about how I got burned out on publishing and I've been trying to reconnect with my writing and reclaim that joy I've been missing so much. Well, on Thursday, something pretty major happened that has unlocked everything for me.

For over 20 years, my best friend Jaime was my co-author on the Midnight Daze series. When she first became involved, it was fanfiction. It was a wild mashup of The Monkees, Smallville, Supernatural, and pretty much every movie, TV show, book, and song we ever loved.

Over the years, it evolved into something way bigger. It consumed our lives. We bought into the notion that it needed to be published, so we ground away at it, polishing and polishing until that damned burnout set in.

And so began the whole "Writer Reset" phase. She turned the series back over to me, minus her characters, and we both set out to try and reinvent what we'd created. She tried writing her own stories with her characters, while I tried to salvage what was left and turn it into whatever I wanted.

Obviously, that didn't work. What was not obvious to us until now was why.

Thursday morning, Jaime called me, and we were talking about pretty much everything. The conversation turned to writing, as it often does. That's when it happened: we both confessed to missing OUR Midnight Daze. We missed the characters being together, their dynamics, pretending that certain songs were performed by certain characters, the storylines we'd always loved...and we missed writing together.

The only thing we didn't miss was all that damn pressure to publish the series. After all, that was what had nearly destroyed us--the pressure to "monetize your passion," to treat writing like a business and make it a "career," to "be professional" and focus on making money and pleasing readers.

Then Jaime said something that surprised me: she'd been thinking about asking me what I thought about "getting the band back together." Actually writing MD together again! Making it whatever WE want it to be. Not publishing it. Just writing for fun, like back in our fanfic days. Only this time it can be a mix of both fanfic AND our original stuff.

So, of course I said HELL YEAH!

It clicked for us both right then. That's why we've both been struggling. Up until now, we've been trying to force ourselves to change things when we neither wanted nor needed to. At all. We've been needlessly trying to rewire our brains and turn these stories into something they're not, something they were never meant to be. We were trying to force our characters to fit into stories where they didn't actually belong.

So now we're fixing that. The band is officially back together for good!

Here's the plan: we're going to dig thru the archives (which I've already started doing), pull out the old drafts, go thru them and pick out what we want to keep. Then we're going to make a new draft for Shadows of the Past, which is our main story. From there, we'll piece together the parts of the old drafts we loved the most, then add whatever we want afterward. It could turn into one huge monster draft, or it could become several. Well, technically, it'll end up being both. Bc we're also going to write all the little side stories and one-off scenes we want as well. It's all going to count. No rules, no limits!

The only thing we're NOT going to do is publish it. We're not even gonna THINK about publishing it. This thing is OURS and ours alone. As it was meant to be all along.

Jaime still wants to publish something someday, just not this. I will be cheering her on as she does what she wants. Meanwhile, she knows and understands that I am no longer in the publishing game. I want no part of it anymore. It almost killed my love of writing, so hell no! But I refuse to hold her back in any way just bc I don't want the same exact thing anymore.

That's part of what kept us from doing this for so long: I mistakenly thought I was holding her back by keeping her interested in MD. The funny thing is, she thought she would be holding me back by expressing any interest in it! How crazy is that?!

So, that afternoon, after I got home from my mammogram appointment, I dug into the archives and found one of the drafts, which had been split into ten separate documents. I'd forgotten that at one point, I'd decided to try to make it a serial rather than a series. Anyway, I copied and pasted them into one document and emailed it to Jaime, then I got busy reading thru it myself. And I had an absolute blast! I ended up staying up till 4 AM! Totally worth it! (I'm on semester break right now anyway, so it's all good! lol)

One thing I noticed as I was reading and listening to the playlist that went with it was that the playlist was a little off. The songs were supposed to be in the order of the corresponding scenes in the story, but there were a few out of place. That's when I realized I had gone one set of drafts before the last one! I did some more digging and found that later set of drafts with the missing scene from the beginning. I sent that scene to Jaime separately so she can read it and judge whether we want to include it, and if so, how.

I also discovered that I'd forgotten another detail: she'd asked for one character in particular back before the others, and I'd started revamping with only that character removed and gotten halfway thru before the big split happened. Weird how I'd forgotten all that!

And before all that, we'd been in the process of removing a different character that we'd felt no longer fit the story, but he still appears near the end. We'll have to figure out what to do about that.

For now, I've got to let Jaime catch up and read the draft herself. We're going to be meeting this Wednesday if nothing happens. I can't wait! 😁

The cool thing is, I don't actually have to wait. I could work on it right now if I want to! But I am going to wait and let her read the main draft first. If I do write anything else, it'll be either a side story or a separate scene that I'll share with her later. I already have some side stories I could dive into, and I just might! We'll see!

I also need to clean up my OneDrive and reorganize it a bit. While I plan to use my flash drive as my main storage, I might as well use OneDrive as a backup. Microslop sucks, but it also still works. I've tried, but I can't get away from Word bc it just fits my needs (and Jaime's) better than anything else. We'll just have to keep fighting against Copilot as much as we can. At least we still have the ability to turn it off for now, even if we have to keep doing so after every update. And as long as my Windows 10 computers keep working, we won't have to worry about it as much anyway. Hopefully by the time I absolutely have to upgrade, Microsoft execs will come to their senses and stop that BS. A girl can dream, anyway.

So, that's the update! So happy to FINALLY be back to writing what I really, truly want! And I'm happy to have my co-author back on board! Yay!!!!