It's been around five years since I started writing QQQQ. It's been quite a strange and change-inducing four years. It's almost been as strange as the next five years will be. When this project was just a twinkle in my EYES, it was a wholly and completely different thing. It was going to be based off Petscop and the anime Aria. It's hard to imagine either of those things in the context of what QQQQ has grown to be. That, however, is the joy of being an artist. Making art is different than simply creating. Creators plan things out, masterfully designing and then bringing to life their wonderous creations, certain to please all those who get to use them. The trick is that when you're an artist, you're never the one in control. The project, the thing itself, is the one bossing you around. You must attend to its every whim, scratch every itch on its back, and allow it total freedom. That artistic freedom, counterintuitively, comes at the cost of the artist's freedom.

I can say, for sure, that QQQQ has been yanking me around by my collar as soon as I typed the first word into its Google Doc. Soon it will be finished, but not really. The next few chapters will be the ending of the story. It wasn't the ending I had envisioned at the beginning of the project, or the middle of the project, or the ending I thought it would be when I started writing it. It's a strange thing, how much easier it is to write when you stop writing, and start listening. Even if I had no idea where the story was going, the story itself certainly did. I don't even remotely know if it will be satisfying, but it's what happens. Nothing else could have. It's fully set in history, it just hasn't happened yet.

On that same note, I would like to offer a bit of a half-assed apology. I really, truly, honestly didn't expect more than a single digit number of people to read this. That was probably the secret to why it was received well by those who read it: I wasn't writing with my ego. If I had known that critical eyes would actually lay upon my weird little rambling story, I would have tried much harder to shape it up nicer, with fewer plot holes, fewer distractions, and with more foresight. That, almost certainly, would have killed it. I would have strangled QQQQ before it was even old enough to speak back to me about what it thought was best. But instead, I was taking a hyper-casual approach. I had grand ideas of what the story might be, certainly, and there were twists that I had known were coming from the very beginning (such as the end of the HELL arc.)

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The apology is that QQQQ, as it is now, is basically just a first draft. That's fine, I just didn't indicate anywhere that's what it was, because I didn't know it yet. But now, after reading through every chapter, with my face in a permanent state of cringe and constant thoughts of "oh my god I forgot to put this very important plot point in there," I realize that it really would benefit from a second draft. There was just so much that got lost in the shuffle of my improvisational writing style. But, one day, perhaps when I'm 80, there will be a completed and polished edition of this story. I've even fantasized about it being published by some fancy publisher, but I really doubt anyone with money would be willing to fund a project like this. Even the completed, final draft version. It's probably gonna end up even weirder than it is now. Don't worry about many of the weird prickly bits of the story being too smoothed over in the interest of popular appeal. I'm still me, you know?

So, now that you've read this, go tend to your own QQQQs, because I know you all have them. At least one or two. Go find them and dig them up, no matter how old. In fact, the older and more forgotten the project, the better. Wake them up out of bed. Make them eggs and bacon. Ask them what they would like. And—I have to stress this a lot—leave your own plans and mental images far behind. Look at what's there. The scribbed words in your notebook, the one half-finished page of your comic, the cringe-inducing beat you made in your pirated copy of Ableton. Look at it for what it is, something completely divorced from your own wants and desires. Listen to what it wants. And if you can't hear it talking to you, listen harder. It's there, I promise.