I can't write the rest of the story.

At least not in the first person perspective I've been doing for so long. There is no real ending to speak of, in all honestly, it was too close to LotGH. If you read or watched it you probably know precisely what I'm talking about with the protagonists. 4-5 years ago before I started writing the very first draft. If there's any veteran readers still from around then, it was, in the words of a former acquaintance of mine: super dry, like a codex and no characters to speak of that you could feel attached or feel for. It was those chapters that I hastily and embarrassingly replaced with Memories of Toscana chapters. I was 24 or 25, fresh off the heels of my enthusiasm for LotGH: I was going to write the American LotGH, or something of that nature. There are alternative endings I considered to shake off the "lotgh fanfic" stigma, though.

I was stubborn and marched on like a conqueror despite the glaring errors of the beginning, not once looking back at all the threads and inconsistencies I left behind. But now I'm here, slumping off the horse and realizing the errors I've made. I'm on the footsteps of 29 now. I'm at the age where I was supposed to originally write a 28-29 year old disenfranchised, disillusioned Victoria being yanked from retirement. I couldn't write a 17 whiny little Victoria at this point. I'm too broken and wracked by anxiety now.

I did too many monumental things wrong with the story. Just the fact that I didn't actually put the second draft(what this story comprises of) and didn't bother to clean up ch0-9 or really any chapter up to the Li welcoming party chapters. Back then I was so proud of those chapters, but I think my maturity outpaced the story after it. And the entire story suffers as a result. Then there's the issue of me making the scope bigger and bigger, more words to write, more monologue to flow, characters abrutly introduced and more politics within poltiics... and I just couldn't keep that going anymore after 4 years. I was completely and utterly burnt out by the time I soft-wrapped up Li's story.

I wanted to keep this concise but I got carried away. it pains me I'm more accustomed to writing walls of text when it's not my story, haha. I kept this bottled up for so long, and maybe in the end I was lying to myself. The imposter syndrome won in the end. I was and am a thoroughly hack writer. It's not easy to write this out after so long. it was a mistake to write in first person tense. it was also a mistake to write by the seats of my pants, it made the pacing suffer catastrophically everywhere in the story. By the time Li and Brutus were in the shuttle talking about Ishtar-Terra I was frantically trying to drum up how I'd write Embers of Ishtar. In the end the planning was too little too late.

After I watched Dune, the whole Shields struck me like a thunderbolt: I needed to include that to evolve the story... to make it exciting. Maybe this is the attribute I needed to get the story moving and feel refreshing? Frankly, I have no idea how I'd write guns and shooting. I didn't know where Victoria would be situated in the first place. Where would her role be in the invasion? How could I can her actions interesting? Mind you, Victoria is still a junior officer, she could barely manage a platoon or the elements of a battalion, I don't know. Even these days I still struggle with that one. Then I watched the 1997 Berserk and the fears of how do I write a melee-oriented sci-fi space opera? How would soldiers get ahold of these shield devices? How did the Ishtar legionnaires even make them? How much do they have how much should I focus on guns or last hurrah like tank battles in the colony? Things like that. On top of where the hell is Victoria in all of this? The biggest takeaway after watching Berserk especially was how do I make Victoria kill and depict it realistically?

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I don't have much experience with guns, only games rather they be VR or not. I've never killed, I've never witnessed someone close to me tragically dying in the same vein. I never got my hands bloodied: I couldn't make Victoria kill in hand to hand mortal combat, much less how the hell do I depict guns and melee in this setting? I couldn't live through her head doing that. And the "ending" I had in concept was just the icing on the cake: how do you, as the "villain" Jothanton, tell a battered, shocked 17-year old you're simply a pawn in the bigger grand scheme of things and they'll do to me what they did to you? Etc. It was just a poor man's attempt at Metal Gear Solid shenanigans, that's where I think a lot of influence going to play in the last volume. That sort of ending was going to rub people the wrong way because it's preachy and political and we have so much damning stuff going on in real-life; remember the Preamble chapter with the lengthy dismissal of pure coincidence over the Russian events? Yeah, there's no way I could refrain from "copying" real-life contemporary actions and not face scrutiny or outright getting banned from the site.

I guess really that was my biggest contributing fear: There's no way I could butt heads with Royalroad or even Spacebattles moderators over Victoria killing in first-person. There's just no way and it probably wouldn't end well. The final scene was too graphic and I wouldn't budge from revisiting it for the sake of self-censorship. I won't go into details what it was exactly, many years from now when I'm in a better footing you'll see what I mean.

Well... with that all out of the way. What now? Am I going to delete this? Am I going to write anything else? Well, first of all, I know I probably lost pretty much all creditability after this. No one who's read this or sees the 'dropped' tag will probably not want to read any other fiction by the author, that's only natural.

I did consider deleting this, but recently I was informed my webnovel was stolen and put on Amazon, luckily that was resolved within a day. But what's to say it won't happen again? I'm not too sure why someone would want to rip a shitty story like this for a quick buck, you'd probably get more money out of your mileage working a dead-end job like me. So I won't, since I'll need that as insurance in case it's attempted again, but I'll probably delete them on Scribblehub and spacebattles.

I want to remake this, properly, in third-person past tense. And most likely not serialized... just so I can actually sleep better at night and not be haunted every single day over the story. At the same time, my rekindling for medieval and antique settings makes me yearn to write a setting in that. I hated fantasy so much unless it was down to earth like mount and blade. Berserk enamored me with its setting. After the 1st ep I forgot it even had monsters, and the little twist in the dungeon made me appreciate dark fantasy in a way: I particularly loved how exceedingly rare it is for fantasy settings to explore the beginning of a demon invasion and people's reactions to them. That's fantastic.

On another note, I just finished playing Rome2 recently with the epic DEI mod and I feel bursting at the seams to make a medieval setting story, a hint of magic that may be just now emerging or on the throes of extinction. Maybe it might fare well better here? Like with nearly all my stories I'd done, they usually include a lot of similar names in terms of characters, places, and etc. Fun fact, Cosmic Saga was originally going to be more like LotGH meets Gundam. There was strong hints to that in Victoria's oxygen-deprived hallucinogenic glimpses of the future with the two machines shooting rays at eachother. If that sounds vaguely similar it's because it was ripped straight from a certain sequence from Gundam Unicorn. On the subject of gundam and space colonies, Australia was going to get colony dropped but it was going to happen off-screen and gets passing mentions in the sequel novel after The Last Waltz. Oops!

But ah, right, the Cosmic Saga. I don't want all my hard work and effort to go to waste: Maybe it'll show up here better polished and easier to digest-on a new fiction page of course. After all, why would I want to finish this ugly duckling, then write the Last Waltz volume (that covers Ishtar-Terra itself) then rewrite it all in a different narrative? That could get ugly and add more years to the "ill probably get around to it" list. Maybe I will stop writing completely. Who knows? I try to tell myself it's not a big deal at the end of the day, there's literally hundreds of thousands of stories much better than this.

So... if you're still willing to stick around, you could click that follow button if/when I upload a new fiction. Like a stranded astronaut sending out a distress signal, maybe it will get answered... one day. Will anyone answer it? Will the Cosmic Saga ever really get proper closure? Well any of my stories get closure? Who knows.

So long space cowboys. I hope one day I can grace you with my words again.