I'm reading over the end of Living History and it hit me...

It's done. It's really, really finished.

I've dedicated 15 months of my life and almost 600 pages of text to Living History.

How did that happen? How?

( Blather to spare my Flist from a huge-ass post. )

There have been days when I've loved Living History and the words flowed freely. There have been days when I've hated the damn thing and was prepared to chuck it away as a never-to-be-finished WiP. I've played with it, I've fought with it, and at the end of the day, I still look at it with a mixture of love and hate. I know it's pretty good, but I see spots where I could've done so much better. There are some lines that make me happy and amazed that I thought them up, and there are whole paragraphs that just make me cringe. Sometimes I wish I was a little better seeding those Q&As through the story. Sometimes I wonder if I was too heavy-handed on the future stuff, or if I over-explained things on the present-day stuff.

I suppose when all is said and done, I'll never be able to explain how I actually feel about Living History. It gave me a chance to fall in love with characters not named Xander or Faith all over again. Yet at the same time it threw curveballs at me as I tried to connect the beginning of the story with the end.

Yes, I wrote the end of the story 15 months ago.

Living History was written in much the same way that the U.S. Continental Railroad was built: I had to hook up both ends somewhere in the middle. Sometimes that required a some huge swerves in the plot to make it all meet up.

For example, when Willow comes up with her plan to wrest the future back for her friends, I had to figure out why she'd think it was so important. What was her motivation? The only thing I could think of was that Willow had somehow got a glimpse of the future herself and realized the danger it posed. So, how do you do it? Enter the Grail causing Willow's brain to go haywire.

Or when Giles hears Catherine's tale of the First Battle of Sun'dayl. Why was he there? Was he looking for her? Did he ask to hear it? On a plane back from writercon, the shimmy shakes showed up and gave me my excuse. Which meant a lot more writing on my part to make it slot into the story and show the effect it had on Xander, Faith, and Giles, such as being willing to swallow Willow's lie whole.

There are a few instances where it happened to me, but those were the biggest and had the most impact on Living History's final shape.

It's strange to look at the start of the story and realize that at first I started writing it because I was sick and tired of all the Scooby-bashing that was going on. If you read the original challenge, you can see how bad it was and why it annoyed me so much. I wanted to write a short romp that would derail the whole challenge and prove you could write a story that made everyone look good in their own characteristic ways without bashing anyone or turning anyone into "the bad guy."

I still think it's interesting that there isn't "a bad guy" anywhere in Living History, and everyone takes their shot at being the antagonist. The only "evil" that needs to be fought is some Great Darkness in the far distant future that does not immediately imperil Our Heroes. The biggest battles that are actually fought are all internal (I'd like to think) as different characters try to come to grips with who they are, how they relate to one another, and confront some dearly held (and possibly erroneous) beliefs.

And I did it all because of a momentary fit of pique and because I wanted to prove a point, maybe the most petty reason ever to start a fanfic.

On the balance, I'm not sorry I did it because, when all is said and done, I got a lot out of it. I learned to actually think about what I was writing beyond the basics. I had to balance whether a change would make sense and would actually fit into the flow. I had to make sure that, even in a story as horrendously long as this one, that something happened in each and every chapter that moved the story inch by inch to the final conclusion. If anything, Living History made me more disciplined about my writing. I never thought that something that I always found relatively easy to do could be such hard work.

It's changed the way I approach fanfiction. It's even changed the way I write things in my professional life. I understand now, maybe more than ever, that keeping things simple in your writing actually takes a hella lot of work.

I don't really know who to thank first, really. All of you who've left feedback, even if I really and truly suck at responding, were really the people who pushed me to finish the story I semi-affectionately call "The Monster that Ate My Life." Thank you for pointing out typos (yes, I appreciate it), or pointing out things that didn't make sense to you (because I could address it in the very next installment), and for posting your questions and concerns about characters and how they were portrayed.

All of you kept me honest. You were the ones that made Living History what it is. I could not have done it without you.

And for that, I thank you all from the bottom of my heart.

I'll start posting the ending parts starting tomorrow and it'll be smooth sailing from here on out.

Starting Nov. 12, I'll be posting the start of a certain birthday fic for a certain nwhepcat which somehow became something of a follow-up for this. Don't worry. It'll be nowhere near as long (probably half the size, in fact) and will not take 15 months to finish.

That's a promise.