Hi! It’s me! Lily!!!
Looks like it will be cloudy for the eclipse tomorrow! Aww!! Well, that just means the sky will get REALLY dark for a little while. Maybe it’ll be like night for four minutes. Still should be interesting.
We went to church today. The pastor announced Joe and Anathema’s engagement. Everyone applauded politely – even the (soon-to-be) ex-wife of the guy who attempted to, well, assault her. I don’t know if she’s forgiven or not, but she seems resigned to the situation. She at least seems to realize that it’s not really Anathema’s fault. No one forced him to do any of the things he did. (For his part, he’s still rotting in jail, and it looks like that will be the case for the foreseeable future.)
I stood up and did my thing. I had a message but I don’t remember most of it. It had something to do with forgiveness again. Something that seems to be on God’s mind lately. But Dave has been feeding me bad jokes, so after, I fit one of those in too. Something about a catholic chicken.
Anyway…
After that the girls were over for band practice… and we didn’t practice at all. We got some sweets and chocolate and tea and basically pulled a K-on. We wanted to talk about our future. I don’t think I mean just the future of the band, I mean… our future. The whole thing.
Beth and Crystal and Diana and I sat around the table and talked it all out. I said that I was going to Japan in a few months and they had to figure out how to do without me. Crystal just looked at me with doe eyes and started bawling. All I could make out between her (very deep) sobs was that she didn’t really care about the band, she just wanted her big sister. I started crying too. After all that, we talked seriously about what we all wanted to get out of the band, and it turned out that Crystal was the only one that really wanted anything out of the band… just as I suspected, honestly. Beth likes to sing, but she’s not too keen on playing guitar, and Diana doesn’t really care about the band at all, she just cares about Crystal, and all of us think Crystal’s far too good (or at least has too much potential) to be held back by us. Frankly, Diana wants to be a cook/chef.
So the band basically broke up.
It’s not because we don’t want to be sisters anymore, it’s because we want to be sisters more than we want to be a band, and… it’s just not working out. Crystal has to make this work on her own. But… she has all of our support, and she knows that. So she seems this weird combination of heartbroken and raring to go. We told her we’d help her find new members, and even help write songs and stuff when we have time, but… our heart isn’t in it and she doesn’t really deserve that. Especially as good as she has the potential to be.
I’m not heartbroken at all, at least not about that. My heart was never really in it. I’ve got too many other things going on.
Beth said she might stick around because she does like to sing, and she is Crystal’s best friend, but they’re going to have to be the core of something new.
The first casualty of time… and there will be many more, even in the next few months.
So we all went out and had a farewell-to-the-band dinner.
I think we did something good. Playing drums was fun. But… it’s not what I want to be doing.
Oh well.
Everyone’s home now. Everyone has school tomorrow, but it’s eclipse day so it’s gonna be a weird day. A really weird day.
Anyway… I guess I should to to bed.
Love you all!!! ❤️
From the creator:
I used a JSON export plugin and about thirteen lines of python to import this whole thing into obsidian (that turned a months long task into about an hour), and now I just have to make all the links and tags and stuff. I’ve already identified four plotholes or dangling plot points, and I’m only a couple of months in. There is going to be a serious amount of retconning going on over the next few months while I prepare to turn this into something a little more permanent than a serial fiction. I’ve been avoiding retconning as much as I can, but it’s not avoidable now. I much prefer to leave things as they are, warts and all, because that gives the story flavor and fits into the paradigm of a slightly flighty teenager pretty well… but the structural stuff is its own problem.
I also identified a few more posts where I got the date wrong that I didn’t catch the first time through. There should be absolutely none now, but… famous last words.
Let’s be honest: by all measures but one or two, this serial fiction has been an abject failure and an utter waste of time. In the three years I’ve written it, I have very close to zero readers. I have no idea how to get more readers. I have no idea how to make it so readers want to keep reading. Once I’ve retconned this, finished it up, and turned it into a PDF, I really don’t want to put any more time or effort into this. If no one’s seen it in two and a half years, they won’t start now.
But in the one or two measures in which it counts, I guess it was worth doing. It helped me to work out some stuff in my own life, I created a good character and an okay I guess story, and… even if no one ever sees it, I have a work out there that I can be somewhat proud of. I guess there’s that. People can say I couldn’t write, but no one could say I didn’t write.
And it’s also time for me to start thinking about the next project. Which may be Lily related. But it’s not going to be this story. That’s almost done with, now.