Finishing Rogue

Hey Guys x

I'm in an emotional mood, so I thought it was only right to write this post!

I was writing a fanfiction, called Rogue, from 2nd January 2016 until April this year, and when I finished it, it felt really weird.

The character of Rogue was someone that I had been building before I even knew that this was something that I was going to write. I had her powers figured out before I even knew her name, I imagined myself as her in every film before my fingers even touched the keyboard, she was and is attached to me in a way that's difficult to explain.

I lived with her, I was her, I was her best friend, her conscience, her God, her everything.

I'm trying not to get too deep! But for me, when I create a character, sometimes they tend to just stay in my words on the page, they never make it into the real world. Rogue was definitely different, I feel like she jumped off the page and made her way into the actual Marvel Universe, which would have been incredibly cool!

And that got me thinking about what it meant to actually finish something. For me, finishing anything is a huge accomplishment.

It was the longest thing that I've ever written. At 80,000+ words it literally is the length of an average novel, and that astounds me. I never thought I'd be able to write anything that long, let alone something that actually means something to me. But I did it. At one chapter a week, I wrote something long, something that did mean a lot to me, something that still does.

And I guess she means a lot to me because the Marvel world that I placed her in means a lot to me. The Cinematic Universe is something that has been a huge part of my life for over two years now (wow, time has flown!) and writing fanfiction is my way of honouring it. I love it so much that I want to share my own take on it, I want to create my own character to place in that world, I would like to create more characters for that world one day, maybe even a spin-off story or something.

Sometimes, when I think about the things that more 'grown up' people my age are doing, like clubbing, dating, drinking, moving on and out, I think about my fanfiction as a silly hobby that people would probably laugh at.

But then I think about what it's done for me. I spend so much of my time doing what I love, writing, and I actually have something to show for it. I have these works that anyone can read and either enjoy or hate. I have constant plotlines in my head, I have ideas whirling and bubbling and exciting me so much that I can't sleep. I have things to wake up every single day and feel passionate about. I have things to look back on. I can go as far back as 2012 and see things that I wrote, see what I was proud of back when I was 15, what I was into, what my writing was like. In 5 years time, I can look back at what I'm passionate about now and make it better. Who knows if I'll still be writing fanfiction when I'm 25?

But if I am, it'll be because it makes me feel then, the way it makes me feel now. Excited, passionate, desperate to create, itching to write. Surely that's what it's all about?

Lou xx