From Me, To You [Read after novel completion]

Hello dear readers! Your Paradise has now concluded! In celebration, I thought I would release a special chapter to serve as a sort of 'behind the scenes' type of content regarding the creation of this novel and the journey while writing it as well as to issue out some thank you notes.

I have been creating stories since before I could read. When my mom would read me my bedtime stories I would say, "I want to read it this time," but since I didn't know how, I would just flip through the pages while making up my own plot and characters.

As I got older and would play with dolls, I would get frustrated with their plastic books that didn't open. To solve my frustration, I would create books for them and use stickers as illustrations.

When I would do coloring books, my mom would want to throw them away when I completed them saying, "It's not the same as a normal book! You've finished it, there's nothing left for you to do with it!" .....so I would look at all the pages and come up with a story line for them and make my mom write in it so I could keep my coloring books. (What can I say, the pictures were pretty!)

Then I got to my teen years, and I started to write fanfictions. 

I got so frustrated with them though. I like to keep characters the same, I always hated when I would read one and the writer would take one of the established characters and give them a whole new personality. However, I then found I was extremely restricted in what I was able to do with the story and where I wanted to take it.

Yet, I was never able to write my own. I'd either come up with a beginning and end, beginning and middle, or middle and end, and I would struggle to figure out "How did we get here?" or "Where do we go from here?" 

As I created my other two works (The Aurelian Empire & Two Deaths, One Love), I didn't know how things worked at all, it was my first time posting my own original work. From those I learned so, so much, and I am still learning from them as I continue to write them.

Due to health reasons, those had to come to a pause and when I felt better I thought, "I want to try something new since I need to refresh myself on my other works before I complete them."

So I decided to write "Your Paradise: Listen to My Song." I had so much more knowledge while writing this novel, and for the first time, I was able to have a fully fleshed out, proper outline (for a webnovel).

As I wrote, I felt a little disappointed. I felt like my writing quality had dropped immensely from my previous works and I found that I was getting frustrated with myself because it wasn't exactly how I wanted it. 

There were times that I had to throw that out the window and say "Just keep writing! You can't achieve perfection!" (I've also discovered I'm a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to the things I'm passionate about as well.)

Before I knew it, this novel became the first novel, in my 28 years of life, that I have ever completed.

All of the frustrations I had with it, with feeling it wasn't up to par, with feeling that it wasn't "good enough", all of that disappeared. Now I'm extremely proud of it and this novel will forever be extremely special to me.

From it, I learned a lot about the art of story telling, how to create a proper outline (suited for webnovels since I was trained in traditional novel writing), and how to really preserver! 

I, at one point when I was younger, also had my own music - of which I also wrote the lyrics to all of them (except for one). Since those were scrapped and never released, I became very depressed and I didn't touch lyric writing again and I stopped being able to sing too.

This novel also helped me start writing lyrics again and I think my lyric writing improved so much. Recently, a friend of mine even asked me to write new lyrics to a song because they wanted to see the song in a different perspective and I thought "Wow my lyrics have improved that much?" 

Through writing this, I've rediscovered my passions, improved on so many things outside of writing and I will be forever grateful!

That being said, I'd like to issue some thank you's now:

To my readers: First and foremost, thank you so much for reading my novel and supporting me throughout this journey. Thank you for putting up with the days I didn't upload. Thank you for leaving your comments and letting me know your thoughts. Thank you for sending me power stones and showing your support for my novel outside of just reading it. Thank you for giving my work some of your attention and your precious time. I am very appreciative of it and I hope you enjoyed the journey!

To the readers who dropped my novel or decided it wasn't for them: Thank you for giving my novel a chance. Thank you for giving it some of your time and attention, and thank you for giving me the opportunity to entertain you (even if it didn't last).

To my beta readers: Thank you for giving me glowing reviews, after coming back to writing from a year of hiatus, my confidence was quite low and I didn't have faith at all in this novel in the beginning, but your compliments gave me the encouragement and belief I needed. Thank you for thoughtfully giving me your suggestions as well. Whether I applied them or not, they did make me stop and think, "How can I apply this?" "What would happen if I applied this?" "Is this right for what's happening right now?" and that lead me to other thoughts and to other things which all helped shape how I wrote my novel and helped me to keep those things in mind and keep applying them with the same questions. 

To MrFay: Thank you for encouraging me and supporting me while I wrote. For not letting me give up when I felt like I wanted to and telling me to keep writing when I had those "I don't want to do anything today!" kinds of days. Thank you for giving me compliments on my writing and for boosting my confidence. Thank you for believing in me and overall making me feel like I was capable!

To SeraphWedd: Thank you for gifting me my first ever castle and for helping me put my story out there.

To theothecollosal: Thank you for using my first chapter as a practice for your drawing. Since it is a dream of mine to have my novel adapted into a comic, it gave me a taste of that dream and gave me a lot of motivation! That meant the world to me!

To QueenFrieza: Thank you for giving me my new cover!

To MooingNymph: Thank you for fixing my terrible text on my cover, and thank you for always supporting my work!

To WordWarden: Thank you for giving me support and giving me strength during hard times!

To Nico: Thank you for helping me come up with a title for this novel, even though I ended up not going with the one that was originally selected, it still helped me find the avenue to the correct one and thank you for supporting me~

To My Akina: Thank you for always having my back and sticking up for me when no one else would, for always having an ear to listen to me and a shoulder for me to cry on. Thank you for believing in me when others wouldn't (even when people tried to tear us apart), and thank you for being my best friend in the whole entire world. You are one of the best people I know and I am so, so thankful to have you in my life.

To My Saki: Thank you for teaching me so much, and for helping me grow. Even through all of our fights and disagreements, no matter how long it may have taken to work past it, thank you for showing me that a fight doesn't mean things are over. Thank you for respecting my feelings and being understanding of me even during our 'dark ages' as we like to call them~ Thanks for being my cutie youngest~

To the Juris, Airis, Makotos and Mikis of the world: Thank you for showing me what to look out for in a person. Thank you for teaching me that the world is a cruel place and for making me appreciate the good people around me so much more. Thank you for teaching me to be more cautious and thank you for giving me a variety of different experiences that help fuel my creativity. 

To those of you that are facing bullying or have faced bullying in the past, or even may face it in the future: Know that, with all of the bad people, with all the evil out there, there is still good. There are people that will love you no matter what, there are people that will stand by your side. Maybe you haven't found them yet, but they are out there. Don't lose hope, try to learn what you can from each experience and try to turn those experiences into something useful for yourself. Use those experiences like nourishment to help you grow and rise above all of them. When a rotten plant withers away and returns to the soil, a new plant will grow in its place, stronger than the one previous. Be the new plant. It will be hard, there will be times you will cry yourself to sleep and feel like everyone hates you. That's normal. Just like there are those times, there will also be times where you will feel happy too, so don't give up! You can do it! I believe in you!

Lastly, to Your Paradise: Listen to My Song: Thank you for being a novel that taught me so much. Through your name changes (Eye on the Prize, Avenue to Avalon, Paradise Symphony, etc) and the struggles and challenges I faced with you. I will forever be grateful for what you have done for me and I hope you will be able to do more in the future. Here is to you, and hopefully you will become someone's paradise one day. I hope some day, you will be able to help someone. 

Thank you everyone, thank you for everything~

- Thalia <3 < p>