[Author: Taking a break]

Aight, I'm gonna be straight with you all. I've stressed myself out too much.

This fic was meant to just be some fun little thing that I'd use to really flesh out some ideas that I've had bouncing around in my head for a while now. I wrote about twenty chapters before I suddenly had a thought:

'Hey, this is pretty neat! I wonder if I should upload it somewhere?' I thought to myself.

At the time, I thought it was a fantastic idea. But I'm starting to realise that maybe, just maybe, I should've given it some more thought.

I'm not a very organised person. I get burned out of things super quickly, usually within a few weeks at a time before I need to take a long break from whatever it was that I burned out on. I knew this, but I didn't take it into consideration when deciding to upload this fic.

For a while, it was fine. You guys are all amazing readers and I've seen blissfully little in the way of hate for either me or my story, and I honestly can't thank you guys enough for engaging with my work!

But that's kind of the problem... uh... hold on let me take a moment to think of how to say this in a way that doesn't throw you under the bus...

I don't want to disappoint you?

Yeah that's about right. You guys are so nice that it made me feel really bad the first time I had to take a break for real-life stuff... and the next time after that too...

It made me feel so bad that I felt like I had to just keep working, just keep writing. I had been a reader myself for a decade at this point, so I was very familiar with the disappointment of waiting for a new chapter to come out only to see nothing for weeks at a time...

So even as my ideas started to dry up and I knew I had to take time off to recover from the burnout, I kept going anyways. Which led to the ridiculous sleep schedule issue that happened a couple weeks ago...

And that leads me to now.

The ideas have, finally, completely dried up. I do still have a few plans for this story in my notes, but they're all plot points set months, or even years down the Naruto timeline.

It hit me when I started writing the Sword Saint fight at the end of the little Sekiro-esque Dungeon that was meant to just be a mini-arc that introduced the concept of Dungeons so that other Reincarnators could use them to get stronger in the background while Seija's main story was playing out.

That was chapter 62.

Now I sit here staring at the currently-unfinished chapter 63 and there's just... nothing.

I have NO IDEA how I want the fight to play out. Specifically I don't know how I want to choreograph it. Sure I could cheap out and just timeskip over it to get into the plot points that I DO have some ideas for... but as said, that would be extremely cheap and I like to think my work is of a higher quality than that.

So... I guess the final, ultimate points of this whole message to you guys are as follows:

This fic IS NOT DEAD, OR DYING! I will finish it.

However... I do need a break. A long one.

I can't believe I'm saying this, especially not to a collection of readers as wonderful as you guys, but I kind of regret uploading this fic to the internet. Not that I think my work itself is bad or undeserving of seeing the light of day! But because I simply was not prepared to finish it yet. We're barely half-way through Seija's childhood and I plan on having this story reach all the way up to the time of Naruto's original story, where she'll be in her late 30s/early 40s! 

We're like... maybe 50% through with this wild ride. At MOST!

So yeah. I'm going to take a break to get the ideas flowing again. Really hard-reset myself back to the early days when I could bang out 10k words in a single day of writing, with zero stress of deadlines weighing me down.

Maybe I'll upload chapters whenever they're done, which could be weeks or months apart knowing my burnout cycle. Or maybe you won't see me for a year and I'll suddenly come back with like fifty chapters in a row all saved up to post one after another on a regular schedule.

No clue.

Either way it goes, you WILL see me again. Honest! Maybe read the fic again from the start a few times just to keep the memory fresh for when I finally return? Heh.

That's all from me for now (sorry for buzzing your notifs with this not-chapter, btw)... and as always...

HAVE A NICE DAY!!!