A Note from Me...

[Yakima]

Some of you expressed concern for my departure from the Discord Channel so I thought maybe I should explain why.

First off, it was of no fault to any one person or necessarily anyone directly. Some of the conversations would drift to things I didn’t want to hear and instead of throwing a fit and telling everyone to stop on my (one person’s) account, I decided to remove myself from those conversations at the sacrifice of the conversations I wanted since there was no way to hide what I didn't want to read/see. I was getting pretty bad anxiety over those topics due to personal experiences, and justified or not, leaving was my solution; leave to let you all be you and allow me to go be me. This was not the only reason.

It was becoming clear to me that my goals and wants were different from the community. I wanted to write stories again, create characters - all of that but the more I did that the more I found that most people don’t have time to read them. It was very depressing to know that my efforts were just going to be passed for ‘please, I just want a summary’. And after several clutches hatching only to be disappointed, I am losing my drive to put the effort into characters that will just never have their stories read. I have put my heart and soul into projects for other people in the past, only to have it just...blow up. I always walk away feeling like an idiot for trying. This was kind of where my thoughts were heading here. I miss getting stories from people, too. Not short ones, but nice long ones that I can take to bed with me to read and stuff.

I also don't mind giveaways, but I can't keep up and this is what killed it for me in the past, before the Nexus died. This is why I have kind of stopped asking for dragons from giveaways - because I have a pile of dragons from giveaways that are backseat to actual characters I have developed through the story. I’m probably alone in that type of thinking (along with other lines of thinking I found out...) but that’s me.

These are just some of the ‘reasons’ I needed to step away from the Discord and I intend to return (I sent myself a never-expire invite before I left...I’ll come back when I’m ready). I just felt that, because some of you expressed concern, I should explain why. Or try to. I probably failed but I tried. It’s honestly really complicated and I don’t want to make others feel bad or like they’re at fault or like they did something. The way I see it, it was me and none of you are responsible in any way for how I feel...or how I choose to deal with it. You did nothing wrong.

Like I said in my exit, I will still be here and on the Forums. If you friend (or have friended) me on Discord we can still talk. I will keep up on my Trello Card updates. And, once I have the situation with losing Dreamweaver figured out, I will continue to update my websites.

[Shard]

<3


Wait wait 'losing dreamweaver' what? since it's my go to obviously i am curious, but my version is suuuuuper old.

[Dray]

Sorry to hear that things were a mix of bad vibes, Yakima! If anything's coming up that you'd like to see stopped in the future, I think the community had agreed on a pineapple emote to discreetly ask a convo be paused or taken to DM's or something.

Long stories are tough on a few folks in the community, but I'm sure it's not everyone who doesn't like reading them. It might be worth it to chat to someone on a meta level about what you're hoping to write and where you want to go with the results of a clutch before you send something in. I've found that throwing a stats page or a story without any of that work was a source of sore feelings in the past and we're probably most of us ready to help with a story going forward if you're aiming for something in particular.

In the meantime, I hope that dreamweaver works again soon, yikes!! Thank you for putting up the wiki and helping me get back towards being organized with all the work you've done so far.

[Yakima]

My bf's friend who offered to let me use his account (he could have two computers registered to use Creative Cloud) decided he's going to cancel and I offered to pay half but he said even if I did that he would still cancel at the end of the year so... I can still update with something like Notepad++ or whatever but I lose the templates that I have come to rely on (basically a template in Dreamweaver allows me to change menus or anything that stays the same on the page, so I could change the footer, tell it to update all pages and it was done...I didn't have to do EACH page manually...) Pretty sure your version has no idea what a Dreamweaver template is, Shard.

Yeah, I plan on being more specific in the future, and probably more specific on types of dragons, too. I'm more focuses on Pern and Sentra (which is going to a mixed home for Court and Pernese, and a few others like Hathians...and Sentran dragons when they're resurected from literaral bones...). I do like surprises which was why I wasn't being specific but sometimes the hatching would come along and I would just feel like the dragon didn't fit my character or something. I'm trying to get my database together so that once I can, I can just get riders up but until I know the fate of my tempalte pages, I will probably hold off on new candidates, except the ones I currently have out.

[Trix]

I can relate to the giveaways, though it's calmed down. At one point I was thinking: I want to write a story again, but I'm there now so that's good.
I'm happy to know you'd like to read a long(er) story. You'll be getting my jungle juju candidates in the next regular clutch at Isla. I figured out long ago that special clutches just don't need long stories or plot since all the dragons are cool. I was saving my longer stories for those regular clutches but then I got cold feet because the story really is long.