Hey. So I know a ton of you love this book. I finished it nearly two years ago, and honestly when I first wrote it I felt so grateful to have so many people reading my stuff. At the time Scream was my comfort movie and Billy and Stu were the world to me. I was in high school nearing the end of Junior year, and the beginning of Senior year when I decided to publish it. So many people were loving it. Even got nominated for Wattys2020 and made it to 10th place in the fan fictions category for at least a week. And I felt so amazing.

But after a few months into it, I burnt out. Not because I didn't like Scream anymore; because so many people were DMing me, pressuring me, trying to find me on OTHER SITES to demand me to update.

In my Senior Year I was taking college classes. I was in 7 clubs, running two of them. I was aiming to feel so accomplished and proud of myself. I wanted to feel like I earned graduating. Writing Eureka on top of all that was admittedly a lot to take on, but I felt like I was doing really good. I was getting so many votes and so much love. I worked so hard Senior year to do it all. Even landed a lead in the school play. That play never came, though.

COVID ripped it all away from me. I didn't get anything from my hard work. And suddenly every comment telling me how good I was doing was starting to get drowned out by teenagers telling me to update; because so many kids were home now because of COVID, and it was my job to entertain them. Writing on here was all that I had, and every day I turned to this site only to see nearly 700 notifications a day of people actively pulling apart something I was doing for fun. That's what burnt me out.

I suffered multiple losses during COVID and when I turned to my silly little stories on here it got me nowhere. Nearing the last few chapters I felt so rushed by complete strangers who would literally tear at my writing out of spite for me not updating, and I was getting so anxious that I literally ended the book 5 chapters short.

A lot of people didn't like the way I ended it. And I get that. Because I didn't like it. Sometimes I think about rewriting it but I remember what the first write-through put me in and it just hurts.

I did it for fun. And now I hate this work so much that even watching Scream makes me upset. My comfort movie. I lost everything and I can't even look at the cover for this without feeling like it took something away from me.

I thought that maybe when I published it, things would get better. But no. I think someone on Tiktok might have recommended my fan fiction. Because out of nowhere I started getting people who were shitting on everything. People who called harmless writing quirks annoying, people who would make cruel jokes about what I must be like in real life based on my writing.

And before you brush it off as criticism, I did too for a bit. And even though I didn't ask for constructive criticism, I just took it. But at some point I just stopped editing and left the errors be. 15 chapters, all at least 3,000 words long, and I wrote it all for free online for everyone to read. I figured that's all I really owed anyone.

And then came slurs.

I guess some people assumed my race, gender, sexuality, even my neurological make up. Got DMs calling me racial slurs- which never landed because I was white, but I still felt awful that someone would say that given how little space POC creators already have in the realm of fan fictions. People called me a f*g, a r*tard. Even got one comment claiming I had daddy issues or was touched when I was a kid. Can't tell you how much I wanted to delete my works right there. Delete my whole account.

I deleted all of these. Didn't open the app for months and when I came back more were there. They died off a little after the Ghostface trend on tiktok did. People were bored of something that used to be my main comfort after they ruined it for me.

Weirdly enough, that isn't the end of it.

I started getting harassed for another thing that was so fucking stupid.

Smut.

As you all who have read know, I wrote fade-to-black instead of smut. Before I even did, people were relentlessly begging me to write smut on this work. I didn't want to. First it was because I wrote during school a lot. During my two study hall periods. I bought my own chrome book just to do it, actually. So the school wifi didn't ruin it for me if Wattpad got banned (Which it did like halfway through the year). Obviously I wasn't going to get caught writing porn. Writing X Readers for fictional slashers during lectures was enough embarrassment.

After COVID started and I 'graduated' I uncovered a lot about myself and found that I was really uncomfortable with writing porn. I mean REALLY uncomfortable. I don't owe you all anything, but yeah, childhood sexual trauma is a bitch. Uncovering it is even more of a bitch and honestly I didn't care much for telling anyone. I haven't even told my close friends.

But you know who felt they were entitled? You guys! You wanted me to make porn for you! To spend hours making free content for you. Comments calling me a prude, comments saying that I'm a fucking bitch for not wanting to write porn about HIGH SCHOOL AGED CHARACTERS (BY THE WAY). Yeah, another huge reason I didn't want to do this was because I became an adult after it was completed and didn't feel comfortable writing about high schoolers anymore. Shocker, right?

The worst part was that so many of these people sobbing about not getting written smut were children. They had ages and birth years in their bios, all of them around 12 to 16. It made me feel disgusting. Kids wanted me to give them literal porn? Why the fuck would I do that? Seriously.

Even to this day, so many children begging for me to stop being a prude and 'just write it already' and to stop wasting their time.

I feel like I'm the one that wasted my time. This fan fiction is nearly a 4 hour read (5 if your reading speed isn't super sonic) and it took two years to write out fully. The edits, the drafts, me literally planning out chapters in a separate book. Rewrites, fixing mistakes, rereading my work over and over and over. And the funny thing is? I did it out of love for my work. Did it out of love for Billy and Stu and Sidney and Randy and Tatum.

And I didn't get anything. I don't get paid for this, guys. It's a hobby. I write because it's all I have to do when I'm sad. I write because I love the media I consume and I love characters so much I just need to put all that love into something. I spent two years on something for people like me to enjoy. And I really hope some of you still can, because I fucking hate it.

I couldn't even feel good about myself when I was nominated for the Watty2020 awards. I just felt like 'yeah, I mean, sure. I spent so long on it, it just makes sense.'

No love, not even closure. It felt like someone gave a participation trophy to a corpse after a contest for breathing, where they had a stroke in the middle of it and nobody cared.

And after about another year and a half, I've finally published something else. After a year and a half of thinking it wouldn't be worth it. I didn't publish it here. God, no, could you imagine how that would go down? I put it on Archive Of Our Own. And people have been so nice. The criticism always comes with complements, people aren't scared to leave kudos and commentary that genuinely helps me. I feel so much better. It took me so long to realize I wasn't being dramatic. I just needed to get treated like a human to like writing again.

To some of you, I genuinely love you. A lot of my original readers that gave me so much love and actually wanted me to grow as a writer, thank you. I can't express how much it meant to me to have those good times with you.

But to a lot of you, it ruined writing for me for over a year. It made me feel uncomfortable with the one thing I found comfort it, and it made me want to hide everything I've ever made. And I sincerely do hate you for it.

I hate Wattpad. Ao3 was always better. And yeah, I didn't reread this for spelling errors, and I'm not going to. That's all folks.