News 3-2-26

Happy New Year everyone! Though, I’m REALLY late to that lol.

I want to apologize for this site going dark. My mom had a pretty bad health scare in November, and that took all of my energy through December. I wasn’t paying attention to much of anything other than her recovery, and had no idea that my domain had expired. *insert facepalm emoji here lol.* It took me so long to realize, because I hadn’t really had any updates on my writing, and I assumed everything was just running smoothly in the meantime. I was SO wrong.

That being said, I have some updates now. I had gone back and forth on the Instagram account I used the most back in 2020-2021. It started as a mix of a writing account and a gaming account, mainly because the only game I was playing was also being used to take screenshots for the “visual novel” version of a written story I was working on. Now that I play some more games, it has become more gaming focused, yet I was still attempting to fit writing in there somewhere. It just didn’t make sense, honestly. So, the account I was using as a personal account on Instagram has now been made public, and I post the more writing related stuff there, when the old one is just used for gaming content. Also, I am not really playing the game I started it on anymore. I said I would keep posting there, but it would only be screenshots for my story, but I haven’t even done that. For those who don’t know, the game I’m referring to is “The Sims 4”, and honestly, the whole EA buyout thing has left a bad taste in my mouth. I did buy a new PC recently, and I installed it, but who knows when I will actually use it.

On the same subject, I don’t know what I plan to do with the Pure Magic series anyway. My goal was to finish writing it, edit it all and publish it. In the meantime, I wanted to also finish the visuals for that Instagram account. I’m not sure if I will be doing either of those. Here are my reasons. For starters, Pure Magic was a fanfic. It was a Sims 4 fanfic, since most of the characters, other than ones I had created, were pre-made sims. Morgyn, Caleb, Lilith, all premade. I wrote the series with the Realm of Magic pack being the main focus. No hate to Maxim or EA (prior to this buyout, of course lol), but I had no idea just how much Realm of Magic ripped off Harry Potter. I feel like releasing Pure Magic, even though it’s a mix of spellcasters, vampires, even werewolves and fairies in later stories, would land me in hot water because it’s not only too close to Realm of Magic, but also too close to Harry Potter. Soooo, I may stop editing it, leave whatever is up on this site here (I have to check, because I think I took it down) and move onto other stories I can actually publish. That being said, I have already started editing them, so if I did take them down, I will have to at least change names in the stories before re-posting them here. I’ll figure it out. lol.

Onto the next update. “Reddit stories”. I am sure most people have seen those reddit stories in short form videos. I’m sure at first, they really were taken from actual reddit stories, but now most are written with AI. This leads to complaints from people. I decided to take matters into my own hands. I’ve started writing short stories and making them into these short videos. One of them is very clearly fiction, but the next was in the the style of an actual reddit story. I plan to do more, but while I’m not using AI to write these stories, I am using an AI voice to narrate them, and I only have a certain amount of credits per month to use those voices. In the meantime, I will also post them here in my “Short Stories” tab, and when I have enough of them, they will be released with “Such is Life”, the book I’ll publish of my short stories and poems.

Whew…..okay, I think I covered everything. I will post updates when I have them, and anyone who is subscribed to the newsletter will get these updates right to their email. Don’t forget to subscribe! Thank you so much, and it’s good to be back. <3

Lauren