Life as I know it: Using fanfiction as a motivator

My WIPs got deleted and my life as a writer flashed before my eyes.
And then. I started again.

Life as I know it:
Using fanfiction as a motivator

So a few weeks ago my laptop died. 

And for someone who only uses their laptop to write, it hit me pretty hard. 

Though I haven't worked on any projects for the past six months (minus Project M which is always on hiatus because people that know me in real life read it and...yeah, the teasing hasn't stopped), I've had several incomplete, unedited one-shots and stories cooking, including original work that I hoped to publish one day. All of it was the result of almost three to four years worth of stories, and they were gone within seconds. 

Word to the wise: Backups are important in life.

However, once my laptop revived itself, instead of shutting it down and hiding out in my blanket fort out of depression, I opened up Word, and wrote. 

Throughout the last six months since the completion of Sibling Intervention, I didn't feel like I could write anymore out of exhaustion. But looking back, I realize how productive I was when I had fanfiction in my life.

A little look into my personal life:

At the beginning of 2014, I received my results from my final exams and was officially a high school graduate. During 2013, I wrote next to nothing since I felt that my education took precedence over writing stories.

Initially, I did well. 

However, within three to four months, I felt drained in every sense of the word. 

When I closed my eyes every night, I opened them to another morning; living is hard when you're exhausted. My weekends consisted of sleeping and during the week I was literally a machine. I was in a rut, and even when I forced myself to sit down and write just to finish Sibling Intervention, I could feel my brain frying in my head. And even with my good marks, I wasn't happy. 

Eventually, I gave in to my exhaustion and shut the lights off upstairs. My motivation to do well for my exams had dwindled; I succeeded in burning myself out in less than six months. 

By the time the exams rolled around, I didn't care about passing well - just passing. And I achieved that. 

When I started college in February this year, I was excited about a new beginning, studying towards something I was interested in (no math, no physics, no reciting textbooks). 

Out of the desire to immerse myself with the real world, I kept away from fanfiction after completing Sibling Intervention, saying to myself that I took forever to finish a story anyway and that I didn't have the juice to start another. 

The day I decided to just throw ideas at Word was the day my laptop committed suicide only to be resurrected with nothing left. It was a clean slate. And a seeming punishment for being gone too long.

I rolled with it though, and that's how this happened: 

I've been toying with the idea of writing a Twilight story for awhile. How I feel about Twilight as literature will be discussed later, but the fact of the matter is, I wanted something new and I got it. 

The story I wrote: Flavor of the Month, was completely different to Sibling Intervention, and though I've only just started it, I want to do something different than the hordes of romance stories in every AU fanfiction out there. Along with my first Twilight fic, I started the second part of Sibling Intervention called Brotherly Advice and Sisterly Persuasion. 

It's been less than a month and I feel more motivated to do things again. 

My real life concerns like course work and projects are planned and completed as soon as possible in order to give me time to write before my next self-imposed deadline. 

It's more of a challenge now in order to get things done. Whereas in the past, my marks were for me, in fanfiction they were both for me and for the people that read my stories. I hate disappointing people so writing fanfiction and using the desire for updates (which every fanfic reader knows to their soul) to push me in my real life have helped. 

I hope it isn't a few weeks kind of thing, but time will tell. 

Until then, I'm going to ride the high and hope I don't crash when it stops.