Hey readers!
Yup. It's Jay.
Though I should probably mention my real name is Joshua.
It's been a while. Too long, actually. I stopped writing Phantom about a year ago, and I never explained why. It wasn't until I looked it up a few minutes ago and saw that more people were reading my book than I expected that I realized you all deserved an explanation.
First of all, I want to thank and appreciate every single person who read Phantom. A story is nothing without the people reading it, and all of you who opened this app and saw this book and decided it was worth reading are everything to me.
There are multiple reasons why I never continued Book 2 as promised. One is that I got into college. Another is that I was battling depression, anxiety, and an identity crisis. Writing was supposed to be my escape, but somewhere along the way it became an obligation, like I was writing for the readers instead of for myself. Not anymore.
The third (and some of you might not like this) is that I found God. And I know that, to some of you, that might not be a good enough reason, but to me it was. God is the reason I didn't commit suicide after years of self-hatred over being sexually attracted to both genders (Casmir and Katarina are two sides of the same coin—me), so I wanted my life to honor Him. I looked at my work and asked myself if what I was writing glorified Him. I questioned the plot, the characters, the words. And I decided it didn't. So I convinced myself that maybe writing wasn't what God wanted me to do. Maybe it wasn't worth it.
So I tore it all down.
I deleted every chapter from this very app. I deleted them from Wattpad too, going as far as deleting my Wattpad account, and I almost deleted this one as well (didn't get around to it, obviously). I gave up Phantom because I thought that was the sacrifice. I thought that was what He wanted me to do.
But I forgot one little detail.
For those who've read the Bible, and even for those who haven't, you probably know the story of Abraham and Isaac. God asked Abraham to sacrifice his son, but Isaac was never really the plan. In the end, God provided a ram instead, and father and son went home together. Some of you might see that story as cruel, but think about all those romance tropes where someone says, "I'd burn the world for you." Love demands sacrifice. Sometimes even of the thing you treasure most.
Phantom was my Isaac. My kid. And I thought God wanted me to sacrifice writing it, so I did.
But the story has haunted me from the moment I stopped writing. I still think about Sal and Kat and Casmir. All the romances you never got to see. All the battles you never got to fight with them. The characters that were meant to emerge. The twists. The story. They're all still in my head. In my dreams. In my nightmares.
I haven't been able to write anything since. No stories. No novels. And for months I prayed and asked God why.
Then I stumbled across a saved draft.
Apparently, deleted chapters aren't fully deleted on Webnovel (there's a trash bin I never emptied). I started reading what I'd written, and slowly God began opening my eyes to what I couldn't see before.
Writing wasn't the sacrifice.
Phantom was.
And so I'm rewriting it.
The thing is, it's a slow process. It might take a year or more. But I'm doing it. I'm fleshing out the plot and the characters. Making them more real. More human. More me than I ever thought possible. Think of it as an alternate timeline. A "What If?"
I don't know when it'll be ready. I have school, and I have a life beyond the keyboard and screen. I don't know if it'll be on Webnovel or Wattpad, or if it'll end up with a publishing company. And I don't even know if any of you will still be there to read it.
But Phantom is coming back.
Maybe not with the same name, but it's coming.
And it's scary to realize that I started something people actually enjoyed. It's overwhelming too. But I'm trusting God that everything will be okay.
I leave you all with this promise.
Sal's story will not die.