Transitions & 5,100 Subscribers

First and foremost, I want to say a big thank you to all 5,100 subscribers.

If you are new here, thank you for giving my blog a shot. You might not know what to expect but I hope my work will impress you enough to keep you reading. If you have been here for quite some time, thank you so much for sticking around. Plenty of bloggers have come and gone, but you chose to stay. I really appreciate the support.

Seeing my subscriber count grow everyday is a huge encouragement. It reminds me to do my best for all of you. One reason I don’t give up on this blog is because I know I’m being read… and as a writer and blogger, that means a lot. I’m sure you all will agree on that.

So, thank you! Thank you so much!

Now, let’s talk about transitions.

Since I started my blog, it has gone through a couple of transitions. My blog first started as a place to promote my first novel, but it soon became a platform for me to deal with my post-potter depression; I started writing the Joanna Chen fan fiction and short fan fictions as a way to cope with the end of Harry Potter. But ultimately, it became a way for me to improve on my writing.

If you have been around long enough, you would remember the days where I don’t capitalize my i’s. Oh, wow. Jeyna, you cannot do that ever again! You would also remember writing or reading comments that brought to light my errors. Yes, I had plenty of those and I am very grateful for them. If no one said anything, I would not have improved at all. So old timers, thank you for being grammar Nazis.

Fan fiction was the focus on my blog for quite some time, until I decided to overcome my fear of being plagiarized and began publishing original works. I dropped the short fan fictions and began posting short stories and blog series’ such as Dr. Slubgob’s Letters and The Lucrative Business. I also tried a few reader interactive projects, but they failed. Well, one should not be ashamed of failure.

Now, I believe it has come to a point where another transition should take place. As some of you might have noticed, the FHB fan fiction is coming to an end. After which time, this blog will be completely focused on my own original fictional works. There will no longer be fan fictions. I’m sorry if that news disappoints some of you, but I think it’s about time I move forward. I am glad I started fan fictions and I’m glad many of you have come along for the ride, but I hope you would still remain on board with this new transition. There will also be a special project to kickstart this new phase, but I’ll write about it another time. This is actually one transition I’ve wanted to make for a while, and I would appreciate your continuous support. It means a lot to me 🙂

So, thank you in advance and thank you for reading this now. Also, thank you so much for all your comments, likes, shares, re-blogs, emails, and special features on your own blogs. I couldn’t have asked for a better group of readers and I hope that in the near future, I can look back and say, “Those early subscribers on my blog, they made a difference in my life.”

Thanks guys!

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A Bad Dream

A bad dream, that’s what I tell myself. Nothing else can explain what is happening to me at this very moment in life. The world has become so unpredictable and my fate is left in the hands of the unknown. I don’t know what is going on, and I don’t know what to do.

It started one night, where a full moon sat on the blank canvas of a sky. There were no stars and no clouds, just blackness overhead. I can’t recall what actually happened or how I got there, but I remember feeling an intense amount of pain. A kind of pain that left my ears ringing and my head throbbing even after it ended, pain that made my eyes teary and my body weak and clumsy. It took a while, but by the time I got my bearings, I found myself in a forest.

I tried to pick myself up, but the world was still spinning around me. I had no balance and no matter how hard I tried, I could not pull myself together. So, I crawled. Nails digging into the wet soil, I dragged my feet one at a time. I was moving very slowly, until a strange smell wafted in a cold night breeze. It was an odd smell and the more I inhaled it, the more I felt like gagging. It was not foul, but it churned the insides of my stomach. Moments later, the trees around me began to fade and I lost a few hours of my life.

When I woke up, it took me a long time to make out my surroundings. The sun was shining on my face and I knew night had long gone, but something did not feel right. My body was aching from head to toe and there was a smell, a different smell from the night before, that lingered in the air. As I sat up on my bed trying to put two and two together, I screamed.

The curtains were drawn back in my room and there was no denying what I was seeing. Scrambling out from my bed and hurrying far from it, I stared in horror at the colour of my sheets. They were red. The sight of red made me choke up and when I covered my mouth with my hands, I saw more. My hands, my arms, my legs and my clothes were caked with blood, dark red blood. This time, there was nothing that could stop me from emptying my stomach with a retch. My world began to spin again, and then I collapsed.

Since that night, I have told myself that it was simply a bad dream. When I woke up after the whole nightmarish affair, I was shocked to find no blood and a clean bedroom. My mother said it was a bad dream and my father told me to forget it. But how could I? It felt so real… it smelt so real. Just thinking about it makes my stomach uneasy, so how can it be a figment of my imagination?

A few weeks after the horrible ‘dream’, my grandfather came over for a visit. My grandmother left us a few years ago and my grandfather found company in us. My parents and I love him, so we never complained when he made unexpected visits. It was a weekend when he arrived, and he stayed for a few nights. On the last night, I found him in my room just as I was about to hit the sack.

“Aren’t you going to bed, grandpa?” I asked.

“Soon. I just want to tell you something,” he said.

“What is it?”

“Find the moon.”

“Huh?”

“Find the moon. That was what your grandma always told me. She said if you find the moon, you will find yourself.”

“Okay, grandpa,” I said. What he said was irrelevant at that moment, but I thanked him for his little advice anyway.

A week after my grandfather left, it happened again. I woke up in the middle of the forest, weak and disoriented. I tried to stand up, but my legs could not hold me up for long. Soon, I was back on my knees, crawling. I crawled for a longer time this round, and when that same strange smell swirled around me, I held my breath and pushed forward. When I was finally too tired to continue, I dragged myself to the side of a river, hoping to quench my thirst.

Pushing my head towards the water, because my hands were too tired to feed me, I saw something I would never forget. It was unforgettable in a horrifying way as I violently pulled my head away from the water. When I finally gathered enough courage to look at it again, I held my breath to the point of suffocation. I would rather suffocate than acknowledge what I was seeing; a beast with yellow eyes, sharp teeth, and wild hair glaring back at me. My reflection was a monster.

In the state of confusion and horror, my mind raced with unanswerable questions. There was nothing to stop it, except for the words of my grandfather. When it hit me, it did not make any sense, but something within me acted on it. Find the moon, he said, and that was what I did. I searched for the reflection of the moon in the river, and when I found it, I dragged myself over and hover over it. As though those words were magic, the monster I saw in the water was gone in the reflection of the moon. What I saw… was simply me.

After that night, I woke up in my room again, and when I told my parents about it, they insisted it was a bad dream. Until they tell me what is going on, I’ll just pretend it is. I don’t know what is going on and I don’t know what to do, but if I ever see that monster again I will find the moon. The moon will show me who I really am.

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I wrote this on the same day I heard Owl City’s new single, Wolf Bite. I guess it is safe to say it inspired this story; a story about the changes and transitions in life.

From playing, to schooling, to working, to marriage, to starting a family, life is always changing and we are always transitioning. These changes and transitions can be dark and scary, and it’s normal to feel lost when we start a new journey in life, but it is in these moments that we find ourselves. The moon that turns us, is the same moon that shows us who we really are. We just have to find it. Day will come soon enough, but in the night, let’s find the moon and never forget our true reflection.

I hope you enjoyed this story! Do let me know what you think about it in the comments below 🙂

*Btw, if you’re an Owl City fan like me, do me a favour and tweet and FB this to Adam. It’ll be really cool if he reads it too, don’t you think?

© 2014 Jeyna Grace

(For more short stories, click HERE)