Everything's fine.
On February 23, 2020, Steam will be four years old. That blows my mind. I keep repeating that the first book was supposed to be the ONLY book because I cannot comprehend how it got this bad. "Katara's Courtship" turned into me fixing plot holes, addressing geopolitics, and having two adults figure out if they could be together because it was far too easy to recognize that they loved each other.
But the world grew faster than I could handle. This story very much was the pasta in Strega Nona's pot. I didn't understand where Unalaq and Tonraq came from so I looked up adoption traditions among the Yupik and the Inuit. Amaqjuaq was born and I wanted to get to know him. I wanted to understand how Amon could Energybend so I had Katara explore the poles. I wanted the story to be about her world and leave everything to periphery.
Except life was happening in the periphery. How was Wu the great-nephew of the only acknowledged child of King Kuei? I looked into Chinese dynasties, the Mongols, and the Sino-Japanese wars. The world was not waiting for Katara to acknowledge it and now there was no evil overlord to topple. She was going to be lost and frustrated.
What frustrated me, what always frustrated me about the story, was the one question every romance author has to ask themselves: why at any given point can the two people not be together? What waylaid message prevented a confession? What observed event or conversation was misunderstood? What supernatural event altered their fates?
I couldn't figure out exactly why Katara and Zuko couldn't simply BE TOGETHER. Probably because I was creating the story as I wrote it.
Steam was supposed to cover a beginning, middle, and end. The first four books would all take place in the same year, each in its own season. Then two about the middle, exploring lives, marriages, and children. One last book got everything ready for Korra.
I don't really know what Steam is right now. Spoilers, if you haven't caught up, but Toph and Sokka were not supposed to get drugged. There was supposed to be a whole other scenario that I don't know I'll get to because both the Spirit and Xai Bau got a lot bigger than I planned.
"Balance" was always supposed to be in two parts, but I just realized tonight that I have to change the entire conflict and climax. What was supposed to be part 2 is going to be another book altogether, and I don't know if that's possible?
All of this to say, Steam has been a lot of work. It's not very popular, but I don't care about that now. I've put so much love, thought, and care into this series that I can't let it go. I want it to be better, but I've got a lot going on in my life. I'm in grad school to be a college instructor for a program I helped create and also really care about. Then I'm getting another master's so I can be a family and couples counselor once my kid is older. I work as an admin assistant at a fairly large university in a ridiculously stressful office and I don't exactly have the best home life.
If I could get real for a moment.
Love has never been easy for me. I didn't get diagnosed with BPD and bipolar till my last relationship ended. Why this sucks is two fold. The first is that as I healed, as I got better and became a pretty awesome person, I realized that he could do that too. He was awful, so unbelievably awful, and so was I. I got better. I worked hard to make myself happy and become a person I liked and someone others liked being around. He could have done that too because sometimes he was the most amazing man.
I also realized that he was the greatest love of my life. After other relationships ended, I would stay friends and I would realize how much better we were apart. We would drift our separate ways happily and I wouldn't mind bumping into them at a coffee shop to chat. I hung out with my ex girlfriend and her husband and had a blast for god's sake. But him?
Katara is not my self insert if I were to say I had one. Zuko is. I'm damaged but I'm cute. I've got good people who love me and supported me as I got better. And I would tear myself apart for the person I loved. I'm not saying Katara is my ex, but she represents what I struggle to support in others. She has trouble self-validating, she feels small in the face of giant and intangible evils, and she just wants to be able to achieve her goals, if only she knew what they were.
I finally know how to answer that one question, but it undermines everything I laid out for Katara. She's not as strong as I thought, not as stable. That changes how she would have interacted with Zuko in "Dragons," and how she would have treated Aang in "Blood & Seawater."
Steam has to change if I'm going to be able to finish it and have it not suck. I need to stop ignoring my connection to Zuko and explore that so he can have more depth. How do I talk about the absent mother, the hateful father, and the importance of found family in my own life? How can I look at my own child, missing a parent, and not wonder about Zuko's fate in Korra? How can I prove that I'm capable of love, real and unfathomable love that transcends lust and romance, if I can't have a fictional boy fight for a fictional girl?
I haven't dated in four years. The love I feel doesn't ignore or excuse the hurt my ex caused me and my child, and that's important to recognize. We don't always get what we want and sometimes love stories don't end the way we hope. But my stories deserve better than my fear.
I hope you're not worried. Everything IS fine. What's been written will stay up and the series will be done when it tells me it's done. But I don't know what this journey is going to look like. My life is going to be insane for a long time and the first two books need some heavy edits. "Balanced: Part 1" is going to be a disaster till I can re-thread this loom. I plan on having it done in April because I have a poster and a paper to present in the spring.
I don't know when "Part 2" will post. I hate going months between updates, but I also don't like the idea of being silent for even longer in order to write it. I'm not fast and I can't be away for too long. I need this story and I need it to be seen. I want other people to love it like I do. So, as I always say, I'm not abandoning Steam. It will be seen through to the end. I just don't know what the landscape between here and there is.
Stay with me and know we're going through this together.