garden of the mind

I have one hour, give or take a few minutes, till sunrise. I'm lying in bed, under my covers with only my phone for company, I have to wake up in four hours, and I'm not sleeping. Instead, I'm reading through my old fanfics.

The Transformers ones, to be precise. Granted, I can't really call these "old" since they were all written within the past year, when I finally got the guts to be part of the fandom instead of just watching it go by. I'm reading through these fics and I'm wondering 'what was I thinking when I wrote these?'

Not because I think what I've written is crap. On the contrary, I feel like everything I wrote during that period of time is so much better than what I'm turning out now. For starters, I actually finished things. Looking back, I can pinpoint around when I stopped writing regularly, and around when I feel my writin dropped in quality. I know exactly what happened.

Homestuck happened. I got sucked into it, and didn't look back. I saw all these cool and interesting ways the comic did things, and I fell for it and didn't think about much else for a while. Okay so I do that with nearly every new fandom of mine, but somehow Homestuck felt different. Feels different. And I'm not entirely sure why.

( Don't bother with the dead rat. )

Help. 

//

Rant under cut due to heavy cursing :|

( Answer the fragging question! )