Catching You Up: Part 2
By M. C. Oliver
I’m not sure when I learned that you can’t publish fanfiction but it was sometime during the creation of my first book.
I was going off into the summer after sixth grade and began typing away on my computer every morning until about lunch or even longer. It was a fanfiction story about Clint Barton’s childhood and his twin sister Kate. I made most of it up, having no idea what the actual childhood of this Avenger was.
Somewhere, I decided to change it slightly. I wanted the story to be similar but I knew I couldn’t publish the work if the characters were who they were.
To sort of make it into my own creation, I kept Kate but renamed Clint Barton Aarav Climber. The story began to develop and I began talking to Aarav as he became my favorite character, growing more and developing more than the other character. He felt so real that I began to have conversations with him at night while I went to bed.
I read the book to my mom, leaving her on devastating cliffhangers. At the time, the story made lots of sense. I was in love with the characters. After a few months, I decided that Aarav and Kate could create portals to take them anywhere they wanted to go. That was how they escaped their kingdom while burned aflame. In fact, they became separated. Kate stayed with her babysitter Cake while Aarav stayed with their dad and other eight siblings. The dad was fiercely protective while their mother had disappeared.
It turned out, Cake was being paid to take care of Kate for thirteen years. Aarav wasn’t in good favor with their father.
Kate’s family lived on a horse farm. Kate somehow befriended a horse in a matter of seconds while having not ever interacted with horses.
Near the end of the day, Kate’s horse was kidnapped and she rode bareback with Aarav and Ana to go rescue him. (For some reason their house was next to a train track)
Is this making sense? Nope? Good, it doesn’t to me either.
In the end, they rescued the horse and returned back home where their father was furious at Aarav but Kate explained and he left them off the hook. You know, for running away after a bunch of crooks who had guns and on a train. It makes total sense! Not.
There were other books but I decided that I wanted to make a second draft of the first book. I have been drafting the first book from June 5, 2022 to February 8, 2025. However, I put the story aside in April 2025 because the story just hasn’t been coming together.
Thankfully I joined the Young Writers Workshop in January 2024 and received some extremely helpful outlining books that Christmas. I had no idea I even liked outlining my stories until I used K. M. Weiland’s Outlining Your Novel Workbook. Both with the combination of my mom have been so helpful. I finally decided to put Downhill (it was renamed from Hooves of Power) away and allow it to just rest for the first time in three years.
I still talk to these very exciting characters and now actually strip the story for ideas much like a car you’ve been trying to build and strip it for parts to use on other projects.
With this story asleep, I started working on a fanfiction short story in January. Unfortunately, I froze up for all of March and wrote nothing because for some reason I thought it had to be perfect. At the end of March, I finally told myself, “No one’s going to read this so write the worst possible thing because no one’s going to read it.
I told myself that I had until the end of April to finish the entire story. I only had about four points I wanted to hit in each “snippet” or “flash” but I didn’t realize how many words were in between each point. So, the “short story” turned into a novel that I decided to put aside.
