The Seventeenth of April, Two-Thousand and Six, Monday

I have horrible and excruciating news that I have been deliberately keeping from my readers, partly because I have not yet been able to come to terms with it myself.

Merely a few days after Christmas of 2005, I came to discover that somehow, a very precious folder, containing all my manga had been erased. Yes, erased. Wiped out. Vanished. You could imagine my absolute shock. I could only sit there and cry, screaming at everyone around me, raked with anger and anguish, sorrow and incompleteness.

I attempted to search for the files. I recruited friends and relatives who are ultra-savvy with computers, but none of them could find the folder. At last, they advised me to call the Geek Squad or data recoverers, but both will be expensive. I have been in the process of denial for a very long time. I could not even begin to comprehend the fact that I had lost over 300 pages of work.

You see, this particular folder houses several subfolders that contained my separate manga: Soul Sakura, Apollyon X, Sakkidatta, Strongblade, Wings of Snow, In Crucem Tenshi, and a few others that were in its earliest stages of birth. Within each subfolder were the important character profiles, story notes and quotes, and story summaries that all contributed to the successful production of a novel within the series. I also lost Japanese culture notes, a long list of Japanese names, surnames and their meanings that I had been accruing, and a file that had multiple story ideas for later works. Thusly, it is not only the disappearance of the stories themselves that I mourn. If you ask me why I cannot rewrite them, that is why. I have simply lost too much to begin to restore them with only the chambers of my cluttered mind.

Since then, I have been depressed, finding myself unable to want to write another piece of work. I had found my life’s passion wholly obliterated. I have had stories deleted before, but nothing like this. This was a collection of stories and their notes. You might ask me why I did not have a backup. Simply, it was all too much to backup. Because I go to school and work, I am always on the go, and hardly have time to write, much less back the stories up. I have attempted to in the past. I have sent them to myself in e-mails, but I find myself constantly updating a story and since my computer has gradually been slowing down, it became more and more time-consuming to update the stories and the files that pertained to the stories (I also frequently updated those as well). The task was often tedious, and I could have never thought this would happen. As of right now, I’m not exactly sure what happened anyway.

There is a faint silver lining in the gloomy clouds, however. Stories such as my vampire stories (Angel Blood, Return to Darkness, etc…) were not harmed, because they were not organized into the system of folders I had created for the numerous works of manga. Furthermore, to ease the minds of my readers, This Very Moment and its sequel, One Day More, are also intact. Once again, it was because they were not manga.

I write this to you because I want to let you know why I have been very inactive on my account as of late. I have had a difficult time picking up a story again, and I encountered a titanic writer’s block, when I tried to begin to write again. Since the passing of these months, I have had the strength to start writing again, though painfully. Unfortunately, I started from scraps, and have not attempted to work on anything from the manga folder. I have started to write new works, but fear not, my mind does not wander far from stories that I have left unfinished. I will finish those stories, particularly One Day More. Sooner, rather than later.

To all my faithful readers and remarkable fellow writers, I hope you can sympathize with my situation. Thank you for all your support.

Love and farewell from the darkness,

~SHAMARA AMBROSE~