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Hi guys! Oh wow, it's been a while since this site has been live. It's been even longer since I wrote a blog post.

First off, here's the story behind my very long hiatus:

High school.

Okay, so there's more to it than that. But that is putting it simply.

The last time I posted here, it was August. School was just beginning, and I was taking a bunch of classes that were easy for me. Life was good. I was making a bunch of progress in The Secret of Moonflower Valley, I was making friends with people in my classes, and I had absolutely zero school-related stress.

And then I moved. Again. I switched schools after the first semester and suddenly I had no friends, I hit the Great Big Wall of Writer's Block, and I started taking my first AP course: World History. It's safe to say that my life was very upsetting for a while. School was stressing me out all of a sudden and I was so scared of embarrassing myself that I didn't try to make new friends.

Luckily this period of my life didn't last all that long. I made a bunch of friends in my choir class, and most of them were in AP World, and suddenly I was looking forward to going to school everyday. Even AP World was fun, and it eventually became my favorite class. (My teacher was the absolute goat, and the vibes in that classroom were unmatched.) Plus, I finished that class with an A and scored a 5 on the exam, so you know. Life is good.

But in the midst of all the happy chaos, I had not the time nor the creativity to write. My characters were confusing me and my plot seemed too intricate for me to keep up with. I was so discouraged that I... I considered dentistry as my future career. I've never had even the slightest interest in teeth, mind you.

Well, time corrected things, as it tends to do, and by the time summer began I was rested enough to come to my senses and finally, after almost six months of inactivity, I opened up my Google doc.

And things just... flowed. I wrote a little over five thousand words the first day, some time in early June. I was just writing, and I understood vaguely what I wanted to happen in that chapter. Twenty-five hundred words later I moved on to a few scenes I'd never written. Before I knew what was happening, my word count went from 40k to 45k, and I felt more alive than I'd felt in a long while.

Since those five thousand words, an additional ten thousand have been written. I remembered why I love writing so much. It's like I fell in love with it all over again. And because I remembered SMV, I remembered the Ink Pot Club.

I took it down some time in 2025 because I had no time to monitor what was happening, what I was sponsoring, and I discovered that a few suspicious accounts were talking about gambling and... maybe dr*gs. I definitely did NOT want to be associated with that, so I unpublished the website and promised myself it wasn't permanent.

And it wasn't.

I spent a few good long hours editing this site, banning the suspicious accounts, and adding rules that I'll enforce so that I can avoid any suspicious activities in the future. I want to restore this website to the incredible community it once was, and it starts with you all! If you read this post, please leave a comment for me to find. Tell all your writer friends to check it out! Post it on other writing communities where young writers might find it and be intrigued.

And if you read this, write an introduction post in the Club Chat to help kickstart the community!

—Leah Larkspur