The Thing 3: Assimilation✔️

AFTERWORD

Well, it's done. And it's time to talk about it a little bit.

I've been considering writing a sequel to The Thing 2 for...almost a decade now, I think. Maybe not quite that long, but it's been years. I became especially motivated to do it after I learned that Black Label Games, the developers who made The Thing video game, had been about a year into production on a sequel: The Thing 2. They even had released concept art and a few animations! But they got shut down and the project was buried.

Based on the ending of the first, I knew I wanted to make MacReady a main character and it only made sense to make Gen Inc the main bad guys. Also, M. Cartwright gave me the idea to put North, Burrows and Weldon back into the mix.

Okay, so, I'll be the first to admit that The Thing 3 was...a little light. It's about half the length of The Thing 2. I like brutal honesty. Okay, well, I don't like it. But I try to respect my readers enough to not try and feed them bullshit excuses. So here's why.

In April, I realized that I hadn't written a word of fan fiction in over half a year. I tried to manage writing a fan fiction alongside my original work. When I was looking through my list of shorter fan fics to tackle, I figured The Thing 3 would be the most logical, since The Thing 2 was already done and I hate loose ends.

However, as I started planning it, I immediately began to realize a problem. A big one. It started simply enough. I got halfway through plotting it and hated where it was going. So I scrubbed it and started again, and didn't really like that plot out either. I finally ended up with a workable plot layout, the one you've just read. But this belied the primary issue: I didn't really want to write The Thing 3 anymore.

Too much time had passed, I was bored with the idea now.

This left me with a few options. The first was to scrub the idea...but that would mean taking down The Thing 2, as well, since I hate cliffhanger endings that never get resolved.

Or, I could wait and see if inspiration would come back. But I didn't think that would work at all, because I'd already waited like eight years.

Finally, there was the third option, the one I went with: suck it up and get the job done.

To make matters worse, once the end of April hit, my life kind of got...cluttered. A number of separate issues, both large and small, hit me, one after another. Nothing necessarily serious or life-altering, but big enough that I had to take time out to sort through it all. By June, most of it was sorted but there's been enough other things to keep me busy, distracted or worried that it seriously cut into my motivation and writing time.

So, normally, the first thing to go on the back burner when something like that comes up is fan fiction. And by back burner I mean either I stop writing entirely and put it on hold, or I push myself through it as fast as I can. Which I did both here: first one, then the other.

So...sorry about that, but the reality of the situation was that it was either this or nothing.

All in all, I hope you enjoyed it.

Thanks for reading!