So I think one important thing to note with this one, was that it wasn't my first romance fanfic.

It was my first one on Wattpad, yes, but my first one was a Yugioh fanfiction called 'Dragon Spirit', which was in DeviantART once upon a time.

IT WAS TERRIBLE.

This probably had a lot to do with the fact that I had never read any romance. Like, ever. Unless things like Warriors and the Hunger Games count. Also, I was what, 13-14? I think anyone looking back on their writing from 2-3 years ago will find it really cringy. But I kid you not, this fanfiction was BAD. The protagonist, Kisara, was depicted as a huge Mary-Sue, (she was technically a canon character but you saw so little of her in the manga version of Yugioh that I made a lot of her personality up,) it had zero plot, the romance wasn't even there except for one paragraph where I was like 'oh oops I'm meant to be shipping these two let's make them kiss', and the kiss was just...why, 14 year old me, why would you do this XD

Anyway, White Rose Tea. This time last year, fanfic's coffee shop au contest rolled around, and I went through my normal process for writing prompts - 'which random fits this best?'

Soon enough, I'd thought up a very bad pun. A pun that would shape a considerable portion of my writing from then on.

White rose tea.

I had a title - and it was an opportunity that was too perfect to pass up. To write a fanfiction based on a pun. The contest lasted two weeks, so I did the smart thing and decided that was heaps of time to write 5000 words! After all, that was only two chapters of my normal writing, right? I spent the first week going "this was such a great idea, I'm so smart :D"

Little did I know that two weeks is not heaps of time. In fact, it wasn't much time at all. It was due at midnight on Friday in America, so for me, that was 2pm on Saturday. And on Friday night, I'd had a sleepover with a super amazing friend of mine, Itacat - it was the night she made her account, too. And I kid you not, I was writing at 1:55pm as we were being driven to this trampoline place for another thing, my 4G slowly dying, hoping and praying that there weren't any spelling mistakes in the words I was churning out as fast as I possibly could to give the the first two parts a resolution at the end, before smashing the publish button so hard with my index finger that I avoided using my right hand for the next ten minutes.

But that wasn't the only hurdle I encountered - there was also the fact that I hadn't written romance since Dragon Spirit. However, since then, I'd read a beautiful piece of work by George de Valier, called 'Auf Wiedersehen Sweetheart', a Hetalia fanfic that is hands down, one of my favourite pieces of writing EVER. It was a romance fic - a Gerita one - and it is beautiful!  I cry in movies a lot, but with books, it's much harder. I've cried four times reading books. The first and fourth time it was the Warriors series. The second time, it was the last manga of Yugioh. Auf Wiedersehen Sweetheart, it made me cry the third time. It's 100,000 words, I read it in a single day (it was very gripping, I'm pretty sure one test or another that I was meant to be studying for suffered a little bit,) and it just really inspired me. Up until that point, I hadn't realised just how powerful fanfiction could be - including my own, potentially. (But not Dragon Spirit, that just had the power to make me want to curl up in a heap of blankets and drown myself in my own shame lol)

So once I actually started writing, George de Valier was almost an unofficial mentor when it came to fluffy feels. I re-read his stuff over and over, studying it, trying to figure out how he did it. I still haven't, but I picked up a thing or two, and I relied on it even more heavily when writing Bright Lights, when tackling my first (and so far only) kissing scene. (Dragon Spirit doesn't count XD)

But all that stress aside, I loved writing it so much. And White Rose Tea, though short, was also the first fanfic I ever finished. And finishing a fanfic is one of the greatest feelings I've ever had.