FOREWORD

To start this proper, I should mention that what transpired my desire to write a novel such as this could not have happened if I had not answered a greeting by a certain character I met on September 3, 2013. See, this person eventually became my mate and it would be a good start to our relationship. It would not last. Soon I would find him spying on my activity on FurAffinity on top of being incredibly depressing as to how I should be the one. I AM the one destined to help him after all the heartbreak he suffered. After all the cheating, the lies, the boundless and groundless lust-- I would be his answer.
	Only to inflict me with it instead.
	Just shy of Valentine’s Day 2014, he dumped me for another guy and I would be alone. This person… was the first to show me genuine love and care in a world where I had none at all. It hurt me to no end to have love in my grasp, only for it to be yanked away so cruelly. It didn’t help that I had already been suffering from clinical depression since 2008. This sparked the birth of Klaus Richtors. Klaus is the embodiment of my desperation for love, as well as this one person’s terrible decisions. A character that has these crippling problems and refuses to let them show until it’s too late, is who Klaus is.
	By the end of 2014 I wanted to start a new novel. A romance novel to be precise. One that was resemblant of the hell I endured in that year regarding romance. I started several pieces over and over again, but scrapped each one. Arrabalta:Outcast? Nope. The Concept of a Heart? Nope. The True Nature? Nope. Nope. NOPE! I was in a huge slump in this regard throughout all that time as well as the majority of 2015. I wasn’t sure why. Perhaps I was honing my emotions incorrectly. Perhaps I did not have enough material to go off of? Whatever the case was, on October 7, 2015, I had discovered answers to my problems in the worst way possible.
	See, that one guy I met in 2013 had returned to my life once again, asking for a second chance for the umpteenth time. At that point, I was both still desperate for the love I lost as well as fed up with the begging. So I had decided to answer his second chance. Barely a month later, I caught him cheating on me with a close friend of mine whom I personally rescued from a cheating relationship back in July 2014. 
	Nobody could understand the pain I suffered as a result. And it was because of this, that I started jotting down a vent story in mid-late October 2015. This vent would turn out to be the novel you, my friend, are currently reading, Winter’s Gallows, starring a newly created raccoon character I devised to represent everything I’ve done up to this point in my life.
	Because of my rotten luck, some stupid, absolutely asinine decisions I made, I screwed over my entire state of mind, perhaps permanently. Sure, I found a new lover a couple months later and have been with him since, as of writing this foreword, but I was still hurt and still am. I am not afraid of admitting my weakness of never being able to let things go. But it’s because of that weakness that this novel came to be.
	I wanted this story to branch off into several different directions based on a decision that Lukan would make BECAUSE the decisions I made to get this far in life were rarely ever the right ones. Whether they’ll lead to victory has yet to be determined as of October 2016, but this was to reflect that the right choices are almost impossible to find in situations like this. Results may vary after all, and Lukan’s may very well differ from the ones I made when I found out I was cheated on. It’s also to reflect how so many countless people have had their share of luck so extraordinarily more so than Lukan and I. It makes us wonder just what decisions they made to get like that and why we’re always been destined to fail. Not to mention… what made them choose everything they have in the first place… But at the end of the day, Lukan will have to make the right one to escape the imposing Winter’s Gallows ahead…

~The Golden Fox