So my brother finally convinced me to get an account here. Let's see what we can do with that...

As of 22/08/2016, all stories on indefinite hiatus, with the possibility of sporadic updates. It's not that writing has dropped to the bottom of my list of priorities, it's that I now have loads of other priorities that are higher. However, I might be able to do a little bit of writing here and there.

On me:

British. Voracious reader of fiction, especially supernatural/sci-fi stuff. Equally voracious watcher of anime. Not much of a gamer.

Strictly amateur writer. I'm just doing this for fun. I tend to plan out my stories in a moderate amount of detail - probably too much, actually. Despite this, I tend to get quite hung up on whether my story logically flows, so I'll often just stop writing until I can wrangle the sequence of events into one which makes sense to me.

On writing my first fic:

So, I actually started accidentally planning out the basis for Damascene over a year before actually writing it. Coming up with crossover Servants for Fate/Stay Night is always fun, and it's most fun when you make it a proper exercise and try to fully stat up each character. So, I did that. And then I thought it'd be fun to write some snippets using those characters. And then it turned out that I'd ended up using a pretty specific set of Master/Servant pairs, and they were developing a plotline all by themselves. So, I decided to start to do a rough outline, which ballooned into a 7000-word monstrosity and isn't finished yet. And then it became clear just what kind of thing I'd unleashed when my first two-sentence bullet point came out over 6000 words. Oh dear.

On writing my second (multichapter) fic:

I never expected to be writing anything other than Damascene for a long while. But, um, that particular fic is proving hard to slog through. Don't worry, it's not dead and I know where it's going. But the massive chapters I've set myself for it are hard to do - and it does need chapters of that length to keep the story moving at a reasonable pace. I decided I wasn't going to even try and do that for Labour. The goal for each chapter is ~5,000 words, which is proving a lot easier to manage. Also? The responses the chapters are getting are generally better than for Damascene. I suppose it's inevitable, given the relative numbers of Worm fans and Nasuverse fans, and the fact that Labour is honestly probably a better idea for a story. Don't get me wrong, I intend to write the shit out of the bad idea that is Damascene, but I think Labour is more immediately interesting.

It's certainly interesting to me. I'm very much not a working-class man in 1980s USA, so I'm having to do a fair bit of imagination work to get into Danny's head. I hope the result is entertaining - and respectful.

As of 23/07/2017 Labour is slated for a rewrite, starting at around chapter 3. Yeah, I kinda painted myself into a corner and don't know how to get out of it - and worse, I feel it lost the quality and appeal that the earlier chapters had. So, we're going again. Not right from the start, and not everything past that point will be gone forever, but I need to take it in a different direction. It'll be better, I promise.

On author's notes:

See, when I was reading just so many fanfics and thinking about maybe possibly doing one of my own, I made a decision that I wouldn't use any author's notes, of any kind. If someone is confused about something, then I haven't done my job as an author in-story, and I should really clear it up in-story. (Although I do value reviews telling me people are confused. In such a case, I am perfectly happy to answer questions in personal messages provided it doesn't provide information about future events in the story; in which case I will neither confirm nor deny anything.) It could be interesting to talk about how hard a particular chapter or scene was to write, or about how excited I am to get to particular point, but that's really just teasing, and probably a lot more interesting to myself than to the readers.

Next chapter word count: 0. (A Poisoned Chalice)