FDD status as of 7 November 2019: Chapter 49 (AO3: ch 47) was published on 8/1/19. Chapter 50 is around half-complete, but progress is picking up lately.

No new chapter today for the anniversary. Sorry about that. I could've released a half-length chapter, but it would've been weak plot progress. If you don't mind spoilers, story scraps and chapter segments in progress are posted for feedback on the FDD discussion thread at the Spacebattles creative writing forum. Unfortunately you'll have to Google for it or use the link on my site, because nothing that smells even remotely like a URL is allowed in FFN profiles or stories.

I can't force myself to write; the inspiration is either there or it's not.

As you can see below, I've got some older one-shot stuff, most of it from CCS. Do bear in mind that those fics are quite old; after 2002, life happened and I stopped writing fic as I largely dropped out of anime fandom for a time. Before that I ficced variously for Harry Potter, Pet Shop of Horrors, Karekano, Transformers, and all sorts of other random things that don't exist on the Internet anymore.

A decade later, I found myself completely sucked into an anime called Sword Art Online, based on a series of light novels by Reki Kawahara. The timeskips and narrow character focus of the official SAO canon leave an almost unlimited amount of room for original stories and characters to play in; the series is practically begging to be ficced, and I was compelled.

Over five years and five hundred thousand words later, I'm still writing. Just slowly as I deal with the needful. Life has been a bit of a struggle in recent years, and that's made finding creative energy a struggle as well, but I'm doing my best.

I have two main areas of focus for my SAO fics:

Fairy Dance of Death: an AU reboot of the entire SAO storyline, starting from the premise that Kayaba Akihiko was obsessed with high fantasy and Norse Mythology rather than swords and melee combat, and created the death game of Alfheim Online rather than the floating castle of Aincrad. This third person multi-POV epic is divided up into major arcs, or Acts--the first of which spans chapters 1 through 13, and the second of which runs through chapter 30. Work-in-progress scraps and reader discussions are posted on the Spacebattles creative writing forums.

Kadyn and Camilla: the adventures of a husband-and-wife team through the game, told from Kadyn's first-person perspective. My aim is to make them believable, flawed human characters and give their perspective on some of the other characters and events in canon without involving them in an intrusive way. Although there's an understandable prejudice against stories that focus on OCs, I think this is where most of the more interesting and original stories can be told, and I hope you'll give mine a chance. Start with The Unraveling, which is their origin story.

My quick-and-dirty SAO page contains more information, including links to original hi-res maps of Alfheim and the 11th floor of Aincrad as depicted in my stories, as well as a considerable amount of information about Majutsugo, the language of magic I created for FDD.

Update: FFN apparently just keeps getting more and more pointlessly draconian about stripping out anything resembling an external link; now they're not even allowed in profiles. Piece together the following in your browser if you want to visit my SAO page: ayashi DOT net SLASH sao

For those who care about such things, a bit about who I am.

Let me put it this way: when I first got into anime, there was precious little brought over commercially, most of it bad, and almost all of it dubbed. If you wanted fansubs, you had to acquire them by finding someone (or more often, someone who knew someone else) who had them--without the Internet--and give them money to dub VHS copies and mail them to you. Crunchyroll? Torrents? We live in a goddamned golden age, as far as I'm concerned. XD

I'm a bit of a renaissance man in the classic sense, in that I pursue a very broad set of creative and intellectual disciplines. Among other things, I'm a linguist by hobby with a focus on Japanese and conlanging, and by trade I work in IT (which will come as no surprise to anyone who's read my SAO fic), where I've had roles anywhere from call center tech support to administering server farms for a multi-billion dollar e-commerce site to data visualization. I love to create, especially the written word. I live in the Pacific Northwest with a cat and an absolutely ridiculous amount of Lego parts. I've had some of the Lego stuff I created go viral; if you pay any attention to such things and have any interest in video games, you've probably seen at least one of them.