Recent Update:

10th April 2018,

To Giada: Sorry, upcoming tests and the grad school means I'm slowing down on everything else in my life, fanfiction included.

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Update Status for Specific Stories:

A Few Screws Loose is the New Normal: Will be back to working on it again after I can take a breather from the whole grad-school stuff. Unfortunately, I probably won't update until I have at least five chapters at hand. It's just the kind of story with dense background and plot that works better when it flows and the readers remember what the hell is going on the last time around.

The Unexpected Lives of the Unliving: On hiatus because between preparation for grad school, reading through the EU backlog and researching the history of computing and all that...well, grad school wins out.

Strange Attractors: Ongoing, but slowing down a little (sometimes, I'm going to update every fortnight, and the reason I can still manage that much in the first place if because I have some saved chapters). The only reason I can even write quickly on this is because I wrote this for my sister and she provides instant feedback. In other words, I'm borrowing at least half her brain to keep it flowing coherently. Otherwise, it would languish just as much as the others.

Anything else I didn't mention: Abandon hope, all ye who enter here. Most probably not going to be touched with a ten foot pole until I'm done with the three aforementioned stories.

Hope that clarifies things for you all. Sorry for the delay.

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Bio:

So... it's been a while since I was last active in FFNet and seeing some of my older stories make me cringe. Since I don't think I can in good faith delete them when people still enjoy it (for some reason, I'm not judging, really, it's just that I know I've outgrown them), I thought I'd just make a second ID. I'm certain I'm also older than the median active user here so no, you're not going to get my age. (A lot of my friends have settled down and start making brats. Cripes).

Thus here we are.

I prefer my stories with varying shades of grey and complexity, not just heroes but also anti-heroes and even villain protagonists. I tend to enjoy stories with robust world-building and/or character development more than the plain boy meet girl, girl meet girl, boy meet boy setup commonly found in many fanfics. My suspension of disbelief is less of a gourmand and more of a connoisseur, so plot holes usually has me banging my head on the desk. Let's not get started on the hordes of badly-written high school AU mostly providing paper-thin pretexts for the author's preferred ship(s) that seems to infest many fandoms. This outlook on storytelling is usually reflected in what I write too. My fandoms are all over the place, mostly books and manga with a smattering of movies and (rarely) TV series. I don't tend to write many stories in any one fandom because of that. My weakness for well-written AUs probably stems from the many fanfics I read - common themes get repeated often that stories start to blur together, and anything to stand out against that is noteworthy.

My head is a weird place and this here is what I extract from it. You have been warned.

Fandoms I read (list not exhaustive): Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, BBC Sherlock, Bleach, Chang Ge Xing (some of you might know this as Song of the Long March), (Most of) China Mieville's works, Death Note, Dexter, Discworld, Dragon Age, Dresden Files, Fullmetal Alchemist, (Almost anything by) Gaiman, (Almost anything) Ghibli, Ghost in the Shell, Harry Potter, Hellsing, Inception, Labyrinth, Les Miserables, Lord of the Rings, the Lord Peter Wimsey novel series, Marvel Cinematic Universe, the Mary Russell novel series, Mass Effect, Naruto, Princess Mononoke, Rurouni Kenshin, Team Medical Dragon, The Big O, Spirited Away, Star Trek, Star Wars, Vagabond.

PM me if... you like to discuss plot development, stories, narrative, science, speculative fiction (fantasy, science fiction, and anything weird in between) and various other odd stuffs. I'm interested to be other people's sounding board as they develop their stories, but I can't muster enough attention span to check grammar and spelling - heck, I groan at the thought of combing my already published stories for remaining spelling errors. This is why I don't explicitly offer myself as a beta reader, because that's the first thing that comes to most people's minds when they think about beta reader. Consider my assistance in the light of an editor; I help the story gain focus, check the pacing and turns of plot as well as question the direction the story is going. I also help solidify characterisation.

Last Editor/Beta Reader for: The Naruto/Death Note crossover 'Strawberry Gashes', in which Sakura becomes the displaced person. For anyone extremely allergic to the Mary Sue family, have no fear, even fourteen chapters in there is no romance in sight yet - friendship, character building moments and plot progression are the order of the day.

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In case my user image doesn't make it obvious, my favourite character is certainly Havelock Vetinari from Discworld. Sir Terry Pratchett's world will always be one of my oldest and most long-lasting fandoms.

I've read many stories, fanfics included, and saved not a small number of them in my hard drive. I make a habit of not favouriting a story without writing at least one review for it as a courtesy to the writer, so if you'd like any recommendations in a fandom or two, just ask.

My gender is not important. No, seriously, it isn't. I'm fine being referred to as either, I can put in the effort to dress and pass as either. (These days, I think they'd call it genderfluid).

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To readers of the Folded Between Disbelief and Damnation is Your Disused Hope series, the reading order is:

01 Regret is Cheaper Dead than Alive
02 Congratulations! Your Memory is Happy to Burn You!
03 Two Dearly Departed Dark Lords
04 The Unexpected Lives of the Unliving

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It's too bad that the favourite stories section can't include a user's impressions of the story. It would've been a more useful way to remind myself why I favourited one story or another.