A Brief History of Our Writing
I wrote several snippets of fiction in my high school composition notebooks; most of them are lost to time, though a few can be found in the old fragments page.
My writing career really began in November 2017, when I wrote the first drafts of what would become Endless Stars. My chief influences were MLP fanfiction and wildbow’s writings, and I had the ambition that I would “be like wildbow” in some way I never thought too deeply about. I sought to learn more about writing, and spent the next year revising ES, until around November 2018, where correspondence with Wizard-of-Woah! and Rhythminthemind convinced me to finally publish in November 2028. ES updated weekly till late April 2019, then exhausted my backlog. The next three chapters were published irregularly, and a fourth was never published.
And the Darkling Reefs Abide began in August 2019, a much more ambitious bit of xenofiction than ES. I intended to improve on some weaknesses of ES — beginning the story with decisive action and clear motivation, rather than the slow and contemplative pace of ES. I wrote twelve chapters, then ran aground on a hardware failure; my laptop died, and with in half of an unwritten chapter was lost. I lost the motivation to continue after that.
Of Waterweft began in November 2019, my first stab at NaNoWriMo, written with a similar swagger to AtDRA. I got a few chapters written at a 4k/day pace before getting stuck or burning out.
There Lies Already the Shadow of Hope began (mostly) in December 2019, conceived with a refrain that becomes a running theme in my attempts at writing after ES: this will be a quick, simple story. The conceit of TLAtSoH is that it would be a novella told in the form of five fight scenes and some prologue/epilogue material. I was quite proud of the writing in the prologues at the time, and the second chapter was some nine thousand words written in a single evening, a feat I’d never exceed till years later. Alas, I can’t find any surviving copy of that chapter.
The characters and world of this story captured my imagination in a profound way — you would know it today as Black Nerve.
The first chapters of Kaon Rising were written in early 2020, I think as part of a general inclination among the AlexanderWales fandom to write “royalroad bait”. I revived it for nanowrimo in November 2021, writing seven more chapters.
Eifre Quest began as a quest hosted on discord in March 2020, with most of the first arc being posted over the next month, followed by a final update in August (delayed by losing progress & motivation). It revived again in Feburary 2021 with the Marka interlude, and it continued to be written with varying regularity until January 2022.
A Chimerical Hope began in January 2022, proceeding off an on for the next year,