fairydanceofdeath - Tumblr blog

[fairydanceofdeath]

Chapter 37 of Fairy Dance of Death is up

So, I just posted Chapter 37:

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/8679666/37/Fairy-Dance-of-Death

What happened to Chapter 36? It's there. I posted it two months ago. I just forgot to post the update here. Whoops.

All manner of fit is encountering all manner of shan, and it's anyone's guess what the world will look like once the dust settles.

Side note in the interest of trivia: in terms of word could, Act 3 is now longer than Act 1, and it's easy to see why when you look at the numbers. Word count for the three:

Act 1: 113,925 (avg/ch: 8,138) Act 2: 156,138 (avg/ch: 9,228) Act 3: 128,242 (avg/ch: 18,224)

So the average word count per chapter has nearly doubled from Act 2 to Act 3. Come to think of it, that is probably a contributing factor towards why the wait between chapters has increased.

I don't see that changing, though. As I go back and re-read through the early parts of the story, I can't help but feel that some of them come across as sparse or rushed. Some of the individual character segments now are as long as entire early chapters, and I think this in part reflects an increased depth to way the story is written. Make of that what you will.

As always, let me know what you think in the reviews!

[fairydanceofdeath]

FDD Delays (Summer 2015)

Sorry about the delays. Given the time that has passed since the last update, there has been some speculation that the fic is dead. Don't worry--it's not.

Life is just being life, and I have had very little creative energy to devote towards writing. Aside from increasing day job responsibilities, in what free time I do have I've managed to get sucked back into MMOs. Yes, you can all laugh at the irony. I like to tell myself that it’s valuable research. *nods*

It sucks, I know. I want to see the story finished, too. I can't really say anything other than what I always do: I can't force it, and it'll be ready when it's ready.

[fairydanceofdeath]

Chapter 35 of Fairy Dance of Death is up

With sincere apologies for the wait, here is Chapter 35:

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/8679666/35/Fairy-Dance-of-Death

The continuation of Sakuya and Argo's meeting, a disturbing new discovery by Griselda's group, moar Kiriasu, and another of the new POV characters for Act 3--someone I've been looking forward to introducing to you for quite some time now.

Enjoy, and as always, let me know what you think in the reviews!

[fairydanceofdeath]

FDD will be updating soon

So, that thing about not being able to promise regular updates because of life obligations and all that stuff?

Yeah. That.

With that said, Chapter 35 is finished and now in the proofing stage. Expect the update to go out at some point before the weekend.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjjZGyYcH9E

[fairydanceofdeath]

Still Alive

[insert Portal joke here]

Since it's going on a month and a half since the last chapter of Fairy Dance of Death, I just wanted to let you all know that I'm not dead, the fic isn't dropped, and so on. It's just one of those riaru things; the holiday season is not usually a good time for me.

As usual, no promises on a timeframe for the next chapter; inspiration and free time can be fickle, and I don't want to disappoint people if I'm wrong. You'll be the first to know when that changes.

Thank you all for your patient and loyal readership. It means a lot and keeps me going.

[fairydanceofdeath]

Interactive World Map

Lately I've been putting a lot of work in Tableau into making some use of all the data I have (made up) about Alfheim's zones. The old world map I made is good, but there isn't much information on it. So, about 3000 painstakingly hand-placed vertices later, here's the first version of FDD's new interactive world map: http://ayashi.net/sao/fdd-worldmap.html

It works like any other filled-polygon map in Tableau, but if you haven't used one before, you'll find the controls pretty simple--use the toolbar in the upper left to zoom or reset the view, and shift-drag to pan. Hover any zone or POI for a pop-up window with a little information about it.

Obviously these aren't all the zones or locations in Alfheim, just the major overland zones and POIs that have shown up in the story thus far. A few of the zones are still unnamed, and content is a little sparse, but you can probably better visualize where things are this way. Listed level ranges are what they were at the start of the game.

Eventually I want to add a function where you can select a zone/POI and populate a sidebar with more information. We'll see. Have fun!

[fairydanceofdeath]

Chapter 34 of Fairy Dance of Death is up

The last of November's weekly upates, here is Chapter 34:

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/8679666/34/Fairy-Dance-of-Death

Another lengthy span of time with Kirito and Asuna, a return to Yuuki's story, and more.

As much as I'd like to be able to write full-time, the last month has consisted largely of coming home from work and writing and/or outlining until it's time to go to bed. I can't sustain this pace indefinitely, but I'm very glad that for the fic's second anniversary not only was I able to launch Act 3 and post a new chapter every week, I met and exeeded my goal of 60,000 words this month. Four chapters, each of which have averaged at least 15k words.

I can't promise when the next chapter will be, but you'll hear about it here.

[fairydanceofdeath]

Chapter 33 of Fairy Dance of Death is up

Continuing the weekly installments in November, here's Chapter 33 for you:

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/8679666/33/Fairy-Dance-of-Death

Kirito and Asuna fans, rejoice--the majority of this chapter follows their slice of the story.

Chapter 34 is about 2/3 written, and I expect to have it done in plenty of time for posting on Black Friday. See you next week!

[fairydanceofdeath]

Fanfiction.net doesn't expose daily or hourly stats in any useful way, or else I'd do this in Tableau. But this screen shot nicely illustrates the kind of interest that the debut of Act 3 generated. Mon the 3rd through Wed the 5th were typical of the kind of daily hits that the story got after being on hiatus for several months.

I posted Chapter 31 around 5am on the 6th, shortly after I got up for work that morning. Less than 20 hours later, over 1500 of you had generated more than twice as many pageviews!

You can see the next spike on Fri the 14th when I posted Chapter 32. That one's still settling itself out. I'm interested to compare these numbers with the activity next weekend when I post 33.

[fairydanceofdeath]

Chapter 32 of Fairy Dance of Death is up

As promised, a week later here is Chapter 32 for you:

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/8679666/32/Fairy-Dance-of-Death

Introducing one of Act 3's new POV characters, and the return of one we haven't seen for quite some time.

[fairydanceofdeath]

Act 3 of Fairy Dance of Death has begun

Chapter 31 has been posted, kicking off Act 3 to mark the second anniversary of the fic.

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/8679666/31/Fairy-Dance-of-Death

The defeat of «Hrungnir the Impervious», the 25th Gateway boss, was a turning point—and so were Loki's emergence as an antagonist, Sakuya's acquisition of the Sylph leadership, and the discoveries unlocked by Sasha.

Alfheim is changing in ways both expected and not. The trio of Kirito, Asuna and Yuuki have gone their separate ways for the time being, each with their own individual quests.

Prophet is still out there... somewhere.

I have quite a lot of material amassed so far for Act 3, and I'm really excited to begin finally getting all of this stuff I've been planning written out. I'm targeting one chapter per week in November, posted at the end of the week Chapter 32 on the 14th, Chapter 33 on the 21st, and Chapter 34 on the 28th. The first of those is already written, and work on 33 is well under way.

I doubt I'll be able to maintain that pace beyond November, but that's my goal until the end of the month at least. There's quite a lot that's going to happen in this act, and ideally I would like to have all that wrapped by this time next year. By the time November is out, the plot will have advanced quite a bit, and I'm really looking forward to hearing what everyone thinks of it—so please, as always, let me know.

[fairydanceofdeath]

Act 3 to commence on November 6th

The high-level outline for Act 3 is substantially complete--enough so that I've been able to begin writing again. I've actually been struck with quite a bit of inspiration from all the planning and outlining I've been doing; so far I have upwards of 20k words written.

Chapter 31 is essentially all but finished. I have some further proofreading passes and refining to do, but in its current state all of that is essentially polish work. The upshot of all of this is: the beginning of Act 3 will be posted on Thursday, November 6th, 2014 to mark the story's second anniversary.

This leaves me with a decision to make. I've been growing increasingly dissatisfied with the technical limitations and professional negligence of Fanfiction.net, to the point where I've been seriously considering moving the story over to AO3.

More behind the cut.

I've already begun the migration process; it's given me an opportunity to do some long-needed cleanup--such as fixing a few character names and typos that I've never managed to get around to on FFN. Right now the story isn't set to public; you need an AO3 account to read it--but that would change if and when the migration was complete.

With that said, that process is not complete and new chapters will not yet be posted there, so don't switch over yet. Consider this a heads up for a future direction I'm seriously considering.

In the meantime, watch your mailboxes for the new chapter alerts that will be going out on Thursday morning!

[fairydanceofdeath]

Plagiarism Alert

A Wattpad user reposted portions of Fairy Dance of Death on that site without my permission. A user by the same name had contacted me two days prior on Fanfiction.net requesting permission to repost the story on Wattpad, and I explicitly (and politely) DENIED that permission. I do not want ANYONE reposting my written work, and I have only granted this permission once to someone so that they could post a Korean translation.

Other than Fanfiction.net, there is currently only one other place where this story should appear in English: on my account at Archive of Our Own (AO3 username: Catsy), where I have been considering migrating the story. I have an account on Wattpad, but it is named Amezuki, not Catsy (which was taken) and I have not posted this story there.

I have contacted the administrators of Wattpad and requested that they remove the content that was posted without my permission.

Update: the user has removed the unauthorized content.

[fairydanceofdeath]

Because we all like nice round numbers in base 10 arithmetic, FDD has hit something of a milestone--just today it passed 400,000 total views.

Admittedly the significance of views on FFN is a bit overstated--almost 85,000 of those views are from the first chapter, with the rest of the chapters from the same time period hovering somewhere between 10k and 20k views; most of the former are likely people who only read Chapter 1 or just clicked through once and then noped right back out. XD

But whatever--data is data, and numbers are fun. In fact, to celebrate this milestone, click the following link for a simple visualization of FDD's traffic through the end of September. Unfortunately it's aggregated at the month level rather than the daily stats you can see in FFN's crappy interface, but that's because FFN doesn't expose traffic stats in any useful way--all of this has to be manually scraped from the tables in my admin view there. >.>

Here's the crosstab for this viz, for those who are only interested in raw numbers:

From this I can safely assume that there are at least 4,000 current readers of this story. That's... kind of awesome. Thank you to all of my readers over the last two years!

[fairydanceofdeath]

While outlining, I kept finding myself wanting to refer back to where a given character appeared or was mentioned, so finally I sat down and went through the entire story chapter by chapter, recording each and every mention of any character, even the unnamed throwaways. The linked viz is the result.

Spoiler warning: there may be spoilers for character appearances if you haven't read the whole story. There are filter controls on the right sidebar which will allow you to filter out chapters and/or acts that you haven't read, among other things.

A few other interesting data points:

As of the end of Act 2, there are 119 characters in FDD, 98 of whom are named.

Of the named characters, 30 of them are introduced by the end of the fourth chapter; a total of 50 are introduced by the end of Act 1.

12 characters have at least one POV segment; 10 have more than one.

Kirito appears in all but three chapters, and is a POV character in all but one of those.

Argo is in all but seven chapters, Klein in all but eight. Only two of Argo's chapters and four of Klein's are as a non-POV character.

Of the 67 named non-POV characters with dialogue, 40 are OCs.

Most of Sasha's named orphans have more "screen" presence than Agil or Lisbeth--and Lisbeth is (has been, once, briefly) a POV character. (note: they will be making a comeback in Act 3)

Enjoy!

[fairydanceofdeath]

Whence "Golden Apple"?

Someone on the SB forum asked an interesting question: why did Griselda and Grimlock name their guild "Golden Apple" in the first place? Were they ignorant of the role of golden apples in mythology? It's perhaps a bit ironic, considering the rare drop that broke up the guild.

Honestly, I think this boils down to yet another instance of Kawahara naming something because of the reference or allusion that he wanted to make without really thinking about why the characters would've chosen that name. But since the question was asked in the context of FDD, I was inspired to write a little omake that may or may not end up being included in Act 3.

--------

“Golden Apple?” said Griselda, cocking her head slightly as one slender hand paused halfway to her game menu. The words ougon ringo tickled something in her memory, a faint recollection from high school—a life that now seemed even more distant and alien to her than her years of marriage in the real world. “I feel like you’re making a reference and I’m not getting it.”

“It seemed appropriate,” Grimlock said, wearing that secret smile that he sometimes affected when he felt like he was being extremely clever about something and wanted everyone to know it. She’d always found it endearing, but occasionally now it rubbed her a little wrongly, and she wasn’t quite sure why. Perhaps it was just her mood at the moment; she’d woken up on edge, and nothing had been able to set her right.

When no explanation followed, Griselda decided to try to a little trick that Sakuya had showed her while she was part of the Sylph militia. She knew her husband was waiting for her to prompt him for an explanation so that he could show her how clever he’d been, bless his heart, but this morning she didn’t really feel like playing that game—-so instead, she changed the game. She remained silent as she might once have at home—not out of deference now, but out of patience; while she waited she continued scrolling through her inventory, looking for the gear she wanted to wear out on today’s farming run.

It didn’t take long. Grimlock cleared his throat slightly, drawing her eyes to the side just in time to see him adjust his round-rimmed glasses onto the bridge of his nose. “Mythology,” he said. “You know, of course, that this game is very loosely based on Norse mythology.”

Griselda nodded, even though the question had been rhetorical—now giving him her undivided attention, albeit with her eyes slightly downcast out of long habit.

“In Norse legends, the goddess Idunn cultivated golden apples that were the source of immortality for the Aesir. In our case, we farm and produce the materials that—in a manner of speaking, of course—are the source of immortality for our clearing groups. Guilds like ours are, if you will, the source of golden apples for the NCC.” When he’d finished his explanation, Grimlock looked at Griselda expectantly, pride in his eyes.

“Very clever, dear,” Griselda said obligingly with a demure smile, humoring his eccentricities as she always had. She doubted more than half a dozen people in the entire game would recognize the intent behind his choice of guild name. That aside, although she was still feeling a bit out of sorts this morning, she did appreciate the careful thought that her husband seemed to put into even the littlest things, and she leaned over to kiss him on the cheek so that he’d know she meant it. “And speaking of that job, it’s about time for me to go meet the others.”

Something flickered across Grimlock’s features at those words, something that briefly darkened his eyes and pressed his lips into a line for a moment. It was there and gone before she could really process it. “Yes,” he said with a sigh, making it sound like a concession he was reluctantly permitting. “I suppose you must.”

She could hear the beginnings of a now-tired argument in his words, and it was an argument she did not wish to rehash—not today; not now. “I should be back in time for dinner,” she assured him, equipping her weapon last of all. The crafted long sword Grimlock had made for her appeared at her side with a shimmer of light, and she met her husband’s eyes as it did. It wasn’t the one that she usually used in the field—she didn’t have the heart to tell him, but she’d gotten a mob drop that was better—but she at least wanted him to see her wearing it as she left; she knew it made him feel better about not being able to join her in combat if he was able to supply her with his own two hands.

As she pulled her cloak around her avatar and ventured out into the subterranean tunnels lacing through Nissengrof, Griselda still felt something nagging at her—something about the guild name. She knew she’d heard the term somewhere before, and although she didn’t really know anything about Norse mythology that she hadn’t learned after being trapped in ALO, the sense of familiarity had settled into place even more strongly after Grimlock had mentioned that it was drawn from mythology. Something else… something familiar from one of her classes years ago. Greek? Roman?

She shook her head to rid herself of the stray thought as a gust of wind howled down the tunnel and buffeted her face. These were the kinds of little, irrelevant things that you just couldn’t think about when you were outside of the safe zone, not if you wanted to stay alert and alive—that had been drilled into her in the earliest days of the game, and the deaths of several party members during the Salamander blitz had made the lesson stick.

By the time that she reached the rendezvous point and joined her party members, she’d entirely put it out of her mind.

終り

[fairydanceofdeath]

One of the things that I've been working on as part of the outlining for Act 3 is fleshing out some of the new characters who are going to appear--a few of which will have POVs as secondary characters here and there in plot-relevant ways. Among those are a cast of characters that I've been really looking forward to using and writing: the members of the Golden Apple guild. So here's a sneak-peek at the short versions of their character writeups: Griselda (22 F Sylph - long sword/shield) Separated from her husband on launch day, Griselda found herself thrust into the defense of Sylph territory when the Salamanders attacked. Once a very quiet and obedient wife, the experience brought out an inner strength that had always been within her somewhere, and she thrived in the Sylph militia until the Cait Sith broke through the Valley of Butterflies. At that point she set out for Leprechaun territory to find her husband, and eventually sought work farming mats to supply the NCC clearers and their smiths. Grimlock (25 M Leprechaun - no combat skills) On the other hand, Grimlock broke under the weight of his predicament, and suffered a breakdown during the early days of the game. He ended up apprenticing under one of the smiths making gear for the Leprechaun clearers as they leveled up, and found that he had a talent with the crafting interface and recipes for making Leprechaun Constructs. When his wife found him, they moved to Nissengrof together and formed a guild for just the two of them. Meanwhile, he began working to craft devices and gear for the NCC clearers. Schmitt (29 M Gnome - guard lance/tower shield) Terrified of death, it took Schmitt a while to venture out of Nissengrof. But after his first few level-ups, his confidence started to build, and he eventually joined the Gnome clearing groups as they leveled up in preparation for clearing the Valley of Giants. That confidence took a huge hit after the deaths of several teammates during that raid, in which he was a part of the raid leader's ill-fated tank group. While the NCC clearers began to tackle the World Tree, Schmitt stayed behind in Nissengrof and ventured outside of the safe zone only to work for farming groups supplying the NCC. Caynz (18 M Gnome - warhammer/magic) A senior in high school, Caynz was part of his school's drama club, so he was looking forward to the roleplaying part of ALO. That took on a whole new meaning after launch day, and although he didn't quite have the guts to try to be a clearer, he went adventuring in the areas around Nissengrof and did his best to help the other low-level players in the area whenever he could, eventually developing a reputation as a local guide taking low- and mid-level parties into the area dungeons--while playing his role to the hilt. Yoruko (18 F Puca - short sword/song magic) Unlike many Puca, Yoruko actually had talent with a musical instrument in real life--she was a member of her school's band as a flute player. So when she found that Puca Song Magic worked very much like a rhythm game using simplified instruments of various sorts, she took to it immediately. She was one of the lucky few who were chosen by lottery to receive a Navi-Pixie, which had been ubiquitous in the beta to help players get their bearings, but very rare after launch--something which she tries to keep quiet, but which has been a huge help in letting her explore and adventure in the areas claimed by the NCC.