Red Shards

by Etaru

A mapper, Etaru, is caught between his own mind and the malicious intent of a murder guild. Tragedy has torn his already fragile perception of reality and he finds the journey back to sanity is a difficult one. Yet, despite a world that he feels conspires against him, he keeps pushing on. One step at a time.

1. Introduction

Hi, my name-or my pen name, anyway-is Etaru. So, first off, I realize that the name of the main character is the same. The main reason is that I'm really, really bad with keeping track of my own characters' names. After that, I just like the name. While the main character isn't really based on me, he and I share some things and I draw on some personal experience for him (but I generally try to take part of my personality and focus on that for every character to create a sense of realism). If you don't like that, I can't blame you at all because I generally don't like it when the main character is obviously based on the writer. That's mostly just when it's obvious that the main character is a paragon and nearly perfect.

Second, and this ties in neatly with the first thing, this story deals with mental health issues. They won't quite as dominant in the story during the first arc, but the main character is plagued by these issues so proceed with caution if you feel that this could be a trigger for you. For example, at the time of writing this, I've hit a bit of writer's block because I triggered myself and couldn't slip into the minds of my characters to create a coherent conversation and have had trouble sitting down and writing.

Tying that back into my first point, Etaru is supposed to be a highly imperfect person. Not quite an antihero, but close enough that I imagine he won't be everyone's favorite character.

I've never been good at creating realistic romantic drama. I was once told that I was good at writing tragedy and was terrible at writing romance, so I'd love to get pointers if / when I get to places like that. Even setting the stage for it is difficult for me.

As far as accuracy to the universe, one thing I realized early on was that throwing spikes couldn't be used as an offensive weapon. What I decided on is that it can't do damage but can still apply poisons like the paralysis effect seen early on. I can edit it out if people think it diverts too far from the lore of the universe. Second, the reason Etaru uses two katars is not because-at least from my perspective-he is dual wielding. My explanation is that "hand weapons" like brass knuckles and katars would be an offshoot skill of unarmed and it didn't seem to make sense to limit unarmed to one-handed and two-handed. Once again, this can probably be edited, but I'm not sure its necessary.

Really, the focus of this book is on the psychology of the characters and the philosophical undertones of the story. The Aincrad section is mostly designed to build up to when the books enter the ALO section.

I'm a novice writer (if I can call my myself that) so I'd greatly appreciate any advice and I appreciate any time you take to even view and read it.

I hope you find your time reading this to be enjoyable! :)