NiHao,

I'm an average, semi-retired avid fanfic reader, at the stage where I no longer look for new fics, scour communities for new authors and believe I have just read about every good story in the fandoms I read in...it's pretty sad, in retrospect.

I will be graduating soon, and maybe I will try writing again when I can grasp how to form sentences again.

I love stories to death, I will usually prioritise a good story over everything else.

I love drawing, and the wrangling out of characters on my computer amuses me to hours on end. (I can literally draw for 6 hours straight and feel like only half an hour has gone by).

And most of all, I am a ridiculous, sappy, happy ending addict. Thus, I will never be able to read Wuthering Heights, which is a crying shame because Jane Eyre is ridiculously heart-rendingly brilliant story.

I love themes of independence, freedom, love that focuses on personality and emotional development, bloody good plot and realistic, loveable characters. I love humour most of all, the ability to make someone laugh is a gift to be treasured.

In the true spirit of a story-junkie, I am going to trumpet the best story I have ever seen, heard, read, in comics, manga, TV series, anime and movies:

The manga, Fullmetal Alchemist by the amazing Hiromu Arakawa-sensei. It's hard to believe there's a story out there that does everything I love, but this is it. *stops myself from producing a 300 page essay about why I love it to pieces*

In real life I am a maths science nerd, logic makes the world go around and English tests only our ability to bullshit. I don't believe in gods, but I believe in the astonishing human capacity for faith, whether to grip onto the last shreds of hope or to blind us to the world around us.

The fanfiction I've written 3-4 years ago is not something I'm proud of (how ridiculously contrived, it is, I am so so ashamed...oh well) but there's a lesson to be learnt in everything I do.

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll.
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

-William Ernest Henley