Chapter 43: Author Notes/Reflections Thus Far

Minor errors regarding the publishing of Chapter 42. But Chapter 42 is out, in case you didn't get notified

As usual, thank you for reading thus far. Chapter 42 is the longest chapter so far in the story, and it stands at 5,267 words according to FF, and 5,043 according to Word. The content of the chapter obviously represents somewhat of a large milestone in both this story as well as the overall story of SAO. So I thought I would hash this out really quickly to once again communicate with the audience. This might be a bit more on the self reflective side as opposed to the usual Author's notes.

I guess the first thing I'd like to express is that it can be really difficult with a story this length (for reference, grand total this story is about the length of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban) to keep track of things. I'm not saying this as an excuse per say, but if I ever end up reiterating a mechanic, it's because I couldn't quite track down whether or not I've already explained it earlier, as not only is it a really long ways back, it's also a magnitude of years back now.

At this point, I've kind of arrived at a fork with where I could write with. The two options as I see it are either 1: take a break from writing Kirito for a while or 2: perform a rather significant time skip. I have a plan for both and would be interested in hearing feedback regarding either choice.

One piece of potential criticism I'd like to get in front of is the way physicality is expressed between characters in a relationship. I have to keep the content age appropriate with not only FF's overall rules, but also the set rating of the story. I'm pretty much going to leave it at that.

I've been thinking of starting a like say a blogspot or similar site to post periodic updates on how the story is going writing wise, and maybe as a place to more appropriately post stuff like this there.

The thought has also creeped into my head about the possibility of somehow refining and cleaning up some of the things from the beginning of the story. Let's just say...I'm not the writer I once was. There are certain aspects in the beginning that could be tighter. There are a few arguments for and against it. Two major ones against it are: there's really no clean way to do that, and two, it's kind of an artifact regarding how I used to write, and how I've changed.

Date and time formats written in each chapter will be changing from this point forward, so please be mindful of that.

In case anyone happens to be curious, I'm influenced in writing style from several authors. I won't name them all, but I case study Thomas Hardy in how to describe environments and scenes. One aspect that I still continue to struggle with is writing the fighting scenes. Without illustrations it's kind of difficult to convey what's going on, I believe. I try to imagine in my head what the fight scene might look like and then translate that image into words on paper. I experimented around with this style during the lake fight scene, where I wrote the fight as Sachi was seeing it from the sidelines. I'm happy with how that turned out, but that's not necessarily a practical technique for every scene.

That's all I can think of right now. Once again, I'm totally open to feedback and will try to respond in a timely manner.

Again, thank you all for your continued readership. I hope you all are staying safe. I love you all.

-Inferius