My new poll is up. I'm iffy on it. That's why I'm asking you.

Hi. I'm Samhildanach. I'm a man, I'm in my twenties, I've nearly gotten the degree I actually want, I've got an extra degree I don't need, I'm from the US, and that's all I'm willing to affirm about myself. My name isn't Sam Hill, but if I ever published an actual book, that's probably what my pen name would be. Read more on my username in the next section. Anyways, I'm not a professional writer, but I do think of myself as a writer, as I think most writers should. Maybe someday I'll write an original novel and try to get it published.

My pen name, 'Samhildanach,' means 'equally skilled in many arts,' which was an epithet assigned to the Irish god, Lugh, after he earned his place in the Tuatha De Danaan by not being the best at any one thing, but by being as good as the best at everything. Actually, it should be spelled "Samildanach," but I misspell all my usernames so that I get to use them even when I'm not the first to claim them.

My profile picture is a Yu-Gi-Oh card called Cybertech Alligator. He's got 2500 attack and costs one tribute to normal summon, just like Summoned Skull. Only he's cooler. I know of the card and have an emotional attachment to it because of a game called Yu-Gi-Oh! Power of Chaos: Joey the Passion. In it, you start with a deck filled with amazing spell and trap cards and some of the worst monster cards ever (though there are several good ones, too). The only way to get more cards is to beat Joey in a duel. You get one card for a single duel, and three cards in a best two out of three match duel. For some reason, you can acquire multiple copies of limited cards (cards that you can only place 1 copy of in your deck). Anyways, I got this game when I was like, 8 or something. Maybe I was six, maybe I was ten, who knows. Anyways, you start with like 45 cards or something, and there are a total of 771 cards, and there are loads of utterly crap normal monsters. If you don't know about Yu-Gi-Oh, allow me to sum up the feeling of getting yet another garbage normal monster. Yugioh is a trading card game, where you have cards and battle the opponent. There are monster cards, spell cards, and trap cards. (And like Xyz shit if you're playing with new rules, but that's not in Joey the passion) But anyway, imagine this: You can play one "monster card" per turn. In your deck of 40 cards, roughly 20 of them are "monster cards." Of those, there are ten that are "normal monsters" and ten that are "effect monsters." Like the name implies, "effect monsters" have additional effects that do things, normally making them more useful. But "normal monsters" don't. All they have are ATK and DEF values. The highest attack value I've seen on a "normal monster" that you can summon without tributes is 1900, and the highest defense I've seen is 2000. But most are a balance, like 1700ATK/1150DEF. So imagine spending fifteen minutes duelling this guy to get a card, only to receive a normal monster with 900ATK/200DEF. There is literally nothing redeeming about the card. It's utterly useless. The feeling is soul crushing. Anyway, when I first got the game, it was for Christmas, and normally my family travels to my Grandparents house in a different state right after christmas. I installed the game on their computer, played it, and won CyberTech Alligator, and it's a "normal monster" that requires one tribute, which is where you sacrifice a monster to summon a stronger one, and it's got 2500 ATK, like I said, and that's extremely high ATK for a 1 tribute monster. It was awesome. But then we went back home, and my 8-year-old brain was forced to realize that CD-ROMs don't save data to themselves. The game saves data locally, on the computer. Meaning Cybertech Alligator was not on the disk, it was on my grandparents computer in a different state. Actually, I've recently found out that this game is extraordinarily picky with its data. Different users have different data which is sort of hit or miss, but even the same user using Administrator mode to run the program will save the data somewhere else. Anyways, it's been 17 years since this game was released, and that may or may not have been when I got it, and I've never again received Cybertech Alligator. That's why the card is special to me, and that's why it's my profile picture.

Wow. Long Yu-Gi-Oh! rant, there.

My stories:

-Currently focused on:

Ascension (PJO) - Kind of my flagship story. I started writing it just a few months after quite a big depressive episode. Then I stopped writing it for something like two years, over which time I matured a lot, I feel. I reread the story now, at the start of 2021, and go, "Wow, this was my best work?" I'm sure I'll feel the same way in another two years, too.

Have Another Round on Me (PJO) - A cute little story made up of a bunch of tiny drabble like things. Each chapter is its own story, and each is precisely 108 words, according to fanfiction.net's document manager. I plan to stop adding chapters once there are 108 in total. May I suggest chapters: 1, 22, 24, 28, 29, and 36. Those are my favorites.

Shangri-La (PJO) - This is a harem story. In it, the Titanomachy is "over" but it took a really long time. Percy is twenty four, and is the head military leader of both camps, Greek and Roman. There is no second great prophecy, at least not yet. AKA, there's no Gigantomachy on the horizon, and everyone seems to be taking it easy, more or less. Annabeth died at some point, probably attempting the Isles of the Blessed, getting reborn, and Zoe was sent to the stars, like in cannon.

I want this one to be a manageable size harem story. I don't like harems where not everyone gets enough attention. It's like, come on, why would they bother at that point? If there's like twelve women, all the guy will have time for is pleasing all of them. Speaking from personal experience, girls don't seem to like it very much when the guy they're dating has no life. At first they'll enjoy all the attention, but eventually they'll realize that they're dating someone who barely even exists outside of their relationship. It's weird. Anyway, I'll obviously discuss stuff like that. PM me for dating advice, LOL. Can be nice to have a stranger listen to your grievances. These are strange times, though. I've not had a girlfriend through the pandemic, nor have I looked for one, so I wouldn't know how things are going at the moment on the dating scene.

I don't want this to be a harem where Percy just collects women, and then once he has them, that's it, they're done. People have problems, and Percy will have a hard time solving all of them. Some people might leave the harem or something. Because it's not like an emperor's harem, where they have no choice. It's going to be 4 or 5 concurrent relationships, and sometimes people break up. Sometimes they get back together, right after. Furthermore, joining a harem doesn't make you bisexual. Some people Percy is dating might be bisexual, but some might not. Some might want to have a three-way sexual encounter, some might not want that, perhaps with the same vehemence that a stereotypical straight male might abhor the idea of having sex with another male. I want to write about a harem with problems, basically.

Chief among the women is Aphrodite, who at some point fell head over heels for Percy, much to his initial chagrin. She'll be kind of like a ring leader, and Percy might get angry at her for influencing women with her divine love powers. Perhaps a point of contention between them, mmm? Reyna will enter the relationship fairly quickly. I didn't care much for Reyna until I started writing her. She's really pitiful, isn't she? Crushing on Percy, crushing on Jason, but they both reject her. I feel like sending her to the hunt was a cop out, and it was in Trials of Apollo I think, so that more or less doesn't count. Percy is always on the look out for a way to get Zoe out of the stars and back on earth. He's also on the look out for a way to get immortality without becoming beholden to the ancient laws. That might mean another goddess could get involved, who knows, mmm? Me, obviously. I already know, because I've got an outline for the whole story.

Percy is darkish. By that I mean he is more prone to killing and torture and stuff, and his personal moral compass is compromised. However, he isn't evil. He isn't neutral or good, but he isn't evil, either. That's why I say darkish and not grey. He has dark thoughts and tendencies, but he tries his best to ignore them. Anyway, he lives in a house at camp. Camp Half-Blood imitated Camp Jupiter/New Rome, but in typical Greek Fashion, they just did whatever they felt like at the time, without considering future infrastructure. Meaning, it isn't as centralized as New Rome, and there aren't nearly as many rules. It's just some houses and some shops, not yet a place to live and to work full time.

The Highland Drake (Dungeon Siege) - This is a novelization of the 2002 fantasy RPG Dungeon Siege. It is a full novelization, meaning I describe everything fully, and you don't have to have played the game to understand it. It's a game with great graphics for the time, no loading screens at all, a fully connected world, fun and simple gameplay, fascinating enemies and locations, and basically no plot. Seriously, the plot is like, "Hey the Seck are back. Take care of it, okay, farmer?" In my novelization, I plan to add plot and flesh out the characters. And boy, do they need fleshing out. The player character never says a word, and everyone else has all of six lines, tops. One when you meet them, one when you recruit them, one if you don't recruit them, one when you eject them from the party, one when you ask for them back, and one when you reject them yet again.

-Will come back to:

A Bargain to Change the World

Duty First: Rise of a God

Guardian of Sanity: Redux

-Won't come back to:

Guardian of Sanity - There's a rewrite of this going up, so once it is eclipsed, this version will be removed.

Favorite Quotes (or Quotes to Live Your Life By):

"Do you know where you are going?"

~Helpful Guard, Dungeon Siege II

"The large print giveth and the small print taketh away."

~Tom Waits

"Three rules from your sensei:
One: Outsource your feelings.
Two: Limit your training to be task-specific.
Three: Assign regret to those accountable."

~They Might Be Giants

"Mr. Hughes says, 'Live and learn.
Dig and be dug in return.'"

~Mono Puff

"gay fish yo"

~Anaklusmos14

"And they sang to remember; and they danced to forget."

~Coyote Run

"Sometimes, things just don't work out."

~My father

"Good things come to those who wait, but only what is left behind by those who hurry."

~I don't remember. Abraham Lincoln or something.

"There's always a bigger fish."

~Qui-gon Jin

"I could shake my tiny fist
And swear I wasn't wrong
But what's the sense in arguing
When you're all alone?"

~They Might Be Giants

"Can't shake the devil's hand and say you're only kidding."

~They Might Be Giants