In the meantime, you can just ignore everything below the cut if you don't care about my fanfic.
I'm at 205K words and Chapter 33, but there's still this big section in the middle that I'm going to have to go back and rewrite, and probably cut a whole chapter. I still don't have an ETA for completion. Right now I am aiming for coming in under 300K words. :o Hopefully way under that. But the rough outline in my head says there are five or six major plot points (call them "minor acts") yet to be written, each of which pretty much needs a chapter all by itself, and usually I wind up needing about a chapter to stitch each one together, so call it 10-12 chapters, and given the way I always end up overwriting so that what I thought would be one chapter turns out to be several... Holy crap, 50 chapters is not inconceivable. I'd be more comfortable if I can wrap it up in 40 chapters, but I think that's a very optimistic estimate. So, AQATSA will be... 40-50 chapters? Let's see how accurate that estimate is.
I do not have a sample chapter for you, but I do have a lovely illustration of a scene from AQATSA:
Click for larger version
This was done by *MioneBookworm. (This was an artist recommended to me by
anyareine. Thanks, Anya!)There has been some discussion about how "accurate" some of the other art has been. As I've said before, I just don't have the ability to describe in such precise detail the characters I picture in my head that an artist can draw them exactly the way I picture them. (I once pissed off an artist friend of mine -- she was very, very good, and now does high-level professional advertising work -- by trying to be too specific about what I wanted some character illustrations to look like while not being very good at explaining what I wanted. She ended up refusing to draw any more pictures for me, and I've always felt bad about that. :() For that reason, I try not to get too wrapped up in whether or not an illustration is a perfect representation.
Likewise, I'm sure most of you have pictures in your head of what my characters look like. And the pictures you have in your head are almost certainly not the same as the pictures in my head. Therefore, no illustration matches any pictures in anyone's head but the artist's.
That said, I gave very detailed instructions for this picture, in terms of who the characters were, what the situation was, what the characters were feeling and wearing, etc. At the same time, I left much to the artist's interpretation. And the results are gorgeous.