This in defence of crack:

Invent your own mythology or be slave to another man's. - W. Blake

I write on behalf of my colleagues in contumacy, my brothers and sisters in arms, the producers (and protectors) of the cause; the writers of crack. Here is our manifesto.

We refuse to be straight-jacketed by the frivolous constraints of “reason” and “sense”. Logic has no place in our stories or in our heads. We are iconoclasts: we determinedly avoid pairings that are conventional, commonplace or trite. We exult in the new and the bizarre, the eccentric, the grotesque and, yes we admit it, the perverse.

We rejoice when we search for a pairing and there are no results: we take the Road Less Travelled and often the Road Nonexistent and we forge new paths into the wilderness of the improbable and the absurd. (No plotline is too farfetched, no scenario too forced, no back-story too implausible for us, trailblazers in irrationality.)

We are the pioneers: we take the cracky first step. We open the door. Come back tomorrow, there will be twenty more. (Once upon a time, GaaSaku was crack...)

We are also the cursed. We are plagued with reviews like “does she even know he exists?” and “they haven’t met” and “but he died” and “DISGUSTING,” and the worst part is they are usually right. We admit that the truth hurts. (But occasionally we get some love and when we do we know that one more innocent has succumbed and so we type on.)

We will have paired every single female with every single male before this day is through, and just when you think it can’t get any worse we will pair every male with every male and every female with every female and we will make love triangles and then we will make love quadrangles and love parallelograms and love hexagons. (Then we will toss in a few inanimate objects and house pets to keep things fresh.)

No character is safe. We revive the dead. We straighten the gays and bend the straights, age the young and rejuvenate the aged, turn males into females and females into males. We control time and we control physics and we studiously disregard temporal coherence and continuity. Chronology is malleable in our hands and canon timelines need not apply. Alternative universes are at our beck and call and we are not afraid to use them.

We challenge you to read us.

We might make you cry.

We might make you like it.

We are the writers of crack.

(WARN AS MANY PEOPLE AS YOU CAN.)

We also spontaneously write grandiose declarations in our profiles when we were supposed to be fixing a typo and enjoy the use of pluralis majestatis in all its schizophrenic radiance.

The moment of recognizing your own lack of talent is a flash of genius. - S. J. Lec

I would like to point out that I am acutely aware of the imperfections which continue to mar Marrow (until Ch. 10) and Uneasy Coexistence (still lingering despite reworking). Both are awaiting revisions to rid them of stilted dialogue, embarrassing plot-related naivety, various manifestations of imbecility and general amateurishness. Read at your own risk. (There is no great writing, only great rewriting. Wise words.)

Marrow and UC will be finished and are not abandoned, the only problem is that they are being written by a slug. Apologies.

Thank you everyone for the reviews and PMs and emails, including the entertaining ones speculating about my death by disembowelment by carnivorous plants.

March 2012: the good news is I found my old files for Uneasy Coexistence and Via Media (the latter was actually completed some time ago but never posted -- so that is now done). I could potentially start working on UC again. The bad news is I have absolutely nothing for Marrow except what is currently posted on this site, so it will take some serious work to reconstruct my completed chapters, plotline, and sketched out scene ideas. I'm not sure how much I am motivated to dedicate that much time to writing for a fandom that I am completely out of touch with, but I do promise to at least give it a shot. (I am, admittedly, a little frightened of looking up the Naruto arcs I've missed and finding out what beloved characters have died. I may completely withhold from doing so while I attempt to finish my overdue fics.)

Thank you very much to everyone who liked my work enough to write me a review or PM. I'm flattered by the effusive ones and humbled by the rest.