Author Update of the Long-Awaited and Much-Delayed Variety:

You might be thinking…

LE GASP! Tituba3 has updated Odalisque?! What? Is it a new chapter? A continuation?

Um, no, none of that (sorry). Instead, I'm writing this because I'd like to inform all of my fanfiction friends and family of a development of sorts.

So here it is! *Clears throat*

As some of you might have noticed, I've been absent from the fanfiction community for a while. Part of it was due to life (college, and all that comes with it), part of it was due to living overseas (Morocco, for the Peace Corps) and part of it was… well…

I started writing books.

Yeah, and not so oddly, I give fanfiction and the community here a lot of credit for helping me get to this point. I'm honest enough to admit that when I first started writing fics, they weren't all that good. They were often disjointed and adverb heavy and altogether unpalatable.

Yet the more I wrote, the more I practiced and the more I tried, the better I became (or at least I like to think so). I would have never kept going had it not been for the people on this site.

I wanted to let you guys know that some of the strongest writing support I've ever received has come from fanfiction people commenting on this fic. Writing Odalisque flipped a switch for me. All the encouragement from you guys allowed me to cross that barrier between "I'm doing this for funsies" and "I'm doing this because I want to be doing this for the rest of my life."

So I wanted to let you know that the anime/fanficiton tree has borne fruit! Actual, novel-length fruit! I'm probably not allowed to advertise the links within the content of this story, but I had to post here because I knew updating Odalisque would garner the most attention.

So please, if you're interested in seeing what I've cooked up since leaving this lovely community, check out my profile. Links to my blog, Facebook page and where to view/buy my books are listed there.

I want to end by once again saying thank you to all the readers and reviewers who gave me the confidence to keep writing and believing. I know this sounds like a Journey song, but it's true. Thank you to each and everyone one of you.

(Oh, and IchiRuki 4ever!)