Well I guess now that I actually have a story that seems to be somewhat popular it's time to fill this persistently blank space with something for those of you willing to grace it with your presence, so I guess I'll start with some simple personal things and work up from there.

Name: Eric (and that's all you're getting)

Age: 24

Height: 6' 4"

Weight: Too damn much...but I'm working on that

Eye Color: Brown

Hair Color: Brown as well but currently clean shaven so it doesn't clash with my reddish goatee (goddamn genetics anyways)

Quirks: Suffers from a persistent, if small, limp thanks to slipping on a patch of ice a few years back

Notice (1/4/13): For the foreseeable future any and all of my Naruto works, both published and otherwise are on a permanent hiatus. I simply cannot muster the desire and initiative to keep writing for a series that does nothing but continue to piss me off and depress me so consistently. I love the world, believe me I truly do, but I well and truly HATE just about everything in it. The heroes disgust me, the villains don't impress me and the all pervasive theme of self-sacrifice that has been central to the whole series from start to what I believe will be a very unhappy finish, especially for Naruto himself, just depresses me something fierce. Now that I think about it, that same theme seems to be prevalent to various degrees in just about any anime I've ever watched though Naruto is the worst that I've ever encountered. Must be a cultural thing, good in theory I suppose but not really something I need to see in my entertainment.

Revised Bio (1/4/13): I have been officially part of FanFiction.net for the better part of six years now, though I'd found the site two years before then, doing a lot of reading and trying my hand at writing from time to time. I started out in the Games section, my primary interest at the time, and even wrote three rather mediocre attempts of stories that never got beyond a single chapter due to a lack of response (thanks to their relatively obscure fanbase) and a more successful fourth that I had to abandon thanks to a combination of lack of internet and loss of notes (that marked the last time I created a physical set of notes for my works, it was too easy to simply let the idea slide when I could just recheck my work...until that work was lost)

Four years ago a good friend of mine, who also happens to be a writer here by the name of talentmissunderstud, reintroduced me to the world of anime (my previous exposure being what could be found on places like Toonami and the like) in the form of Naruto. I spent about a month of my summer vacation at the time watching what I could find online. By the end of the experience...well I'm sure many of my reviewers and those I've had the pleasure of communicating with in recent years are aware of (and in the process of writing this I realize anyone who took the time to read the above notice...silly me) the overall feeling of contempt I've held for the series ever since. Still I'd seen just enough that interested me that I pretty much immediately delved into the depths of Naruto fan fiction.

I was rather quickly hooked.

It was almost shocking what talented, or simply creative, people can do when given a world and characters to play with. Granted for every talented/creative (and yes there is a difference. Talented writers are the ones that actually have a working knowledge of how to represent the English language in written form but can have a hard time coming up with an original thought to use. Creative ones have the great ideas and interesting twists on their given world but can also make it so that the only way you'd be harder pressed reading their work is if you're dyslexic or blind) there are about twenty that don't know their ass from a hole in the ground, or the difference between an encyclopedia and a dictionary, and another thirty that can only be described as lazy. I scoured the Naruto database for the better part of two years, devouring anything and everything that met my standards which eventually branched off into other fandoms like Bleach and Harry Potter and various crossovers between them and so many others.

On the subject of crossovers: I remember reading in one author's profile once that he believed there were three characters that he considered universal, able to fit into any setting: Naruto, Harry Potter and Xander. Having done a considerable amount of reading into all three I can agree to a point, if the author is willing to bend the characters to suit their new roles, since there are precedence in all three worlds that would allow for said heroes to go to their newfound homes and friends (there are several heroes and villains in Naruto that can create wormholes and travel to pocket dimensions, not to mention the ever mysterious and largely ignored sealing arts, magic in the Harry Potter-verse can be utilized to hop dimensions, since they already can manipulate time and such it's not too much of a stretch, and the same can be said of the Buffy-verse and there is of course the rather common Halloween plot to abuse) The thing about crossovers is, if you are taking a hero from his home to an entirely different world, you really cannot use their canon selves. They have to have some kind of improvement or alteration especially, in my mind at least, before they even end up in their new environment. Let's face it the canon heroes are tailor made to fit the situations and struggles they face and are generally very ill equipped to deal with the kind of enemies they'll meet. To use the three "universal" examples above: Canon Naruto is just too...stupid, for lack of a more elegant word, and inflexible to handle the new challenges, Canon Harry...well he's just too damn reliant on the help of others for his success, he's powerful but he lacks the ability and mentality to utilize that power to it's fullest extent and Canon Xander...well as far as I'm concerned his only real failing is that he's distressingly human but that is generally the point of introducing crossover elements in the first place.

Bottom line, my policy for crossovers is to change the hero in some way before introducing crossover elements whether it's something as simple as making the hero older and theoretically more mature and less unseasoned than they were originally or change something about their upbringing, although if you are injecting other worlds in their world then that is generally one of the prime times to do so.

Now where was I: Right, anyways as I was saying. I eventually decided to try my hand at writing once again and while I was certainly more talented than before, very few of my own ideas ever seemed to click for me until I rediscovered author challenges, having largely ignored them prior, and like a shot I was off. Sadly only two of my ideas, Fate and Fantasy and The Black Blood Flows ever actually got anywhere, just nowhere fast. About two months after I posted the very first chapter for Black Blood and a week after the third chapter of Fate and Fantasy my computer completely fried itself, taking all of my accumulated work to the grave with it, along with my most consistent source of internet access (my friend had a laptop he let me use from time to time but not often enough to actually get any real work done) and since I'm somewhat lacking in funds it took me several months to get things back in working order and by that time Black Blood had undergone some small changes and a nearly month long conversation with dracohalo117 the whole idea had pretty much been overhauled. So I sat down, started writing the second chapter for about a week and then...just stopped. I had hit a case of Writer's Block so bad that I quite literally sat there for about three more months just staring at my screen, unable to get the words to flow for either story. I'd lost my drive and inspiration to write anything based in the Naruto-verse, those stories being only two of about eight different ideas that I'd been working on that refused to go anywhere either. Hell I tried writing two different stories for Harry Potter during the summer and while I nearly completed one chapter, key word being nearly, for one the other didn't translate well from idea onto paper and in the end I gave it up as a bad job. Eventually I crawled back to my roots, having exhausted pretty much everything I was willing to read in the other sections, and decided to see what had been added in my nearly four year absence from Gaming fan fiction.

And thus was The Edge of Madness born. I've always loved Elder Scrolls, ever since one of my oldest friends introduced me to Morrowind and I accidentally pick-pocketed the leader of the Thieves Guild in Balmora and died to the battle-cry of "Thief!" as I watched blankly thinking "No shit!" the whole time. I'd loved Oblivion nearly as much despite it's issues and Skyrim was a vast improvement over that even despite it's plethora of technical problems that continue to plague it even now. I'd thought up and discarded a couple of ideas, as seems to be my habit with these things, until I read Through the Portal by FirenIce15 and my mind seized upon the concept of Sheogorath, as the former Hero of Kvatch, being the Dragonborn/Dovahkiin. It pandered to many of the things I like about a story, a powerful hero who actually has an advantage over their foes (a result of my general disgust with anime I think) and a way to put my own very morbid sense of humor to work.

Now true it probably seems a little overkill to some to have an actual god running around amongst mere mortals and all that but come on...I mean seriously is it going to change the outcome all that much? If you're writing a story that's based on a story where everyone already knows the ending does it really matter how you get to that ending? Well...yes in a way but the only thing that it influences is how you want to present the story. Me? I'm going to avoid all the stress and dark, depressing pitfalls many heroes seem to fall into. The only thing that's going to be dark about The Edge of Madness is going to be the sense of humor.