artificialsatellite | Rouse Your Bold Heart

After waking up in forest with no memory of how he got there, Japan meets a human man with the name and face of a dear friend. It quickly becomes clear that he is very, very far from home - In more ways than one. The man welcomes him as a guest and Japan finds himself inadvertently swept up in the lives of the people around him. With no obvious way home and a growing sense that this human is more than the simple man he seems to be, Japan must seek an explanation for his sudden appearance in colonial America against a backdrop of the war that defines his friend's existence nearly a century before they will ever meet.

Chapter 20 is now up on AO3!

Can't believe it took me so long to update, and I also can't believe I've been writing this for over a year, and I REALLY cannot believe it's 20 chapters long and we're not even halfway through.

Thoughts under the cut!

I think part of the reason this chapter took me so long to write is that, in addition to life stress and everything else, not a lot actually happens? It's a necessary point in the story, the information they learn and share in this chapter is significant, but it's just like. People talking.

In my original outline this chapter and the next were together in one, but this one was already almost 5000 words and I did not want to end up posting 10k words of "And then they talked about this stuff, and then they talked about that stuff, and then they got in the and cart rode almost all the way to New York City but there was a river in the way so they stopped at the inn for the night and talked more about some other stuff related to the first stuff." all at once.

Anyway. I'm pleased with how this fic has progressed and I've got almost everything worked out pretty solidly up through the end, but I thought I knew where I was going with it before and it grew a lot more than I had intended, so we'll see where it ends up. I'm super excited to finally introduce Amelia and Arthur (real Arthur!) not in the next chapter, but the one following. It's about to get exciting, and I'm a little nervous that I won't do it justice or that it'll turn out it's not as exciting as I thought and everyone hates it, but we'll just have to see. It had been a very long time since I wrote fic and posted it prior to this one -- like, a LONG time -- and I'm honestly just really impressed and touched that anyone's read it, let alone this many people.

I also super did not expect anyone but me to care about a USJP AmRev fic, lmfao, so even one reader was really exciting to see.