>You guys at Eyrie have had a huge influence on my writing, let me tell
>you; before, I'd thought the fictionalization of yourself as nothing
>more than blatant self-insertion on the part of the author, to self-
>grandize him/herself and make up for some personal short-coming.
>I don't think like that anymore. Many of my projects, since reading
>UF, have been "write yer' own"s in the spirit of what you've
>accomplished.

I think they've been a big influence on anyone who took at shot at writing these kinds of tales - I still refer on occasion to Hopelessly Lost on occasion to see how this scene or that scene was done, in hopes of finding something that'll spark through my synapses to create my own scene, for Wayward Ones. The entire reason I came around to writing any of the current projects my friends and I have is because of these guys - Gryph, Zoner, and ReRob in particular, since my first encounter with EPU was the first story of UF, but everyone who has ever written for any of these stories, as well.

I half-suspect that there're a lot of people out there writing their own stories who were inspired by this place. EPU has made a huge, and from what I can tell, entirely positive effect on everyone who had an idea they thought was cool, but didn't want to write down, for whatever reason.

>I just think its a shame you've closed the gate on new authors to
>contribute to your universe. Sure, I understand that everyone and
>their corgi would end up trying to insert themselves and utterly
>ruin the world you've all tried hard to carefully sculpt.
>Sure, I know its to help keep the flaging tatters of your sanity
>from blowing away in the stiff winds of the digital seas, as ton
>after ton of meaningless shit got dropped on you by every
>hack (self included) from here to the ass end of creation.

Argh. Don't I know that one. I keep wanting to write a UF/WO crossover, since there's already a tradition of temporary dimensional displacement in the two author-avatars in it.

Actually, now that I think about it, I think NTE is the only series I'm working on that doesn't involve dimensional displacement in some fashion. The Card Captor set not counting, since I haven't even seen the first bit of that from the would-be catboy who claims to be working on it.
And I'm not even sure about NTE, at the moment. I haven't developed it enough to know yet what'll happen. It may even develop that it's not supposed to, and then the story decides to hang a sudden left down Shifter Lane...

-Khirsah the Deranged
"Run around screaming until someone freaks out and tells you the way."