To all the Dearest,

For as long as I can remember, I've been trying to make elaborate worlds - with varying degrees of success. The World Letters began May 12, 2010. The first one introduced Kakyuu Raigond Atstabol, my Dragon Rider. This self-insert was a half-dragon, half-mermaid, half-elf, half-werewolf, half-whatever-else and she wrote about exploring her world, her boyfriends, and that time she boiled a guy trying to hit on her in oil. My friends, in-turn, wrote to me as their characters - about their great wars and dragon gods and pets. (As all good 6th graders do!)

For me, World Letters began to crystalize into which the manner I experienced writing, roleplay, and fiction throughout my adolescent and young adult life. World Letters meant I always had to have a world and one of the characters in that world was mine. And since then, it has always been so.

I'd describe World Letters today as "an epistolary novel I write to my friends, email-by-email" but that sounds incredibly pretentious. (I basically do that when I'm trying to impress the seriousness with which I take my craft.) Tonally and in terms of the tropes, general practices, and writing quirks found within my Letters, they're more accurately described as, "Serialized Fanfiction but it's in an original world." And this whole world of Yssaia and the games and the art and all -- it basically exists as a way to serve these letters.

At the time they were created, they were much more diegetic - Kakyuu actually wrote to my friends' characters during in-fiction down-time - not during the events she described. But, with time, the letters changed and evolved. I can still pinpoint the moment when they shifted from diegetic letters to being first-person short stories. And when they went from being loosely two paragraphs to strictly four to whatever-length-I-want. I remember when I was banned from releasing more than one World Letter in a day (after I wrote 4 very long letters in one day and sent all of them...)

Lots of these little quirks and such influence the way World Letters are written to this day - including the distinct lack of quotation marks when people speak. (This is largely caused by the email format, where indents were once difficult to input.)

Today, my friends from back then live far away. Other people have joined and left us over the years - but I continue to write. I mostly write these for myself -- partly as a way of practicing emotions and partly as a way of practicing fiction writing. They're rarely edited and, once a letter is sent, none of its contents can be retconned. (After all, how can you retcon what has actually happened in a world?) I don't really write them to please a crowd, but to please me. Nonetheless, I want to share them with you.

Here, on itch.io, I will occasionally post new PDFs as well as announce updates. But if you want to read them as they go live, I recommend you check out my website for Yssaia HEREand you can get some of the Performance Art-side to serialized fiction.

These Letters mean the world to me. So, I hope they can mean a little something to you.

Thank you,

--Amaiguri

P.S. Since these letters were, in the past, sent out one day at a time, I think they're at their best when that performance-art aspect of the serialized fiction - the time scale in-between their releases - is preserved. But, obviously, ultimately you should read them at whatever pace you wish.