Julie

A.K. took down his site years ago, but here's a Wayback link to his classic series:

web.archive.org/web/20040208110845/http:...rls.org/stories.html

I wish i knew what happened to ak loved his stories.

Same here. Loved his stories too and would be fascinated to hear what happened to him. I always assumed it was same thing that happened to the artist Coyote.

Several years ago, there was a blog post by David Matthews who does the Tetsuko comic. He has always been open about being an caricature artist by day at Disney. In his blog post, he mentioned how the artist known as Coyote showed up one day at his station at Disney and said hi. They had never met before and chatted for a few minutes. Turns out Coyote got married, had kids, and no real time for his sketch work that he used to do. The two shook hands and that was last anyone has heard from or about Coyote (to my knowledge).

I always assumed it was something similar for AK. I have several ideas for continued stories past Fall of Superior Girl. I even have some ideas for a re-write of AK's original Superior Girl chapters. Mostly to tighten things up and drop a few plot threads that go nowhere. However, life just gets in the way of sitting down and taking the multiple hours it would require to write those stories out.

Yeah AK was amazing and he's certainly missed.

Apologize if i got this wrong, or if its out of bounds...

But many years ago I thought there was a workshop, and plagiarism was being discussed....

Afterwards AK seemed to fade away. The whole situation seemed rather bizarre.

I don't remember that from a workshop but it would have been years, possibly over a decade, ago.

My thoughts on disappearance were more on just old fashioned burnout. You can see it with his stories over time. They start really strong and over time get into a routine. Then the updates start becoming fewer and fewer until AK would kick off a new story. Then the cycle repeats itself. I always figured that AK just got a bit burned out on the genre and life got in the way of writing further.

I had dinner with AK a number of years ago to talk about AUverse-related stuff, back when we lived near each other, and while I'm not going to say anything directly about him, given his strong desire for personal privacy, it was my sense then that he was starting to drift away from writing Julie stories. Not burnout in the normal sense, but rather that he simply had interests in other things that were drawing more of his attention.

He was a very intelligent and accomplished man with many interests. 

He did continue Julie stories for a while after that, but with declining output. Something I can relate to. 

I see this as a very normal thing when it comes to hobbies. Many of us have varying interests over time. 

Besides, our particular hobby takes a LOT of time to do well, especially if you are writing an involved serial story. 

Also keep in mind that anything written in our sub-genre is perishable. If you read a story you like, you need to personally archive it. Brantley's pointer to the WayBack machine can help, but who knows if that's always going to be around either. The 90's pre-commercial internet, where everyone could freely express themselves, was a very active dynamic when it came to our kinds of stories. But it is also an era that is fading away, bit by bit. 

You can even feel it here on SWM, which is slowly fading as well. There isn't as much Forum activity as before, with a lot of that advertisements for pay-wall sites, and the number of new authors and new stories from older authors is slowing gradually. For now, we are a last vestige of the free-sharing 90's style of swapping stories in this sub-genre. Which is why I'm here.

That was a glorious time, and I can still feel some of that vibe, but I have to listen more closely to hear it. 

Shadar

shadar wrote:

I had dinner with AK a number of years ago to talk about AUverse-related stuff, back when we lived near each other, and while I'm not going to say anything directly about him, given his strong desire for personal privacy, it was my sense then that he was starting to drift away from writing Julie stories. Not burnout in the normal sense, but rather that he simply had interests in other things that were drawing more of his attention.
 

Fair enough. I am glad that he is doing well and certainly understand changing interests and hobbies over time.

As for the site, I think a lot of the traffic has moved to Discord. However, it has always been a small community with its feasts and famines of activity as with all things.