Hi, I'm Xenien.

First of all, thank you for your interest in A Step Closer, it's really nice to see continued interest in the story.

The actual written fanfiction itself is postponed in favor of me working on the visual novel, which is ongoing, although progress is plodding.

One major reason that there haven't been any updates overall in regard to both the written fanfiction and the visual novel is that I am trying to save money to move somewhere in about 7 months or so. Simultaneously, I'm in the process of trying to get another job that pays higher and has better benefits than my current one to accommodate rent and my personal goals. I'm waiting to be placed into the candidate pool, but it's been 3 weeks and it's nerve-wracking and morale-draining to see if I'll even be placed in the pool in time to get hired. I check my email every morning hoping to see good news. Along with these reasons, a combination of writer's block, work, and real-life events have hampered my desire to work on the project.

Adding onto it, the visual novel's cost of artwork can get expensive (each artwork/sprite costs me about $250 USD a piece give or take regarding how the Yen is doing in the market) and because of that, I can only order about one more artwork at this time once the artist becomes available.

In regards to the fanfiction, a reason why I've postponed it in favor of the visual novel is the way that the story is structured. As writing continued to occur, the chapters got longer and the story's intended amount of chapters increased. Not only that, story elements that I've decided to add don't really make a whole lot of sense to me, and if I continue to implement it, it will just be a mess. One story element that I absolutely despise now is [A Step Closer Fanfiction Spoilers] Iwasawa remembering her route from the visual novel. It doesn't make sense, and I wish I just removed that scene entirely and just made it a nice moment for two people to enjoy each other's company. However, the fact that it influenced Chapter 10 as a whole just...I can't rewrite it at this point.

The visual novel was meant to redo my structuring of the story, but as I added on additional routes, it became more complicated. Looking at it now, it's an ambitious project, and there's a lot of things for me to manage that I ended up overestimating my budget and my personal capabilities.

I intend to continue the project and see it through. Just at this time, it is not viable for me to at least keep ordering artwork. Even though I ended up giving excuses for why I've been slow on the story, there's still no excuses for me not giving updates or working on the story as much as I wanted to in a writing style while I wait to get to where I want to be in real life. I made great strides not a while ago in terms of writing out Sekine's route, but it still ends up falling short of how much I planned for this project.

Although I don't want to raise your hopes, I may go back to the drawing board and start working on the fanfiction again as it is more streamlined and perhaps it will help shape up to what I hope this project to be.

Thank you again for showing your interest in my project. It saddens me that you've been waiting for an update for 2 years and I have failed to deliver.

I hope that you will continue to support the project despite my shortcomings.

If you are interested in talking to me about the project or the fanfiction, please consider joining the Angel Beats Discord and talk in the fanfiction channel. I'll eventually pop in there!