Life of a Project - The Tower · 4:11pm Apr 13th, 2020
Stallions are hard... pun intended.
If you've ever wondered why I've made 40 stories, but only ever took the time to diaper stallions in one of them... well, this is the blog post for you.
I have been trying. For the past few years ideas popped in and out of my head, mostly for characters like Shining or Blueblood. They all came back around to the idea of sissifying them one way or another, which in fairness is about the only way I want my stallions handled in diaper fics but that's just me. Yet nothing stuck. Everything was either too tame, or too rushed. And what few ideas I did have, such as Celestia babying Blueblood or Cadence hypnotizing Shining, were tackled by other writers long before me, which ended up sapping what motivation I could muster.
Finally, I realized my problem was not using the world of MLP enough. One of the reasons I've loved returning to this franchise for my writing is literally anything can happen. You have modern cities with 21st century living arrangements, western towns ripped right out of a John Ford film, medival castles, an empire made out of crystals, technology, magic, bizarre flora and fauna and characters like Discord and Chrysalis that really let the imagination run wild. Few other worlds are as fun a playground as this, and so I decided to stop limiting myself to well trodden ground.
Enter, the Tower. An idea not to dissimilar from FOAL 9000, in that it's a place that's forcing an unwilling participant into diapers. Implying that it was built by Sombra gave me a lot of leeway into the kinds of things I could make it do, and dividing it up by floors both gave the story a sense of progression that I felt FOAL 9000 was lacking, and an excuse to dole out the sissification in bite sized pieces.
Plenty of ideas followed from that. The riddles and punishment angles were almost necessary additions. Forcing Shining to decode what the Tower wanted gave him wiggle room to only do what he was comfortable with at first, before being forced to go even further to appease it. And punishing him for disobedience insured he couldn't go back.
With all these things fueling me, I cranked out an 8 chapter outline and in May of 2019 started in on chapter 1. I got through most of the set up, right up to Shining reaching the Tower itself before hitting an oh-so-familiar wall. Not uncommon for me, usually blasting through the set up phase only to fall off afterwards was a thing that happened. I decided to take some time away from this project and finish F9000 first, which didn't end up taking that long.
I found that my motivation then only dropped. F9000 had been a massive undertaking, and I've talked more in previous blogs how it just made me want to stop doing longer fics all together. And back then that included the planned 8 chapter epic of Shining vs. the Tower. I Pigeon-Holed it, almost ready to say good bye to the idea forever... if not for the fact that it was damn near the only thing I wanted to do with Shining from then on.
Seriously, none of the other ideas I thought up for the guy appealed to me after this one. It was just a little too perfect. So every few months I'd return to the doc, dump a few more paragraphs in before losing motivation yet again, and move on. I just couldn't get myself in the mood to do something so long again.
And I tried to find other ways around this. At first I planned to only make the fic 4 chapters long and cover multiple floors per chapter, but that only promised to make each chapter unbearably long. I tossed around the idea of a Choose Your Own Adventure style approach, where each chapter would only need to be a few paragraphs before giving the reader a new choice, but that quickly ballooned into way more than the original plan and I dropped it.
Finally, I had a break through. On a particularly good day with nothing else to do, I found myself finishing the first chapter of The Tower before I'd even realized it. Proud of my work and for once feeling up to keep going, I published the first chapter and used the burst of motivation you guys gave me to plow through part the second one as well.
But I still kept running up against that wall.
I really really wasn't in the mood for another long fic, even more than I originally thought. And the prospect of seven more chapters, each promising to be as long as the first, really drained me the more I thought about it. Plus, some things about the planned seventh and eighth floors didn't sit right with me. By now you've probably realized "Hey, those never made it into the final story, did they?" And you would be right.
You see, aside from what was already in the story, I had two more ideas to torment poor Shining. The first was a spanking floor, where he'd have to situate himself in a pillory and let a mechanized paddle deliver one spank for each minute he'd been in the Tower so far. The idea was to let him stew in regret for all the time he'd wasted refusing to do things or put things on. But to make it work, there's have to be even more paragraphs upon paragraphs in the earlier chapters of him being all wishy-washy about following the riddles. And that just didn't promise to be fun to write.
Nor did the spanking, for that matter, which just promised to be an endless barrage of THWACKs and CRACKs without much else. Shining didn't really have any agency in this chapter. Yes he'd make the choice to get in the pillory and take the spankings, but once he did that he couldn't really back out or change his approach. Unlike floor 2 or 3, where he had to keep trying new things and react to his failures, here he was just stuck. And it was boring.
Equally uninteresting was floor 8, where he was just supposed to stare has a spiraling screen until he was hypnotized into thinking he was a mare. Suffered from the same problems as floor 7. He was stuck in one place, not doing much of anything, and had very little agency (and by that I mean even less than other floors were allowing.)
So, in the interest of saving myself some time, and making the story better, those two chapters got cut. The spankings entirely went away, much to my own dismay I assure you, and the hypnosis was moved down to the fifth floor, where instead of staring at a screen until his mind went blank, he had to contend with a personality overwrite on top of the mirror maze. This gave me way more options to torment him write him in that floor, and still got us to the point I wanted to be at for the final room. Plus, removing some of the back and forth time wasting stuff made a few of the early chapters way easier to write. Instead of Shining constantly refusing to do what the Tower wanted, waiting endlessly, and then finally giving in, I really only kept those bits for floors 1 and 2 before allowing him to just accept it so he could get it over with quickly.
Now the end result was a far better story in my opinion. So, uh... I guess the lesson here is hooray for laziness? Like, not in the traditional sense or anything. But if you can find a way to do more with less, that's pretty ideal when it comes to writing. Certainly worked out for this story.
Let me know what you think about the story behind The Tower. I'm interested to see if I made the right call back then.
Honestly, it's one of my favorite stories from you (and not just because I like seeing Shining Armor get babied). Trimming the fat of the extra two floors probably helped in the long run.
Also, I never finished Foal 9000 cause it just felt meandering and overly indulgent. Which yeah, is something to be said for almost every diaper fic. That one just had too much bad stuff happen to too many ponies that it lost my interest.
5241680
Glad you like The Tower!
And yeah, F9000 is super indulgent on my part, I can't lie
I honestly wonder how it would've turned out had I written Tower first.
5241684
You know I actually liked the overindulgence. Also just being toyed with by machines is a rather big turn on for me.
But that is just me... I am weird.
From a writing perspective this was a lot better. If not for the lack of something a bit more it would have been my favourite as well.
It was a really good story to sit through, even though I'm not one for mind control and as such. Though, I am looking forward to future stories of diapered sissies as you wrote it exceptionally well.
5241762
Indulgence is rarely a problem so long as you enjoy it. I just also get it when a story goes to far for your liking. Has happened to me a few times.
5241764
I'd love to do more. Now to figure out what I can force poor Blueblood into...
Oh, no! *Blushes* I thought I had favorited the story so I could continue from how well you started it back in May of last year. I must not have clicked the 'Favorite' and, therefore, got no updates. :(
I was really stoked for this story and, now that I know I goofed up, will go, favorite it, and read everything I missed.
5241913
Hope you like it!