Updates on Stories and Stuff Part One:

Hello every pony!

Firstly, I need to apologize for the time it took to post chapter two for 'No Country for Bad Ponies' along with my Wonderbolt Academy story as well. As I have had a promotion at work to department manager. New responsibilities have made the workdays longer eaten into personal time at home so the writing progress has been slow. I posted some interim stories in the meantime with 'Behind Blue Eyes' and 'Time Enough for Everything at Last'; with the former being written back in 2018 in a mostly-finished state but never got back to finish it until recently. While researching law enforcement and work-re-education programs used in criminal rehabilitation, I needed a story to work on that was unrelated to my 2 prime storylines I've been working on. I needed some distraction that could be fun to work on. So, I dug out my old Starlight Glimmer story and finished up as much as I could without turning it into another major story project. I just wanted to get it posted after hanging on to it for so long.
The 'Time Enough' story was much the same; something to work on other than my main 2 storylines. It was a 30-day writing challenge that I did not get done in time for the contest. I made contact with the person who posted the contest and asked if they would be my editor for this story. She agreed to do the editing if she could post the story on another writing fan-page as a co-author. I readily agreed to it as I did not want to get bogged down even more with editing a 'contest' story while my main 2 stories languished in waiting for me to get new inspiration. At the end of 'Time Enough' story, I will post as the last chapter the ENTIRE original story out-line I had devised including the various parallel/related stories that could've been drawn from this storyline to make it much longer/multi-chapter in scope. But I didn't want to do that; again, I wanted to keep this story the shortest possible and get it posted as soon as possible. Oddly enough, the Make Your Mark series is advertising a coming special called 'The Secrets of Starlight' and I wonder if it's going to be about Starlight Glimmer. I would find it interesting if it was going to be about Starlight Glimmer meeting the Mane 5 in the future, because that's what my story is about; Starlight Glimmer getting transported into the Mane 5's time and she has to figure out how to get back to her correct point in the time-stream.

For 'No Country for Bad Ponies', it has been a SLOG to get chapter 2 done. I was spending a great deal of time trying to understand what kind of work-rehabilitation programs are out there from state-to-state in America and trying to understand what people are eligible for enrollment into such a program and what kind of prisons/jails would have such programs available for low-level offenders. I did find something interesting that could be incorporated into the story and believable for Sprout to be a part of, so I did make that much progress. But doing so much research for the story I actually found the story itself becoming a 'turn off'; I was doing lots of research about prison programs and not writing the story. The setting was also giving me headaches; I didn't want the setting to be like real prisons of San Quintin, Sing-Sing, Alcatraz or Fort Leavenworth or fictional ones like the one in Shawshank Redemption. I imagined the incarceration rate in Equestria was pretty small; not a world with a lot of crime and/or violence between ponies. But there had to be 'some' offenders there; no world is perfect. What kind of place these ponies would be sent to was difficult to imagine without it falling into a stereotype like used in movies. I wanted something a bit more communal and close-quartered for the characters; not each one isolated away and only seen in certain parts of the story. I hope what I came up with works well enough for this to seem 'reasonable' as a setting for what pony jail might look like. But then again, this is just my take on it and everyone else can have thier opinion about the subject matter of the prison system of Equestria.

I'm going to end this blog here for now and post a second update in a day or so about the other stories posted as well as what I will post next from the back catalog of G4 stuff I had came up with but never finished.