Almost an Anniversary · 5:32pm Jul 10th, 2023

In two weeks time, this account will be ten years old.
If the show, Friendship is Magic, was a person, they'd be almost old enough to make an account on this site and read teen-rated stories.
The original show's target demographic is now a bunch of adolescents and young adults. Some of them probably have accounts on this site.

When I first came upon MLP:FiM and became a fan of the show, when I made my account here, I felt like I was late to the party. We had three seasons done, Twilight had just become an alicorn, and they had started making these weird spin-off movies called "Equestria Girls".
The fandom at that point seemed, at least to me, like a pretty much established "thing", complete with in-jokes and fanon, names and backstories for background characters, all that good stuff.

Four years ago, the show ended, and there were more episodes that had come out after I'd jumped on the bandwagon than there were ones that'd come out before. More than half the accounts on FiMFiction were younger than mine. Now, that figure is more than three quarters, and the user base seems to be growing the fastest it ever has. (If anyone has any idea as to why that may be, please share. I am very curious.)

I'm taking this chance to look back because the journey hasn't been what I expected it to be. It rarely is, but sometimes you get surprised by a lack of surprises.

One of the things I'd expected was for CCLXXVII to be done by now, or at least close to. I'm a bit disappointed with me, but hey, I guess we're all used to that by now.
At the very least, two chapters in six years leaves a lot of room for improvement.
I don't have any illusions of being anything than mediocre at best as a writer, but I think that I have picked up at least a slighter deeper understanding of a couple of things over the past decade, about both writing and who I am as a writer.

I've found that for me, whether I'm writing (fan-)fiction or non-fiction, the part that goes easiest is always the outlining, and the hardest part is writing out the full sentences—in fact, I prefer outlining so much, I tend to do it iteratively and recursively on different levels of granularity. (This blog, being written pretty close to stream-of-consciousness, is very much the exception.)
I have also found when going back to the earlier parts of my work that there's quite a bunch of stuff that's ~~terrible~~ ~~bad~~ different from how I'd like it to be.
So for CCLXXVII's ten year anniversary in November, I'm going to do a big re-editing run, going through all earlier chapters and trying to improve the writing—technical aspects, mind you, not the narrative. Maybe I'll even manage another chapter on top, if all goes well.

The bottom line, the conclusion to my big anniversary blog post is that while the journey from 2013 to 2023 definitely had some surprising twists and turns, I did expect myself to stick with this, and I'll continue to do so. There's still a lot of stories I want to read and write, so the odds are good I'll still be here in another ten years, circumstances permitting. Maybe I'll even have finished some stories by then.

In the meantime I've rambled on for long enough. Take care and have a nice day.

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