There Has To Be A More Creative Way To Say This Than "Here's What's Going On In My Writing Life, I Guess"

Seriously. I can handle writing overlong epic video game crossovers just in whatever spare time I get, but the second I try to come up with a good title for something, my brain goes full Sheen on me and refuses to work until I give it large amounts of cocaine or empirical proof that it runs on tiger blood. And as neither of those things are easily bought on a paid intern's salary or, y'know, anywhere, I just have to work with what I can get. Which, apparently, is what I put up there.

Moving on.

This is just a shot in the dark here, but if you consider yourself pretty good with measuring time, you may have noticed that there's been a bit of a discrepancy between what I said in my last blog post about when I'd be putting up another chapter of Harmony. For those of you still struggling to remember which hand on your watch is the minute one (I've been told it's the big one, but you know how untrustworthy tenured college professors can be), I'll elaborate: it's been over a week--actually, two of them by now--and there's nothing to be seen on Harmony's FIMFic page. In fact, there's nothing new to be seen from me at all.

I'll pause for a moment so you can all collectively say what I know you're all thinking right now: "HOLY SELF-AGGRANDIZEMENT, AQUAMAN, WHAT AN INCREDIBLY SURPRISING SURPRISE."

(I know, right? I'm usually so punctual with these things.)

The good news, though... or debatably good news, at least, is that unlike all of those other times I promised I would write things by a certain time and then didn't actually write said things by said time, it wasn't just laziness and lack of productivity that led to this. In fact, I've been typing away like a man/pegasus OC with curiously developed fine motor skills possessed this last couple weeks. Thing is, I wasn't working on Harmony.

Ever since I let the prospect of drunk Octavia drag me back into this horsefiction game, I've tried to live by a new philosophy. I used to get so burned out just by trying to force myself through one really big and established story when I had a half-dozen new ones bouncing out of my head that I would've much rather played with first, even though I still loved that big story and wanted to get work done on it. So when I caught the writing bug again, I wanted to do something different. Ergo, I'm now living by the philosophy of "write what I want, when I want, and whatever it is have fun with it or there's no point to even being on this site in the first place".

Ergo^2, I produced It Only Hurts When I'm Sober, and truth be told, I honestly don't know if I'm ever going to go back and finish that. Those of you who are Metallica fans may get this metaphor right off the bat, but for those of you aren't Metallica fans, fuck you, you should be Metallica fans: IOHWIS was kind of my own personal St. Anger. A lot of shit was going on in my personal life around the creation of that story, and getting it done was really an exercise in proving to myself that I was still capable of producing ponyfic, let alone doing it well or for an extended period of time. The story got a great reception and I'm happy I put it up, but as weird as it is to say this, it still wasn't the reception I really wanted or expected for it. People seemed to get into because they saw it as an engaging drama rather than a comedy, and to be honest, I've got enough drama in Harmony and In Tooth And Mane to last me several years without tossing a third source for it onto the pile.

Okay, fine, so what have I been occupying my time with instead? Well, I'm glad you asked, anonymous follower of mine, because now I get the great pleasure of telling you this: "I can't tell you yet." This is because there's a slight possibility I won't tell you ever, which is the possibility in which the story never makes it out of editing and never actually gets published. Because of that, I don't want to tease it to anyone now if it ends up that you never get a chance to see it. As it stands, though, I spent a week and a half and about sixteen thousand words finishing a oneshot that takes "AU" to a place I actually don't think anyone else in the fandom has really touched yet, and there are just a few additions and adjustments I want to make before I'm ready to send it up. This is another one that comes with a pretty hefty sense of accomplishment for me: I took a random, entertaining plot thread I would've ignored a few months ago and ran with it instead, and got the whole thing banged out in less than two weeks. My plan was to let it take hold for as long as I needed to get it done, then publish it and get right back on Harmony.

That plan, though, as all those of mice and myself but mostly just myself do, went ahead and went awry, because once that fleeting idea came and went, another one took its place. Except this one isn't fleeting. This one isn't small, either. This idea is huge. Multi-chapter story, two sequel book conceptions in its second day of existence, drop everything else in life and just lie awake at night thinking about it huge. And the funny thing is, it's kind of a dumb idea. Actually, it's a borderline psychotic idea, as evidenced by the fact that I can say with almost complete certainty that no one has ever done anything like this with fan fiction or even fan art in the entire history of this fandom. But all that being said, it's not unsalvageable. If it were someone else writing this, I would say to them, "This is pretty much the strangest, stupidest thing I could imagine you doing with this show, unless you pull it off, in which case it will be my favorite story this fandom ever produces." And if I were that person writing this, which I am, I would reply, "All right, then, dude. Let's see if I can."

However, this all comes with a catch. I've only had an idea take this dramatic of a hold over my brain a few times in my life, and every time it's been a mad rush to drop all my other projects and focus entirely on this new one. Given that I've got three active stories up here, one of which is about eighty-five thousand words of the last idea to hit me this hard, this situation presents a wee bit of a problem. So here's my solution: I'm not publishing this new fic until it's done. That means no tossing it up when the first two chapters are a frantic edit run past raw text, no sporadic updates as I try to manage it along with whatever else comes my way, no wondering whether I've died in a horrific keyboard malfunction and selfishly forgotten to mention the outline for Harmony in my will. I've got an outline for fourteen chapters and an epilogue all lined up and ready to go, and until all of them are completed, edited, and packaged for display, you won't see any of them. Again, this is to alleviate the possibility of disappointment on your part and to compensate for potential failure on mine: so long as this thing just exists in my Google Drive, I can still work on Harmony and ITAM and, hell, maybe even IOHWIS without worrying about neglecting it.

So that's the deal right now: Harmony and ITAM are as good as active, IOWHIS's fate remains to be determined, and two stories are in the wings waiting for a chance to be deployed. This won't be one of those times where I make a laughable prediction about when you might see any of those, but just know that I'm working on at least one of them at any given time. As far as I'm concerned, being able to earnestly say that makes me feel like a new person. And I think that's the best result of that break I took from FIMFiction that I ever could've hoped for.

Oh, and as a reward for making it all the way through this, have three pictures that are in absolutely no way related to anything I've just been talking about:

Comments

[Sparklight]

...Apex Predator... I smell Chronicle.

[Bongoro7]

Because of that, I don't want to tease it to anyone now if it ends up that you never get a chance to see it.

Tease. You were seriously just teasing about it, saying you're not going to tease about it.