Should I Expand Upon "The Pursuit of Happiness"? · 5:08am May 1st, 2012
First of all, I would like to thank a few people that were involved in getting The Pursuit of Happiness featured on Equestria Daily. When I first wrote this story, I was really unsure of it. I thought it was too rambling and spontaneous. I actually didn't plan on submitting it to Equestria Daily when I first wrote it.
-First of all, my reviewers on Ponychan, Pascoite and Minty. You two gave me the vote of confidence to send the story off to EqD. Pascoite did a line by line review that helped me put polish on the story and told me to expand the ending, something that had been nagging at me after my first draft.
-AbsoluteAnonymous, for writing a great sad fic, "The Light Goes Out." I actually started writing "Pursuit" after reading his tearjerker, simply because I also wanted to write a sad fic. Oddly, the two stories aren't alike in any way whatsoever. In any case, I still dislike you for being a better writer than me :)
-My pre-reader, who despite his subjective issues with the story length, still approved it. He told me to try condensing the story. I'm pretty sure I actually ended up making the story longer when I sent the final version in, so there's that.
And on to the meat of the blog post!
"Pursuit" is meant to be a realistic look at life. There's a lot I wanted to say with this story. I hope I conveyed a good message to everyone who read it.
Right now, I'm considering expanding the story. There are a lot of places I could go with it. If I did write a sequel/expansion/whatever, I'd likely start with visiting the lives of the rest of the mane six. Are they really happy? Are they satisfied with the decisions they've made? Or does Twilight just think they're happy? Will Twilight be happy with moving back to Canterlot? I like the idea of all of them just pretending to be happy because they don't want the rest of their friends to feel bad for them. Still, I'm not entirely sure what I want to do with the story just yet, so don't jump to any conclusions.
I will admit, one of the motivations of expanding the story is that sequels/expansions don't have to go through the pre-reading process to get on EqD. Of course, if I were to write more, I would get feedback and polish my writing before sending it off to the blogponies.
So, you tell me! Do you want more? Or does this story work best as a one shot? Have any ideas for the story? Let me know!
And of course, thanks for reading. If you cried or teared up, I actually want to know :)
-Nicholas
It would be interesting to have sequel/expansions for such a brilliant story such as this, but you've listed so many ideas, so many ways that you could take the story, I honestly wouldn't know which one I would like the best...
... Unless you use all of them?
Of course, some of them won't be in the same story, but what's the problem with that? If you get the muse for it, this one single chapter/story could be the foundation for quite a few other stories as well.
I like your idea, expanding the story to the other character's perspectives.