To Whom It May Concern · 7:01pm Jul 17th, 2014

And seriously, To Whom, if "what's up with Boo" is not Of Concern to you, there's little of interest to follow. A surprising variety of people have been writing to ask precisely that lately, though, enough that it seems like a good idea to put up a blanket blog answer to point toward, for those who want to know. But I'm not (quite) egotistical enough to believe that it's a topic of widespread interest to all followers.

Long story short, I'm having some mental or neurological problems that haven't yet been pinned down to a firm diagnosis. Some aspects have been with me for as long as I can remember, while others have gotten much sharper and more debilitating over the last few years.

I have a great deal of difficulty controlling where my attention focuses, and sometimes I can't do certain things even if they're very important and I want to do them -- more difficult when it's important, often. Sometimes the simplest, strangest things -- not even unpleasant things necessarily; opening a word processor, or visiting a website (not even to mention going outside on my own!) -- cause so much anxiety that I'm not able to proceed, and end up falling into odd repetitive "safe" behaviours instead.

Among the things I'm encountering the greatest difficulty with are socializing, in person or online, and writing, as in the actual act of assembling words, whether fictional or chatty -- which conveniently come together in the field of responding to personal messages on a fiction site. Several of you have already seen that it can take me a verrrrrry long time to respond, and sometimes it takes so long that I start to feel awkward about that and delay even further.

All I can really do is apologize and ask for patience; a failure to reply, whether to comments, emails or PM's, doesn't mean I haven't read or thought about your message, honest. Quite often I even have a complete response already planned in my head, I just have to wait for the inner tides to allow actually typing it up and sending it.

Also, it's not at all likely that I'll be doing any roleplaying in the foreseeable future. I just can't assemble words fast enough to keep up, and to be honest, playing make-believe as a cartoon pony isn't the most sensible hobby for someone working on regaining a grasp on reality and identity. So apologies to those who would like to see me return to that.

Most importantly, please don't worry about me. I'm in a safe, actually quite comfortable, living situation now (after a long time in not-at-all-good circumstances), and seeing a psychiatrist and a therapist regularly. After a couple months on Prozac I'm a lot better able to think positively and maintain a balanced mood than I have been for decades, but I'm still living in a haze of confused thoughts and hummingbird attention span.

Now about the interesting part, the pony stories:

Regarding "Nuthin' Gold", the story is planned out in detail, and two further chapters are completely written. But the story is grounded on some rather dark emotions that I'm not so in touch with these days, nor am I particularly eager to reacquaint with them, and I've added very little to it for nearly a year. It will continue, but it's on a Season Five kinda schedule.

With "Trixie's Friendship", well... the trouble is that I've more or less forgotten where I was going with that I didn't take many notes about it, and just what was supposed to happen seems to have gotten lost in the closet of memory. What I do remember is that there would be a big magic baddie near the end... and it was going to be a giant centaurian creature with horns. I suspect that image wouldn't have quite the same impact anymore, somehow.

The general direction of the story seems fairly clear -- Trixie tries to win Twilight's friends away from her, but her idea of friendship is sorta broken, laffs ensue, that sort of thing -- but past an initial encounter with Rainbow Dash, I'm just dry on ideas. So heck, I'll throw it open to the assembly; where would you expect "Trixie's" to go, or what would you do if handed the two chapters already published?

These two stories are definitely not dead -- they're "On Hiatus", not yet "Cancelled", promise -- but they're kind of on life support at the moment.

Before either of those stories, though, I have one that's much simpler and very close to complete, which I tried to bang out in time for Obsolescence's contest but just didn't bang fast enough. Having missed the boat with it, I'm putting some meat on its hasty bones and prettying it up a bit, since I think it's a pretty decent story in its own right but definitely needs more pizzazz (and/or pizzas) to stand up in a non-contest context. That's the most likely thing to make it to publication from me in the soonish time period, but it seems like every time I say something like that, it turns out false.

And I guess that about sums it up. Did you know you're all my very best FRIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEENDS?

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