The State of Things (or: I'm Not Dead! Yay for Me!)

So! It's been a while. ... Yeah, I have no good excuse for that whatsoever. Honestly, the only reason I'm writing this post right now is because I was taking a trip down nostalgia lane and opened up my user page for the first time in ages. It's not that I haven't been on the site or anything—it's that I've receded back into my default "read-only" mode, where I browse the site but don't really interact at all. I should probably try to break that habit.

Enough rambling, though. If anyone's still reading my story Twilight Sparkle: Consulting Detective, I'm sorry to say that I won't be updating it, and I've marked it as "Cancelled". I don't want to lead anyone on anymore, especially myself. I kept telling myself that I would get around to updating it someday, but it'll never happen, and the main reason is that I just didn't think it through when I conceived the main concept in the first place.

If you weren't aware, it's heavily inspired by Sherlock (which is an amazing show that I highly recommend to everyone), but it's not a crossover. That's a problem, because I was basically trying to shoehorn Twilight into Sherlock's role without any consideration for her character at all. I have no doubt that Twilight could be a brilliant detective if she set her mind to it, but she still wouldn't be anywhere near the same kind of character as Sherlock, which is what I was subconsciously thinking when I thought of the direction of this story. He's cold and calculating; she's friendly and warm. I placed too much stock in their shared logical perspective on the world to really consider how different they are. It just wouldn't have worked.

That, and the fact that I literally delved into writing the first chapter without so much as a scrap of an outline, so even I didn't really know where I was going with it. That works for some people (Stephen King comes to mind), but not me. If I don't plan everything to a tee, it all falls apart.

Now, that said, I haven't given up writing altogether. My first attempts have been a bit discouraging, but from them I've learned more about what kind of writer I am. I'm not the kind of writer who can just throw myself into a new idea and come out with something brilliant in an hour or two. I need to plan—carefully and concisely—exactly what's going to happen and when. So that's precisely what I'm going to do.

I'm not going to commit to any dates, because I know I can never stick to those, but I have already started thoroughly planning a few fics (adventure, romance, and dark things, mostly—Joss Whedon style) that you might see soon. And there will be foreshadowing. Lots of foreshadowing. That's one of the things I love the most about planning ahead. I can reveal a plot twist in chapter sixty, and the reader can look back to chapter one and think, "Oh my god, he planned it all from the beginning. That mad genius." Or at least that's what I'm hoping will happen. Fingers crossed.

TL;DR: I've learned from my mistakes as a writer and I'm giving it another go with a different mentality. Oh, and I'll try to blog more. No promises, though. Till next time!