Happy New Year! · 5:38pm Jan 1st, 2017
Been one hell of a month for TLaTU, folks, with five chapters released. Now that we've completed the trial, what's left for the final few story chapters is setting the stage for the eventual sequel, and some simple if surprising funtimes--oh yes, some major and very sexy surprises in store! Be afraid, folks... those of you who read Unleash the Magic know how far I'm willing to go, and there *might* be such a scene to come...
For for those of you wondering about the prominent role that Firefly and her Bolt Knights were given in the trial, part of the purpose of giving them a presence was to tie the Phoenixverse (as we're now calling it) and my two stories set within it more closely together; those of you into my other works may be interested to know that a certain *other* title character is also going to given a cameo here in the final chapter, much as she was at the end of Turnabout Storm. So yes, some unashamed cross-pollination at work here.
Fell Flight being pronounced a Shadowbolt by Luna was part of that, to be sure, but it was also something I really wanted to do for her character, whom I've gotten rather fond of. For those of you who haven't read Rise of Firefly but are now interested in Fell Flight's pre-war backstory (as well as that of thestrals in general), you can find it in the following three Rise of Firefly 'interlude' chapters, which can be read independently of the main story. Indeed, I tried to submit these for a thestral writing contest for Nightmare Night, only to be told they didn't qualify because they weren't written for the contest itself:
1. Fell Flight Backstory, part 1: Cat's Eye Gleam
2. Fell Flight Backstory, part 2: Thunderstruck
3. Fell Flight Backstory, Part 3: Eye for an Eye
In these you will learn how she became a warrior, how she overcame her troubled youth, the stigma of her heritage and the crippling day-blindness of her eyes to become one of Equestria's best young soldiers, with major badassery at the end. These also detail some of the backstory of her mentor and fellow Bolt Knight Thunderbolt, a stallion with a dark secret and very tragic past.
So what's next? Well... on the one hand, the iron is very hot on TLaTU at the moment, and I have bunches of ideas for the final chapters, so it might behoove me to continue working on it. On the other, I don't want to neglect my other stories either; Firefly deserves a fresh chapter or two and I'm probably three chapters away from finishing Five Star Service. I really want to get both it and TLaTU completed before I start work on anything new. They're my longest-running stories, and deserve to be finished and finished well. So the plan right now is as follows: do 1-2 chapters on Firefly, then finish Five Star Service with perhaps another Firefly chapter or two mixed in, then return to finish off TLaTU.
Also for the coming year... I WILL be resuming work on the second book of my anthro novel series, and plan to devote at least several months to it with the goal of a late summer or autumn release. And I may yet try to turn my completed stories here into books as well... if I can figure out how or if that works around various copyright laws.
I don't know about your other works, for Firefly though I imagine it wouldn't take too much to make it safe. A few name changes would likely make it safe as the setting itself while familiarish is quite different from canon.
Happy new year. And may inspiration always find you
.......You don't have to change a single thing to get it published there Firesight. Or do I need to grab my copies of Fallout: Equestria and smack you upside the head?