What's Been Keeping Me

Well, it's been a while, hasn't it? I guess it's only fair to give you a what's-up and at the same time give you some teasers as to what's coming up. Sure, this isn't exactly a well-travelled corner of the internet, but nonetheless this is still the logical place for the sort of musing I've got.

Ahem. Getting into writing pony fanfiction has been a great explorative transformation for me, and I actually learned quite a bit about professional writing in the process of trying to do well for on-screen formats. That being said, almost all of the things I have written about or intended to have since been introduced in the show itself, or to some extent, covered in the IDW comics. To wit: I have a collection of about half a dozen early drafts of Daring Do adventure stories, a story about Rainbow Dash going to a Daring Do convention, and yeah, pretty much all of my ideas about Rainbow Dash and Scootaloo have since found themselves featured in high calibre pony episodes as well.

Which left me with the concepts that involved the world itself, and not so much its established characters. But it's not exactly been the most fulfilling work. I think Following of the Sun might be the best novella I've ever written, but my style remains very niche, even for pony fanfiction standards. Original characters in a drama setting is not exactly the number one passtime for pony enthusiasts, and I'm afraid that on top of that I'm a terrible promoter. I'd rather side-step the big blogs and services than play the networking game: It's just very exhausting to me. So, yes, if someone wants to shop my stuff around and say nice things, I appreciate it. Hell, I appreciate it when even a single person reads a story and actually likes it. Which, y'know, really is the reason I'm writing this update here right now: quality, not quantity.

So over the past year or so I've moved from in my eyes lacklustre story drafts to more general writing works. I've re-written and re-drafted a full-length Sci-Fi novel and it's fairly close to being publishable. Several other such stories have been in my digital drawers, and I've been busy, I assure you.

But what has actually prompted me to write an update is a short story that came to me as I was between drafts on the bigger projects, and as it's a pony story I felt it was especially necessary to let people know I'm still alive and kicking proverbial apple trees. Appropriate titled, Goodbye Country, this pony story might well be my final bit of pony fanfiction. I'm just working on getting (or doing it myself, of course) cover art for it and doing a few more passes with regard to paragraph structure and grammar, and I'll be publishing it here. Hopefully you'll appreciate it. It's probably a little dark and... different, as they say, but I don't want to say too much about it quite yet. Maybe I'll talk more about its concepts after it's been here for a while.

All right. That's all for now. Thanks for staying in touch. (In a manner of speaking!)

Keep reading; keep writing.
-Shade