The Purge · 3:09pm Nov 5th, 2017
Lots of cool stuff. The TL;DR is up front:
* Black Feather universe continues to grow
* I've got a collab partner and we're both writing different stories in the same continuity
* Fallout: Equestria stuff is completely purged from Black Feather, which is now in its own 100% original universe.
* List of stuff which Black Feather was using from the Fallout: Equestria universe, along their replacements. (Good so you can catch up w/o rereading.)
* A bunch of links to show you changes to the existing published chapters. It's more than you'd expect! 
Well, I finally did it.
Black Feather's universe has been growing and developing quite a bit this year despite the lack of much publishing going on. The former could be said to have contributed to the latter, but I did take a break for a couple months there to do a gaming binge. Still, a whole lot has been going on that I should tell you all about.
One of these things is that I've got a writing partner who I work with pretty much daily, discussing things of this universe. DuvetofReason and I have merged our universes together into one internally-consistent and very exciting timeline spanning all the way back to the origin ponykind and going forward well into the age of interstellar colonies. Mind you, we are not co-authoring anything at this point. I help edit his story and he helps edit mine. But we're writing in the same fictional continuity. He will be producing a multi-story sci-fi epic which takes place some 1800 years after mine with Flurry Heart as the protagonist. It's gonna be awesome.
The big push that I've made recently has been to completely divorce Black Feather from the Fallout: Equestria narrative. And I do mean completely. I've been distancing the story from Fo:E for over a year now, trying to make a hybrid of sorts where it's still part of the Fo:E narrative but with a few deviations from its canon as necessary. This even led to a 250-post debate with Seraphem on the Fo:E forum about the validity of branching off canon in side stories.
Suffice it to say, this headache motivated me to see whether I could actually achieve a complete separation. Back when I started, I had the intent of it being a fully canon compliant Fo:E side story which happened to tell the tale of Nyx as an adult and her role in the great zebra war before the apocalypse. This original ambition has grown into something quite different as my desires to tell a specific epic story diverged from the existing constraints. Eventually, I just wanted out. I knew that what I was writing was 100% incompatible with anything in Fo:E. But the problem was that so many of the Fo:E elements were firmly entrenched in my story. It wasn't like I could just uproot all these things, right? The Ministries... Littlehorn... Nyx's PipBuck... The memory orbs... The zebra Black Book... Quite a long list of Fo:E elements had become integral to my story prior to the desire to pull out of the narrative. This presented a big problem.
There was no way I was willing to just abandon the entire plot and start afresh. I had a story to tell, after all, and a whole lot of it depended on these Fo:E elements. Recently, I considered... what if I could replace all these things simultaneously and seamlessly in a way that transformed the story into what I was going for in one quick moment. That's when I began making a list of all the Fo:E elements I was using and coming up with replacements for them which were similar enough that they wouldn't disrupt my own story.
And the reason this should matter to you, the fans, is because I've pulled the rug out from under about twenty "things" in the story and it may be confusing for you to pick up reading the next chapter and see some of these things referenced seemingly out of nowhere. Knowing what these replacements are is going to help some of you existing fans to not get tripped up.
Oddly, in a way it has been a benefit that most of what I've written so far has not yet been published here on Fimfiction. This made the job easier. After making the list of new places, events, equipment, etc. I took copies of all the chapters and scrubbed through them, fixing each spot which still referenced Fo:E stuff. In the process, I ran into the fact that the first five chapters are not up to snuff when it comes to my current standard of quality. You know what I mean if you've read chapters six and seven. Eight is even better. As a result, I ended up doing "quick patches" just fixing clunky prose here and there but not actually rewriting anything yet. Then, a few days ago, I updated all the published chapters here on Fimfiction.
And it turned out pretty well. There was just one area which I couldn't do a quick patch for. In chapter three, Ruling by Moonlight, there's this rather emotional moment where Luna laments what happened at Littlehorn. There's a lot of specific dialogue relating to the Littlehorn tragedy which just couldn't work in the new scenario. It took about two weeks of work to get it rewritten with the new tragedy, entirely replacing Littlehorn. I strongly encourage you all to go reread the part of chapter three immediately after the description of Luna's private quarters, all the way down to where Nyx talks about having nightmares. This whole section is freshly rewritten and I'm very pleased with how it turned out.
Now, for the nerdy among you, or any who are interested in knowing precisely what has been changed in chapters 1-7, I've run the whole thing through a compare program for you to check out. If you click on a link, you'll get the old chapter text on the left with the new chapter text on the right. Changes are highlighted red.
Here are the compare reports for:
Chapter 1 - Of Friends and Nightmares
Chapter 2 - Life in the Battlefield
Chapter 3 - Ruling by Moonlight (with a fairly large chunk of it completely rewritten)
Chapter 4 - No Turning Back
Chapter 5 - Into Wilderness
Chapter 6 - Portents of Darkness
Chapter 7 - Blood and Fire (part one)
Note: I haven't changed anything in the prologue because my next task is to completely rewrite that chapter anyway.
At this point, I can say pretty confidently that chapters 6 and 7 are officially finished whereas 1-5 still need some work. At any rate, all the Fo:E stuff is gone now.
Now, again for the nerdy among you, here's a list of all the Fo:E elements which have been replaced in the story. It's a pretty comprehensive list, though I have left out spoilers in this copy of the document. Some things you'll find out about down the road, but I did want to show you the cool things which are now a part of this universe that were inspired by Fo:E but are definitely not the same. Some things are similar while others are quite different. Check it out and see what you think! 
I take it there will be no more rewrites?
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The universe is pretty solid now, as are the plot threads of Black Feather. As mentioned, the prologue is being rewritten. This is already underway.
After that, it's on with new chapters. I've got Blood and Fire part two already finished and ready to publish. But the prologue is top priority at this time. It's a real mess currently, and I don't want new readers having that be their first exposure to the story.
I'll get to rewriting chapters 1-5 eventually, but I want to get some new material published before tackling those. I do have rough drafts and outlines already finished all the way through chapter 19, some of which may be split in two due to length. A lot of this material is going to be much easier to polish up now that the internal lore has reached a state of near-completion.