Spring Cleaning · 5:48am Apr 22nd, 2018
I've spent a stupid amount of time shuffling things back and forth on my profile page and general story guide and Writeoff story guide of late. To the untrained literally every eye, it mostly looks the same as before. But the OCD tells me it's better now, and Lord knows the OCD has gotten me this far in life, so who am I to argue?
Some highlights:
- Last year's Writeoff story Like Nopony Else went up in my Stuck In The Middle With You anthology yesterday, along with some author's notes and its outstanding would-be cover art. These were horsewords that I loved, but I may have loved them too much because I could never quite bring myself to rework them into the mold of canon!Maud.
- Speaking of past Writeoff stories, my guide for that tells me I'm down to just four outstanding stories that need to make the jump to FimFiction: An Apple Asunder (which should be straightforward), Bra Quest! (which needs some work but features EqG Limestone and a young Sunset Shimmer), Crisis on Infinite Twilights (which I need to stop dorking around with and just finish), and Petunia and the Coelacanth (which I'll discuss next). I've held off on the latter because I keep thinking it'd be cute to turn it into an illustrated children's story, but a key part of that is illustration, and I'm not sure I've found the right artist to make that happen. If anyone thinks the right artist is out there, let me know. Otherwise, I should probably just move this off the "someday" pile and make a FimFiction version happen.
- I recently discovered links to machine-generated lists of my FimFic-Featured and EqD-Featured stories. I've been updating older lists/links accordingly.
- I've realized that I don't have any kind of guide or tracking system for the stories I've done for the Flashfic contests. This is mostly a pain for me because the OCD keeps whispering that I have half-remembered bits of stories out somewhere in the ether. At a minimum, these deserve inclusion in Stuck In The Middle With You. Look for more such guide-y shenanigans "soon."
All in all, it's been good to clear out old stuff and start streamlining what's left. And the fruits have been more than just "bring out your dead;" both A Little Space and Father and Son came out of all this. It's anyone's guess if the other stories in the hopper would do so well, but they've languished long enough--hopefully soon we'll get the chance to find out!
Of course, any discussion of revisiting stuff must also touch on To Serve In Hell . Truth is, it's been harder to stay focused on Hell because it's so big. At this point I'm debating how much more I want to do with it before firing it off to victimsreaders and asking for more feedback. I don't want to waste people's time since I know it has a lot of rough parts, but I'm starting to go glassy-eyed trying to figure out what's working and what isn't. Novel-writing is truly a different beast than writing short stories, and it seems like novel-editing is yet another, hairier beast. 
All this just reminds me how amazing the world has looked since getting my sleep apnea treated. I keep finding all these little piles of (metaphorical) crap that were strewn about, and going, "who left this here?" And 2/3 of the time it was me, but I either couldn't see it at the time or I didn't know what to do with them. Now at least I see more and can think straight (for the most part, as much as I ever have). Pony is far from the only place where that's happening, but it's something that I'm glad to be able to come straighten back up as best I can.
For me the biggest issue with novel writing, editing etc. is just me saying "Forget this nonsense. I'm bored I wanna do something else. " I guess that's why prewriting can be really vital to success. Once you know the who's and how's its just a matter of jamming the language around and making it sound good.
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Yeah. The main reason I ended up in this mess was that I looked around and saw all these people writing huge stories one chapter at a time, and I decided to try my hand at that.
I don't know how people do that successfully. It's just not the way I work. I suppose I don't regret trying it, but it's not how I'd want to do future projects.
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You know when I see that I sometimes wonder if they've just written a bunch of chapters up to a point. Once they do that they then just release each chapter as they see fit. Then they just go back and do whatever it is they have to do as they need or want to do it. I think if I'd approached some of my other unfinished works in the just finish it and release it when ever I'd have actually completed them or at least more of them.