Life of a Project - Dear Diary · 3:22pm May 26th, 2020
Dear Diary got the shortest end of the stick of any story I've ever wrote. Not intentionally, but it did feel like a lot of things conspired against this one. to the point where I'm still kind of amazed that it's... over.
Back in the spring of 2018, I finally put pen to paper (so to speak) on a little idea I'd been cooking up for a while now. Just a simple story of Celestia wetting the bed and Luna suggesting diapers as a remedy. Like many works, it was born out of a piece of art. I've always enjoyed the comic and it got in my head the idea of Luna pranking Celestia into thinking she was a bedwetter. The Twilight framing device was something I came up with a little late into the process. An easy way to cut out and compress the timeline of events should I need to, and it added another layer of delicious humiliation to the pile.
This next part, I've already talked about a little in the story's authors notes, so I'll be brief. A collaboration for another story, Having Your Cake, ended up using a few ideas that I'd been planning for Dear Diary. It would up being that the two were fairly similar. And HYC got published right around the time I was finishing up the first chapter of Dear Diary. So to publish two stories of similar content back to back seemed wrong to me. I've said in past blog posts that I don't like feeling like I'm repeating myself in my fics, and that largely killed any motivation to finish Dear Diary. The problem was, I was now sitting on a completed first chapter. If it was half finished or something, I wouldn't have minded. I've got tones of fics like that in The Pigeon Hole. But a completed chapter just felt like a waste to get rid of.
For a full year I sat on it, occasionally trying to think of something to do for a continuation. I threw out plenty of ideas, but nothing ever seemed to stick. Either it was too stupid, too much to cram into a single chapter, or too horny. As much as I love clop, the fact that the first chapter really didn't set up or prepare for it in anyway just made any idea I had for that angle feel like it came out of nowhere. Sure I could've rewritten some aspects of the first chapter for that, but doing so just sapped my motivation further.
Eventually I just decided to post chapter one and see what happened. And it did... fine. Certainly didn't get the kind of reaction that made me think people wanted more. So I left it as "On Hiatus". Not quite cancelled, not quite a complete story on its own. Just... there.
While I had a few paragraphs for a hypothetical chapter two at this point, I pretty much didn't touch them over the course of the next year.
Flash forward to 2020 and I'll admit I... have slowed down in my output, somewhat. Not for lack of ideas or time, just one of those periods where I'm not writing much. I've had them in the past and I'll surely get them again in the future. I certainly want to write more. I've been starting dozens of fics lately only to drop off once my interests wanes. It wasn't until completing another chapter of The Worst a few days ago that I really wanted to get something else out. Couldn't let one of my few writing oasis' during this dry spell go to waste. After trial and error with a few ideas, I came back to Dear Diary at last. I took some of my original ending and used it. Finally enough time had passed that I wasn't too worried about the "repeating myself" dilemma. I also used quite a few ideas that I'd tried to toss in over the years. I just trimmed it down significantly.
Things like the pacifier were initially going to be just the start of Luna's long con. (And yes, in case you needed it confirmed, Luna absolutely was the one responsible for Celly's accidents in an attempt to wrest a little control of Equestria away from her in a bit of pre-Nightmare Moon desperation) Had I the will to go on with a long, slow burn of a fic, things would escalate pretty quickly. Celestia would start rolling out of bed at night, so Luna would set up crib bars. She'd have magical bursts, and get an inhibitor ring. Toss and turn too much, and get some restraints to lock her in place. The only reason she'd go along with each idea is because they'd all offer her a temporary reprieve from wetting herself. Though eventually she'd be wetting herself every night no matter what, and things like foal clothes and toys, and a giant Luna plushie, would offer a break from waking up wet and messy.
Celestia would develop a weird superstition after noticing the pattern and just keep rolling with it in the hopes that it would lead her to a cure, even going so far as to have Luna give her a nighttime bottle and burp her. Naturally, this was planned to end with Luna humiliating her publicly, much like in HYC. I'm glad I didn't end up going that far, however, because that certainly would've been a just the same ending with a new coat of paint. And one heck of a roundabout way to get there, too.
But hopefully you enjoyed learning about what could have been. I'm just glad I can close the book on this one after so long.
Thanks for posting the second chapter, and this insight into the project. I certainly enjoyed both the main content and the framing device with Twilight. I’m not the biggest fan of forced humiliation, however this story still worked for me. I did have my suspicions about Luna too.