State of the Unicorn, July 2020 · 8:43pm Jul 8th, 2020

It's been a while since I've posted a "State of the Unicorn" update. Since the last one, whenever it was, the world has rather turned upside down. This is affecting me in all kinds of ways. Thankfully not in the sense of actually getting ill, but it has had a bearing on my writing. Or, rather, lack of writing. It's now about a year since I published Raising the Baa, and while I don't feel any great sense of pressure to publish again, I would rather like to get something out before too much longer.

The snag is that I am finding myself in an unhappy frame of mind rather too often for comfort. One reason is that, as things over here start to open up, for several reasons I remain excluded from an awful lot of them, and that's making me feel left behind the rest of society. I won't bore you all to tears by going into details now, but my Dreamwidth blog is where you'll find my general whinging about that stuff. You won't find many ponies over there, though, so I'd recommend steering clear unless you're a glutton for punishment.

So, enough of that. As you'll doubtless know, I've been watching Pony Life. I think I'll probably continue to do so for the moment, as it has just enough about it to keep me sufficiently interested. What it doesn't have, at least so far, is enough about it to make me want to expand its world myself in fanfic form. Fimfiction does now have a [Pony Life] tag, but I haven't yet read any stories that have used it. I expect I will eventually, although I'm rather iffy about including such fics in Ponyfic Roundup [on my off-site blog].

I am definitely, definitely not leaving the MLP fandom any time soon. Probably not ever. Part of that is because I have some damn good friends here. A big part. But even aside from that, I'm not leaving Fimfiction and I'm not leaving this blog. I'm sticking around like an extremely sticky thing. In fact, as far as fandom membership is concerned, I'm in the stickiest situation since Sticky the stick insect got stuck on a sticky bun. So I'm afraid you're going to have to put up with me. Well, unless you stop reading. But that would be cheating.

The whole online convention thing has lost a little of its lustre for me recently. I barely bothered with Whinny City's online offering, even though there was nothing wrong with it. I might drop into the online TrotCon at the end of next week, but I think I'm a bit conned out now. UK PonycOnline may end up being the last online Pony convention for quite some while that I actually spend serious amounts of time at. I expect there'll be more, not least because even 2021's in-person cons are far from guaranteed at this point. We'll see.

One thing I've been doing a lot of recently is listening to fandom music. Partly because of the "Sounds of 2013" feature, partly through a regular music meet some friends participate in on Discord, and partly because it's nice to listen to when I'm plodding around drizzly local streets to get my daily 10,000 steps. I really wish I'd paid more attention to the music scene back when it was enormous, but ah well – if I had done, I wouldn't be discovering cherishable gems like "Giggle at the Ghostbusters".

What lies ahead for this unicorn? Well, partly it will depend on my frame of mind, as mentioned in the second paragraph. If I can be a bit happier a bit more consistently, it'll make it more likely I'll actually write something. I keep on saying too that I want to get "My Little Repeats" [off-site blog again; it's my full-FiM rewatch] back to a somewhat higher frequency. We'll see how that goes. And of course there's Flashfic 150. That at least is something writing-related that's on the definites list. And I think I'll stop there, on an actually positive note!

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