The Night's Stars Update And Excepts Without Context · 7:37pm May 13th, 2021
It’s been over a month since I’ve posted any blogs about The Night’s Stars so let’s change that shall we?
So for the most part I’ve not actually been working on The Night’s Stars lately. I took a short break to read and yell at a German for butchering English since I’ve been waiting to hear back from my prereader, but since it’s taking so long I’ve decided to bite the bullet and keep drafting despite my concerns that I’ve made a terrible mistake with one of the story’s arcs.
The TL;DR of that arc is Accelerationism 100. By which I mean, “Golly, does this change how something will unfold.” But maybe that’s not entirely a bad thing. It removed some of the drama I envisioned unfolding later on with... well, something that you may come to suspect, if you don’t already suspect. Anyway, given that this arc has happened, things have unfolded in a different way than I intended and imagined, hence why I was reluctant to continue on from this since... it’s a big change from what I had intended and scrapping it, especially now that I have chapters building upon it, would suck.
Anyway, I’m relatively confident I will finish drafting The Night’s Stars before the year ends. As to whether or not the entire story is completely published this year, I doubt it. I tend to prefer publishing a chapter every other week when I can, so there is a distinct likelihood this story will continue publishing through 2022.
I’m getting closer to that ending as well. It’s still a long way off, but it’s coming closer.
I have 25 chapters drafted, and 1 being drafted. All except the next chapter are in need of edits and/or rewrites.
And now for excerpts without any context!
Nightmare teleported the scroll away and licked her lips, gradually bowing her head. “We... I need to go.”
She bared her teeth and overwhelmed Twilight’s shield with her own magic, detonating it. Twilight groaned but the force snuffed out the flames and dispersed the spell.
A hoof came to rest on her shoulder; she almost jerked away. As it was, her head whipped around to face Cadance, her magic already prepared. When she realized it was Cadance, she let her magic disperse and bit her lip.
She quietly crept through what was left of the village, shivering as a cold weight pressed down on her mind. The wooden posts were blackened and she could see why the survivors thought it was a dragon attack.
Rarity hugged her. “Oh, it’s okay, dear.” She hugged Rarity back. “I know it must be hard on you, having that thrown upon your shoulders without any warning... or preparation.”
Rainbow sat down on the couch across from them and yawned again. “You two still talking, huh?” The pegasus rolled her eyes. “What are you still talking about anyway? You were pretty much together all night after you woke up.”
A dozen sharp, cutting pains sliced through her body. She shut her eyes and held in a cry of pain as her body tensed under the assault. Glass shattered to the ground, followed by her landing in it and rolling until she collided with a wall and came to a quick stop.
Nightmare Moon looked back at her and was silent for a long while. “You know what you are asking me to do...”
Twilight nodded timidly. “For the most part. But I think that... there are times when her guard has dropped about it. She’s... she’s talked about her foalhood some.”
Nightmare silently stared at the wall across from her as Twilight rested against her chest, sheltered by her wings and held close by her forelegs. Twilight’s tears, sniffles, and trembling had long since subsided, but she knew better than to let go of Twilight. At least, not yet. Twilight needed her now, Twilight needed to know that she was there and that she would be there.
“If it came down to it,” Nightmare shifted her wings before bowing her head and looking at Twilight, “I would.”
After a few seconds, Nightmare tossed her head to the side, then looked off at the floor. “May I... May I kiss you?”
‘I should not have said that. Dammit. Why did I say that? Why did I say that!?’ She grunted and tossed her head to the side as tension swelled up inside her chest.
Nightmare finally breathed in deep, then slowly turned back to face her as she stepped into the room. For the briefest moment, their eyes met and just like that, Nightmare stopped. She immediately broke eye contact to look at Twilight’s chest, and Twilight frowned. “I...” Nightmare spoke quietly, drawing the word out to delay what came next, “messed up.”
She looked down at the blankets. Twilight laid her head over Nightmare’s chest, leaving her looking at Twilight’s beautiful unkempt mane.
*All excerpts are unedited, presented in order that the chapters take place (unless I made an oopsie). No guarantee that the same excerpts will exist after edit passes.
Questions or comments? Post them below!
Nice, I'm looking forward to this.
I am currently about 3/4 of the way through, love your story!
holy moly, this guy gets to read the next 25 chapters
Interesting, looking forward to it!
Gahhh! Some of those quotes are driving me crazy! Can't wait for the next chapter!
How long does your prereader take, again?
hehe, jokes aside, I hope you're doing fine.
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He decided to go back and reread everything published, which isn’t a bad idea. I should do this too, but I can’t find the motivation or manage to force myself to. That’s 540k words, so that takes a while to go through... I asked him to give me his thoughts on the overall plot moving forward because there were several things I worried about. I don’t even know how many chapters or words that is at this point. And then after seeing his feedback on the overall plot/how things develop, I plan to address individual chapters as needed. The next chapter is technically edited, assuming I remember correctly, which I may not, but it’s a 2-parter and the part 2 isn’t edited, so I wanted to hold off on publishing it until I can do both parts on the regular schedule.
I’ve been giving thought to writing other stories/one-shots in the meantime, while also continuing to work on drafting new chapters (which given the problems I’m worried about, may be a mistake). The problem is most of the ideas aren’t one-shots or would be au off-shoots of TNS that would or could spoil things. A fun little idea I’ve played around with, unrelated to TNS, is an AU where Celestia, Luna, Nightmare Moon, Daybreaker, Cadance, and Flurry Heart all exist as their own individuals, with the conflict mostly pertaining to Daybreaker attempting to take over the world while Twilight and the rest of them try to stop her. Of course, the problems here are scale creep and just... not being a short story, most likely.
Although there is a fun little one-shot idea for “A Flurry of Bits” about Flurry Heart and gambling... but I just can’t find the motivation to look into how poker works to write it in a sensible fashion. “Gambling is illegal in the Crystal Empire for a reason.” would be a good description for it. There’s also a fic I’ve worked on and off for a while now, but it’s slow going and I mostly don’t work on it because I don’t exactly know what my goals are, or rather the goalposts or how to get to where I want to get.
I could ramble about several more story ideas but I think I’ll go to bed instead. If you want me to keep rambling sometime, just say so.
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You can ramble as much as you want, and as for reading the story just to say I've reread it nine times, that's how good your story is. Granted, I'm reading it from a reader's POV, so I'm not so sure if there is a plot hole or not.
But even so, your story is genuinely good :)
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Thanks. I cannot comprehend how you could have read it nine times... But I suppose you’re right. I never get to experience my stories from the standpoint of a reader because I’ve written them. One of the downsides of being an author, I suppose... On the other hand, I get to tell stories, decide how they play out, create worlds, etc...
Regarding plot holes, I’m probably forgetting, but the main one I remember is the lack of developing lighting infrastructure to substitute for the lack of sun. The biggest flaw was probably how drawn out Twilight’s... freak out? I don’t know what you’d want to call it, lasted. Should have trimmed that down. Maybe it works out okay in the end but it might’ve been better to make that not be as heavy or something. Then again, I suppose it does help contribute to showing how much Twilight grows over the course of the story.
Were I to start writing more stories, I’d probably wind up being known as “That guy who writes stories about Nightmare Moon.” There’s a scene I want to write, but I don't have a story to go with it, or an actual point for it. Say, Nightmare Moon on a balcony, with her daughter walking out to join her, and Nightmare Moon reminescing on “Mom.”
One guess as to who that is.Kind of nice and slice of life, but... not really a story, and I’ve not figured out anything else that’d work for contributing to that as a story.Then there are two ideas I have that I can’t go into details for because they’re related to The Night’s Stars or inspired heavily enough by it that I think it counts as spoilers. I’d like to write them as non-canon side stories. One of them could probably be canon, but there are potential issues with it that I’m not willing to deal with... The other one can’t be canon, but would make a fun little side-story to explore an idea, even if somewhat briefly. I’m not sure if anyone would be interested in a side story focused on Midnight, though I have no ideas for that. Ah, there are quite a few scrapped ideas and or deleted scenes I could talk about as well.
Gah, I’m really looking forward to publishing some of the later arcs... There are some Chekhov’s Guns... at least 1 of them, and then something mentioned in a comment I was able to work into the story (though this is in an arc that really derailed my idea for how the story would go, and is the same arc I’m worried about being a mistake and wanting feedback on from my prereader because of potential implications that I’m not sure I like). That arc alone could contribute to a few side stories as well, without spoling anything. One of them is probably worthy of its own story if it’s not already written, which it could be.
Also character growth. Lots of character growth. Which you’ve probably noticed on your read-throughs. More happens. It leaves me with a question that, while I may have asked it before somewhere, I shouldn’t repeat because it’s spoilery.
Hmm, tomorrow’s Thursday. I suppose I can look for some deleted scenes to share... or just post a rambling blog post about the story.
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I'm a writer myself, I understand the pain of having planned out an entire arc and not being able to be like boom here you go and instead have to write it all out and hope nothing goes wrong. And yes, definitely keep spoilers to yourself, hehe.
But aside from that, I think I speak for most of us when I say that we'd be happy to see some deleted scenes, or just some senseless rambling. After all, we're your dedicated readers :)
Also, yes to character growth. Definitely noticed Twilight and NMM's character growth!
One last question: Am wondering if that secret organization that wants to overthrow NMM is doing something in the shadows sneakily...(I know no spoilers, but I'm dying to find out. No need to answer me, just a question with no answer 😓)
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So the “shadow organization” as you call them, the resistance, I presume you mean? So there are a couple of things I can say about this/them. One, that’s one of the things I need assistance with from my prereader because Nightmare Moon and Twilight are the main characters and I’m struggling to figure out proper motives, goals, plans, etc for the resistance. So I have several scenes with them drafted, but I need to give them more thought and do some editing when the time comes. It’s probably not a spoiler to say that they’re trying to do something...
Then there’s also a question of, “Should there be only one, or should there be multiple competing factions, at least to an extent?” Multiple factions have benefits to it, so, for example, you could have Twilight working* with one group, while other groups are actively trying to kill her and or Nightmare Moon.
Working* being the form of, “How about you don’t hold the idiot ball and start getting ponies killed.”
There are also questions about independent actors, but that’s probably not as important as the other questions.
Also, apparently, the Chekhov’s gun I was thinking about/remembering isn’t actually published yet... Oops.