RariTwi: Love is War update, and cancellation announcement for Friendship on the Infinity Train

Hey everyone! There's a RariTwi: Love is War update! And also the other thing mentioned in the title. More on that later.

Regarding RariTwi: Love is War, I want to apologize for a couple of things. First, I said I'd start posting chapters once I was done, but that isn't the case. I have two chapters ready, but I haven't started work on the ending yet. Chapter 11 has actually been ready to go for about eight months (though I edited it again this week), and chapter 12 was close to completion four months ago, albeit with parts I was struggling with. Which brings me to the second thing I should apologize for: I said that if there was a big gap between chapters, I'd post what I have so there wouldn't be any dead air. That's what I'm doing now, but I should have done it way sooner.

I've written some other stories in the time between chapter 10 and now, both Pony and not Pony, but I've mainly been distracted by other things, particularly working on Offprint. I'm still working on Offprint, but I just realized how long I'd gone without writing anything and decided I needed to follow the common advice of writing something every day. And then I thought of the fact that G5 would come before I finished RariTwi: Love is War. That brought me to finishing up these chapters, so I'd at least have something out before then.

Chapter 11 was published now, and chapter 12 will be published next week. As for chapter 13 and the epilogue, ideally I'd write the entire thing by two weeks from now, but I'm not going to make that promise. I'll try not to make it half a year, though.

So that's what's going on with RariTwi: Love is War.

As for Friendship on the Infinity Train, I've tried to figure out what to do next, but I was stuck on the core concept of my intended story. You see... well, spoilers for a story I'm not going to finish writing, I suppose.

So the idea behind Friendship on the Infinity Train is that SciTwi is in a relationship with Sunset, and Rarity is with Princess Twilight, and both of them have gotten in fights, which resulted in the Train claiming them. As the chapters went on, we'd learn more about what happened there, and the human and pony would both work through them. SciTwi's issue is exacerbated by the fact that before she ran into Rarity, she had actually entered a train car that was selling spells meant to mess around with your number, one spell being to create a shadow creature that you can send some of your number to. This only works to reduce your number by single digits, but SciTwi knows her magic, and improves the spell to send most of her number to the shadow creature. This has the side effect of scrambling her memories of her fight with Sunset entirely, and as it turns out, the number can't get to zero without resolving the issues you sent to the shadow creature anyway. Plus, the problems the shadow creature causes add to the number, so it's an absolutely bad deal.

At one point, Rarity successfully reaches 0 and opens her gate, and through some trickery, SciTwi is able to go through too. She goes back to Sunset, but whoops, nothing about what they fought about got resolved, and forgetting about it didn't help. She gets stuck on the train again, and confronts the shadow creature, whereby everything gets sorted out.

Sounds good so far.

The big problem is... what were they fighting about? How would these characters think about what they fought about? What aspects do they need to improve about themselves to resolve the fights?

As an asexual aromantic person who has never been in or interested in a relationship, I for the life of me could not wrap my head around it. What problems could cause strife in a relationship but still be solvable? What would a person in a relationship think about all this? I could come up with any number of wacky train cars for the characters to go on adventures in, but it just didn't feel sincere unless I could figure out the problems that got them stuck on the train. And more than a year and a half after publishing that first chapter, I still can't. As such, I've given up.

Incidentally, there's a part in chapter 1 where SciTwi can't remember what Sunset told her. Unscrambled, she said, "I'm sorry, Twilight, but that just doesn't matter to me right now. The other Twilight's problem is a much bigger deal, so I'm heading over to see her." This follows the idea that Rarity disappeared before SciTwi and Princess Twilight is worried enough that she contacted Sunset for support. Jealousy over Sunset and Princess Twilight (maybe? wasn't quite sure this was the right direction) is what pushes SciTwi over the edge into running away.

I have a partial draft of chapter 2, which I'll publish tomorrow along with an outline of how the rest of the chapter would have gone and a link to this blog. Then, I'll cancel the story. I thought I could figure out all the backstory later, but I instead realized this just isn't the kind of story I can write.

It's possible I may come back to the Infinity Train well later, and I'll definitely write more wacky adventure stories at some point. However, I'm pretty confident I won't be coming back to Friendship on the Infinity Train.