End of the year... and very little progress done...

Well, what can I say? My accomplishments this year have been nowhere even close to what I had promised. Had I been able to stick to my intended plan, I would've finished the tenth main story months ago, would've finished probably six or seven side stories, and would now be preparing to start the eleventh main story. But the sad reality of what I had actually managed to accomplish is not even close to halfway through the tenth story...

So... why did I get so little completed on my fanfiction writing this year? In all honesty, I'm really struggling to figure that out. I had finished playing through all those Lego video games at the end of last year, so the absence of that diversion should've theoretically provided me with more time to focus on writing. Not to mention, with my ability to access my writing documents now becoming mobile and much more convenient, that should've given me even more opportunity to get some writing done. I had practically nothing else planned to hold me back. And yet... my writing progress has since slowed down so much that a glacier could now outrun it. I've tried to look back this past year to see what else I've been doing to prevent me from doing any additional writing, but as far as I can tell, the most brutally honest answer I can think of is that I've been essentially finding excuses to do practically anything else beside writing, as if this was some kind of high school or college assignment that I had no interest in working on (which couldn't be further from the truth!). Why have I been held back in a year where there was realistically very little to hold me back?

I wonder... is this what burnout feels like? I've been able to write a combined total of 900,000 words over seven years straight with almost no delays at all, but now in my eighth year of doing this, I just can't seem to push myself any further. In previous years, back when new Equestria Girls content was always coming out, I always had the hard pressure of completing one story in time to get the next story started no later than the year after its reflected canon content came out, but now that I'm in the very first year without that kind of pressure, I've suddenly slacked off significantly, and I'm starting to worry if that might not be a coincidence... On top of that, that last few times where I did manage to complete a chapter, I've been receiving less comments than I did in previous years, which makes it difficult for me to understand if what I have managed to write is even anything good at all. I fear that I've now fallen into a spiraling descent where my inability to keep going has led to more discouragement and less encouragement to keep going...

The very latest content I was able to post was that immensely long chapter where the Equestria Girls of the Lego World joined forces with the Ninjago Ninjas to obtain information on the invading Changeling army. Throughout the summer, I was determined to finally complete that chapter no later than the premiere date of the MLP G5 movie in late September, and I managed to accomplish that literally the very day before that deadline. Since then, the next chapter is still stuck at just a handful of notes to put all the events into a proper sequence, while the next Side Story has that and a few completed paragraphs and bits of dialogue scattered around so that there's not yet any sense of a full sequence of events at any part (and according to the editing records on my Word documents, it's now been almost two months since I've written anything at all). I really would like to complete these stories and the few remaining stories I still have planned for this fanfiction series, but it seems I'm now severely lacking the motivation to keep going anywhere with this...

So... what's next? Where do I go from here? What should be my goal for next year?

Well, it's pretty obvious that my original intended plan to spend 2022 writing the entirety of my eleventh main story is just not going to happen. I would certainly love to at least complete by the end of next year what I had originally hoped to have completed by the end of this year, but after how this past year turned out, I'm not feeling optimistic at all. I'll certainly try my best to go for it, but I don't exactly have high hopes at the moment.

Naturally, the release of My Little Pony: A New Generation has given me lots of ideas for other possible fanfics, but I've obviously got my hands full trying to work on my old ongoing project. Not to mention, I'm actually perfectly okay with not trying to write a fanfiction series in parallel with ongoing official content. When I did that over that last few years for Equestria Girls, I actually consider myself incredibly lucky that I never took any of my earlier stories in such a direction that would've made it very difficult to continue reflecting the official content (the two biggest examples of some rather close calls was acknowledging the existence of a Twilight Sparkle who was native to the Lego World right from the very first story while leaving her absence a mystery at first, and leaving Trixie's fate ambiguous by the conclusion of the fourth story that made it possible to allow her return and full redemption in the sixth story). In other words, I'm actually more comfortable writing fanfics for franchises that are no longer ongoing at all, so that I don't have to constantly fear potentially contradicting some future official content. Therefore, I'm really in no urgent rush to finish LEGO Equestria Girls and move on to any possible new stuff anytime soon.

I've previously tried sharing other MLP fanfic ideas by sending messages to certain members who I felt would be able to make something decent with them, but more often than not, they were simply not interested. With all the additional ideas I've recently come up with for the new generation of pony, I think the best thing for me to do is to share these ideas much more broadly and hope that someone new will come along and take up interest in one of them. As a result, I am now considering starting up a new Group, where I share several of my ideas in forum posts, and if someone does decide to trying turning that idea into a full story, that story will be added to the Group. I don't know if I'll have any luck with this effort, but at this point, I feel like it's worth a try (at the very least, I definitely plan to post a link to such a Group in my next blog post in hope of bringing further attention to it). If I can encourage other members to write at least one or two of the ideas that I'll provide publicly, then I'll consider that effort a modest success.

Well... that concludes what has turned out to be a rather lousy year of writing progress for me. Here's hoping for better luck next year.