End of the First Part and Hiatus · 8:26pm Sep 15th, 2022
Helloooo….
So if you just came from the story, the next paragraph is just a rehash of what you already read, so skip to the line break if you want to jump into the nitty gritty of why I'm doing this hiatus.
I’ve recently finished Boundary Point, Part 1: Initial Conditions of my story. First, a thank you to anyone who made it this far. A thank you to anyone who dipped out at any point (and thanks for coming back if you’re reading this) for any reason. I still appreciate you giving me a chance. And most of all, thank you to the approx 200 regulars who are currently reading my story. While I don’t write this specifically for you, I still deeply appreciate your patronage. Thank you for sticking around and I hope this story, at a bare minimum, entertains you.
Hey! So, I’ve been asked a few questions while I’ve published this story. If you want an explanation of what’s going on and why I am using this pause between sections as a hiatus, or some other questions answered, you’ve come to the right place.
Why a hiatus now and what's the schedule?
I will be taking an approximate 3 month hiatus in order to do a few things:
- Work is the most demanding of my time during the Fall season, so major cuts into my free time can be expected here and should end roughly January. Since I just started this job, I want to put my best foot forward as I learn my current position.
- To build a buffer in the story so that the chaos of life does not severely cut into release of this material. Over the course of the last year I’ve:
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a. Gotten sick twice between chapter releases, the first time right after the initial publishing of the first 3 chapters and the second time the day after I published Chapter 17. One of the two times was probably a breakthrough case of covid
b. Minor surgery fucking my shit up in part due to my old boss calling 10 minutes right before it started and overestimation of their abilities on the doctor’s part. This happened in April and as you can tell from the blog posts and lack of chapters, I padded out the time just in case something bad happened.
c. Changing of job because aforementioned old boss.
d. Planning a corporate trip with the new job
e. Other minor events that would have normally cut out time during the day.
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3. To better plan out the story and world. So far it's mostly been a modicum of planning and more seat of my pants than anything else. I plan on using this time to better plan out arcs and world building. That said, the seat of the pants should still be the most prominent aspect of my writing style along with a deep revision cycles.
4. REST
That said, here is a tentative schedule if you absolutely need to pen something in your calenders:
Sept 29th: I will be temporarily changing the status of the fic from incomplete to On Hiatus (which coincides with my usual 2 week release timeframe), along with the hiatus end date at the top of the summary. This is so that if something happens to me, (like death) at least it might give a heads up to people who would prefer to read completed content.
November 17th: I plan on releasing a special chapter as a very early Christmas Present. So please stick around for that. Status will remain On Hiatus until then.
December 22nd: Moving On Hiatus back over to incomplete. Moving all currently released chapters to Part 1: Initial Conditions. Releasing the first chapter of Part 2: Mixing.
That said, depending on how the buffer is built, I may be temporarily changing the release schedule afterwards from every two weeks to every three weeks or month until a solid enough buffer is established. However, if things go well, expect a return to the two weeks release schedule, eventually.
Why don’t you reply to commenters on your story?
I don't reply to comments to give a space free from me to let fans discuss the work in peace. I doubt that given the contents and target audience of this story, that it will go beyond the Fimfiction page it is on, so I typically treat the comments as consecrated ground and leave all comments, both positive and negative, alone.
This probably has the effect of making some posters feel ignored. Please understand, I am not trying to ignore you. I’m merely giving a space where speculation and discussion can go at it without me butting in every 15 seconds going ‘ummmm… ackchyually….’. Also, there is a part of me that believes in the death of the author. I have to stop writing at some point and let the reader’s imagination take over. Might as well be now.
That said, I want to thank all of my commenters on my story! I really appreciate you taking the time to leave a message.
A question from me to you about Tip Jars
Now I have a question I want to forward to the readers who made it this far: Should I set up a tip jar? It would be nice to get a little extra money to help with my daily tea addiction, but I wanted to hear what you have to say about it before I look into setting one up. Feel free to comment or send me a message with your opinion on the matter.
That having been finished, let me speak about a few things:
I wanted to state one thing that is canon to the story I’m writing, but will probably never be touched on due to The Law of Conservation of Detail:
The Six Circlets is the closest pony equivalent to The Lord of the Rings. However, in recent times, it has fallen out of favor due to the return of Luna and the story’s propensity to demonize anything lunar related. The House of Baronesses have passed a resolution to rewrite the story to minimize this, however, it’s been caught up in committee. Many of the committee members have fond memories of reading the story in their youth. One Baroness has been quoted as saying, “Rewriting this is rutting impossible. It's better that we just put it on the restricted list and add a Forward explaining the context that the book was written in rather than try to scrub it clean.”
Incidentally, Caramel Stamp wrote this story as an escape from her dwery life as a janitorial pony and to give her herd’s foals a unique story for her to read out loud at bed time. Many interpret much of the story to be a profession of her faith towards Celestia, however contention lies with her claiming that Celestia’s Sun is a ‘star of the day sky’ and was nearly blacklisted for this reason. It has since become a staple for many bookworm’s collections.
Luna’s reaction to the story at this time is nil because she has simply not gotten around to reading it yet.
And finally, I wanted to finish off with something of a very weak confession. On December 7th, 2021 in a blog post titled “Status”, I wrote that I was taken by a “Fey mood”. In Dwarf Fortress, a Fey Mood is when a dwarf will be compelled, within the game, to create an artifact of some nature. On some very real level, for the last 11 months, I have been compelled to write and publish this story. I do not know why. What I do know is that I daydream often as an escape mechanism and this is my attempt at channeling it into some sort of work.Very often, when I channel and write my first draft, it's as if I am vomiting out these words. Thankfully, I now have it that I can set aside time every day to allow me to, for lack of a better term, exsanguinate the story I am telling. And what gets plastered on the page is not pretty. Frequently it is barebones and other times it over indulges in minutiae that no one reading would care about. But my biggest fear now is that I will not finish what I have started. That said, I have, at the very least, ‘kept pace’.
That said, I am genuinely delighted to receive such a positive reception to, what might ostensibly call, hack of a story and world. I spend more time editing and revising than I do on the initial outpouring. Things get cut. Things get added. I take narrative risks that sometimes pay off, and sometimes fall flat on their face. But in the end, it's not about me. Not in the slightest. But it is from me, of me. My only fear is that I won’t be able to reach the end before dying (No, I don’t have an expiration date yet).
The truth is, it is taking me time to regain my footing as a storyteller of any sort. Most of the stories I crafted are stories kept in my head, never told to anyone else out of fear of how cringy they were. Please, dear reader, expect me to stumble and fall as I tell this story. Much like the scars on Xavier’s arms or the scars that now adorn Scootaloo, above her right eye, as I write I will make mistakes, I will scar the story I write and you read. Some scars will be deliberate and well thought out. Others will be mistakes, poorly calculated and defacing. But make no mistake, I am not here to tell a perfect story. If I were, the first chapter would never be released. It would still be under eternal revision. Or, more likely, never started at all, kept in my head in its pristine state, never to be etched in sand.
Right now, this story is alive, and only the living can be scarred. Only when I finish up, when those who will find this story past its finale, will the true autopsy begin.
Get better man, everyone needs a break at some point.