I've been writing MLP fanfics since about 2012, and I took a long break between late 2013 and mid 2015. In that time, I did a lot of study on how to structure a story and how to make a compelling narrative and characters, so the stuff I'm writing now is definitely of better quality than my first fics. Two of them have even been featured on EQD!

My first fic that shall go unnamed due to its insanely poor quality (hindsight is 20/20) was set up as a big fat adventure story, starring my self-insert OC. As far as why I started writing, I had just finished reading Past Sins by Pen Stroke and was hit with a stroke of drive that I still haven't been able to quite replicate. At its zenith I managed to hit 18 published chapters and it had a pretty decent following. Feeling all cocksure and having puffed up my chest, I made the decision to submit it to EQD since nothing could possibly be bad about my story... Oh how hopelessly naive I was. The list of flaws that came back was as long as I am tall (I'm 6'1", so yeah), and I'd say that that rejection threw me into a massive funk that caused my self-imposed hiatus.

Now we flash forward to September 2015, and my brother and I had just marathoned all of the Equestria Girls movies. During my hiatus I had written a few token chapters for stories I wanted to make just to convince myself that I was still a writer, but it was after going through all those movies that the spark came back. It's hard to describe, but it just felt like I could go and do this again, and so I remade my FimFiction account to wipe the slate clean and started up on The Princess and the Seamstress. Where the idea cam for is still a bit of a mystery to me, but Luna is my favorite princess and Rarity is my favorite character to write for (she has a great personality and speech style), and so I decided to throw them together into a story. I hammered out three chapters in about three weeks and then thought "Hey, maybe I've improved enough to give EQD another shot!" So, after doing some pre-reading of my own, I sent it off to them... and when it came back, they said that the base story was good and all that needed fixing was a few grammatical and mechanical flaws! I was ecstatic, to say the least, and immediately got onto fixing that stuff. A few weeks passed, I resubmitted, and it passed! So that's the first story I've ever gotten to them, and I've been steadily updating it since then.

The next story that I'm actively working on is Anima: The Creation of a Princess. I've seen a bunch of those "Twilight makes a robot pony" type stories go around, but they all seem to go into dark or depressing themes of what it means to be alive, etc. Thus, I though that it was high time that we had a robo-pony story that was mostly just fish-out-of-water shenanigans and light hearted comedy, and thus was Anima born. Not gonna lie, the first two chapters are a bit heavy, but the stuff I have planned is definitely going to fit into shenanigans territory, as soon as I find time to work on it between TPaTS and the next story.

My most recent work is also the most daunting one to think about, because this is the first big adventure story I've tried out since my disastrous first fic. Alicornae: The Legend of Starlit Sky is a story that was inspired by two sources; the Alicornae EP by Jyc Row (which everyone should listen to, that music is God-like) and the Souls Series. Suffice to say that this is gonna have to be an AU due to how much stuff I'm taking liberties with, but I've found that writing for an AU Equestria rather than trying to keep it canon gives me a lot more creative freedom. This is also the first story I've written since my first fic that focuses primarily on OCs rather than canon characters, but it would seem I've improved greatly since the last time; this story only has one chapter so far and it's already been featured on EQD! Sure, I had to do some fixing on mechanical stuff again, but the pre-reader said that the story itself was really good and had a lot of room to grow, which is a sight better than my first adventure story attempt.

So, that's all my stuff to really talk about. I'd also like to say that this group is a super good idea; talking about the origins of stories is a great way to cement what you're writing about and how you feel on it.