I used to be able to update whatever story I was working on once every two weeks or so, but that hasn't been the case for a while now. I just want to apologize to those following The Griffin's Apprentice for how slow things have been going. Things are a bit rough in my life at the moment, and it's hard to get the motivation to push on in a story. I am by no means abandoning it, and I try to work on it every day, but most days "working on it" consists of staring at the page, writing a single sentence, and then finding myself unable to come up with the words to continue. Hopefully I'll get my drive back, because I seriously love the story as it exists in my head, and I want to share it, but I refuse to do it poorly. I'm not going to crap out chapters just to get them done. That doesn't do anyone any favors. In any case, I hope you all stick around to see where things go with the story, but I wouldn't blame you for dropping it if the gap between chapters is unacceptable. Sorry.

Have you ever had an idea for a story, but for some reason you just can't get the opening paragraphs to feel right? That's what happened to me recently. I've spent the past month and a half re-writing the same bit over and over again. Nothing feels better than finally getting over that little hump and having the story just pour out, though. With that, I'm proud to present the first chapter of The Griffin's Apprentice.

Sometimes, the tiniest of details can spiral out to form their own story. In this case there are two details:

That's Lyra in Cloudsdale at the Best Young Flyer Competition. Obviously, she is not a pegasus, so the logical explanation is that she knows the same Cloud Walking spell that Twilight does. What reason would she have to know such a spell?

The second detail is that she plays the lyre. Taking magic out of the equation, ponies can't play the lyre with their hooves. That leads me to believe that the lyre isn't an invention of ponies in that universe, but rather something that could play it naturally, like griffins. Combined with the Cloud Walking detail, and I couldn't help but imagine that Lyra spent a lot of time with them when she was young, and so this story was born. Hopefully you all like where it all goes.

So, I recently learned a rather important lesson on writing: Contests are not for me. I attempted to write a story for the EQD Nightmare Night contest recently, and I did not like how it turned out at all. Of course, I ended up finishing it at about 2:00 AM the night before the deadline, and I was really sleepy, so I published it regardless. Immediately, regretting that, I kinda shut down for a while, and I haven't really visited this site since then until just now, when I deleted the previously mentioned story.

I am a slow writer. The concept of my horror story has tons of potential, but I was stupid to think that I could figure it out in a week for a contest. I essentially crapped out a one-shot for what should have been a multi-part story, and it wasn't scary. Now that I know that I simply cannot attempt to write within any sort of concrete time frame, that should hopefully never happen again.

Back to writing my next story I go. It'll be a straight adventure this time, though not with the characters you'd expect. Just don't expect a date on it.

Perpetual Lurker

Well, here we are. Six months ago to the day, I published the first chapter of Make a Wish. It was my first real fanfiction undertaking, aside from a failure from before I had familiarized myself with what was horribly cliche in the fandom (it's still sitting around here somewhere if you want to look at it and laugh. Just don't expect me to ever touch it again).  The response I received for it was entirely positive and unexpected, which inspired me to submit it to Equestria Daily. After one quick round of edits, it was accepted and posted up there.

Now the story is finished. I'm really proud of my work, but I know that in the end what I think about it doesn't matter. What everyone else thinks about it does. So, that's what I'd like to hear from you guys. I have comments on the individual chapters themselves, but they tend to be short and only pertaining to the chapter at hand. In the comments on this post, I'd like to hear your complete thoughts on the story as a whole. What you liked, what you didn't like, what you found funny, what you wish had been explored more, etc. Spare me no criticism, as I want complete honesty with my flaws. If I want to grow as a writer, I need to hear what I did right and what I did wrong so I can emphasize one and fix the other in my future works. Thanks a lot in advance!

Perpetual Lurker

While I don't normally keep a schedule, I'm actually sitting on a chapter of Make a Wish right now without releasing it, and I'd like to give a reason for that. I'm planning something rather... special to go along with it as a separate chapter. Not quite a side-story, per se, as it is quite important to the main plot, but it's in a bit of a different format. Too different for me to not put it in a separate chapter post, at least. It's going to be a huge experiment for me, and I hope it works out well. Anyway, I thought I'd give the people who care a heads up so that the weirdness doesn't come right out of the blue. Can't wait to see what you all think.

Perpetual Lurker

Well, I just thought I'd throw out a blog post here for two reasons. First, setting up dialog with my readers is something really important to me. Second, I just noticed that I have 27 people following me, so there will actually be people to read this.

I just released the third part of Make a Wish, but I'm going to wait until I finish part four before submitting it to EQD for an update. It falls a bit short of their recommended 3k word minimum for updates, and I'm already part way done with Part Four anyway. I actually had to cut a lot off of the end of Part Three for pacing reasons. I've been trying to increase the length of my chapters, but all that resulted in was the chapter continuing on long after the obvious break point. Better to keep things short and coherent than longer and rambling. I'm still learning, here. This is only my second fic ever after all, and I'm a bit blindsided by its success. You can read what I had of the first one, if you really want. It's still here on the site. I just didn't realize when I wrote it that I was writing myself into one of the most overused fanfic cliches ever, and once I realized that, I stopped writing it and came up with Make a Wish. It mostly stand as a testament as to the jump in my competence as a writer (I won't say skill, as I still can't shake the feeling that I might still be bad at this, but just really lucky).  

In any case, feel free to drop me a line either in the comments here or in a PM if you have any questions about me or my stories. I'll almost always respond to those, but don't expect any sort of consistent blog posts. I'm not entirely sure how ofter I'll be making these.

Signing off,

Perpetual Lurker