To start with, thanks to everyone for your patience and understanding over my hiatus. I know a lot of people have been following Body And Mind and it's hard when an author suddenly stops a story.

Long story short, the pain from the situation in my last blog entry has eased a bit, enough so that I find myself able to focus on writing again. My exams also turned out fine -- as of yesterday I have a Bachelor's in Computer Science. Wonderful as this is, it also leaves me without much to do, because I'm now officially unemployed and I can only spend so many hours a day practicing making C++ programs or writing cover letters before I can't stand to look at either of them anymore.

Bottom line: I'm only a few hundred words into the new chapter of Body And Mind at the moment, but I'm once again actively working on completing it.

I'd like to begin this post by thanking everyone who's been following and commenting on my story. It means a lot to me, knowing that I've made a contribution to this community and created something that people enjoy. I hope you can all be understanding of my decision to put it on hiatus, then, in light of what I'm about to tell you. Quite simply, I just don't have time or energy to spare for it right now.

I found out today that my grandmother, who was diagnosed with cancer shortly after my grandfather's death last year, will be entering hospice care this Monday. I received terrible news about her condition last Sunday, and while I still clung to hope then, there's no longer any possibility of her recovering. Despite months of chemotherapy and radiation treatment, her cancer has spread to the point that there is nothing further the doctors can do for her. I've been traveling home on the weekends so I can visit her in the hospital because by this point any time I see her could very well be the last. I've always been close to her, my family's still bearing the wounds from my grandfather's death, and this has taken its toll on me -- last week I've slept like shit, I've been missing most of my classes, and in general I haven't left my dorm unless I absolutely had to.

This has been especially hard for me because within a month I will be graduating college. I've fallen behind in many of my courses, and recent events have only made that worse. I'll be spending the next few weeks studying harder than ever so that I can close out my last semester with good grades. It's hard to put any real enthusiasm into it when I know I'll very likely be mourning my grandmother on graduation day, but at the same time I realize how critical this is to my own future.

Unfortunately, I can't give any estimates. I don't know when I'll be writing again. Right now it's an emotional and cognitive luxury I can't afford, and I can't even begin to guess when that will change.

I know from having been on the other end of such a situation that it's often hard to know what to say to a stranger over the internet at a time like this, but I welcome and am grateful for any support that you can offer.

UPDATE: Unfortunately, hospice care never happened because my grandmother passed away.

She stuck through with the radiation as long as she could, even knowing it would've given her a few months of borrowed time at most. There were a few things left she wanted to take care of in those few months, so she gambled on the chance.

It didn't pay off. She never got to do those last few things she wanted to do before she died, and one of them was attending my graduation.

Hey everyone

Like the title says, I've finished the rough draft of the next chapter of Body And Mind. I'm looking for some prereaders, too. Anyone who's interested, PM me and I'll send you the draft. I'm a bit unsure of this chapter, so I'd greatly appreciate any help I can get with this!

For those of you who've been wondering what the hell I've been up to, the next chapter of Body And Mind has been sent to my prereader. Expect it within a few days.

I remember back when the ACB group was first formed, from my conversations with Velkaden where we vented our frustrations with each other about the themes in, and popularity of, and lack of quality of, just about every Conversion Bureau fic. We realized we weren't the only sane people in an insane fandom, and so Velkaden created the group. Back then it was a rallying point, a place for people who didn't like TCB to get together and talk about our problems with the damn genre, and a place to let each other know that there were people who loved ponies without hating their own species.

Then we started writing stories to counter the genre, stories written with the intent to inject some logic and fairness into the narrative. Mine was one of them, but I deleted it for reasons mentioned in the previous blog post. The group ended up growing larger and faster than I'd ever expected it to, and my own inexperience as an admin and irritation -- to the point of irrationality -- against the authors and the genre led to a period where anti-TCB turned into something resembling an online Mongol horde. We clamped down on the troublemakers, we made peace with the TCB authors, and for awhile there was an oddly collaborative effort to make TCB "better." I don't want TCB to be better. TCB can't be anything good. I want it buried in the internet's junkyard. That's the crux of why I'm leaving the ACB group; I don't think we're doing anything to accomplish that. In fact, in some ways it seems like we've been throwing kerosene on the fire.

It looks like the fire's burning out, though. I won't name names, but some of the major TCB authors have dropped out altogether. The flow of new fics is drying up. Many of the major fics haven't been updated in months. We spend 99% of our time in ACB talking about unrelated stuff because there's simply no awful TCB shit coming out anymore. TCB isn't quite dead, but I wouldn't sell it life insurance. The best thing to do is not give it any more attention and let it go quietly. I don't want it around, so I'm not going to keep bringing it up.

That is why I'm leaving the ACB group.

Don't take this as an "I'm quitting ponies forever" message. It's not even close. I'll still be on FiMFiction, I'll still write stories, and I'll always be a PM away. Just don't expect to see me in the anti-TCB group. If you still want to talk to me in a public forum, I plan to start getting more actively involved in Queen Chrysalis' Changeling Swarm.

I've been putting this off for awhile now, but I figure it had to come sooner or later. As the blog title suggests, I'm deleting Not Alone.

The more I think about it, the more I realize I want nothing to do with TCB. Not even in the form of anti-fics. I dislike TCB because I think it's an ugly mark on the fandom, and completely contrary to what the show's about. I don't want to give it any more publicity than I already have. I want this fandom to have more good stories. Stories where the ponies are in-character and where they don't try to exterminate humans. Damn it, I want to read about a Twilight who would lend a human one of Starswirl's books in exchange for one of Einstein's - with nary a mention of "fleshy ape bodies" - and a Celestia who sets up an interdimensional immigration office, no transformation required!

Please don't get me wrong. Writing Not Alone was in many ways a good experience for me that tempered my skill as a writer. I'm grateful for all of the positive attention and praise it got, and I'm grateful to all of you readers who followed and enjoyed it. None of that changes that I think this story's gotta go, though. I'm anti-TCB and proud of it, and I'm going to do my part by dismantling what little corner of TCB that I can. For all of you who gave me the recognition I've received, though, I will leave it up for one week to give anyone who wants to keep a copy time to transfer it to their computers.

Update: Story has been removed.

Good news is if you think my writing doesn't suck, I have another story you can read here.

Sorry for anyone who was looking forward to this, but because I've been kind of burned out on TCB and I'm still not sure about where exactly I want to take Not Alone: Side Stories, it's been delayed.

In the meantime though, to tide you over, I've got a new and unrelated story in the submission queue about a changeling captured by Celestia's guards. I hope you'll enjoy it.

No I'm not going to write a proper sequel, please stop asking, I've sunk enough time into this as it is.

Well, Not Alone is completed. It's been a fun ride, but I've had enough of writing for awhile, so I'm going to take a break for now in favor of focusing on my college courses and other projects.

I just wanted to take this chance to say thank you to everyone who read and enjoyed my story. When I first started out, it was meant to be a small experiment I'd be writing for the benefit of maybe a dozen people. I'd never imagined it would take off the way it has, and I'm pretty damn flattered it did.

That said, I'm not quite done with this story. I know there's more to the universe some people wanted to see that I didn't really give attention to, and some fans have even submitted their own chapters. Because I don't want this to go to waste and I don't want to leave my followers cold, at some point within the next couple months I'll be starting another fic called Not Alone: Side Stories, a collection of not-strictly-canon material taking place during and after the war that people can enjoy or, if they're so inclined, contribute to.

I'd also like to make a few comments on why I wrote it the way I did.

Russell's character was very carefully designed. He's a black South African because his country, and his ethnic group, had fallen victim to the White Man's Burden mentality that I find so disgustingly prevalent in the TCB genre. Rather than being an elite special forces member or grizzled army veteran, he's a scared kid who was press-ganged into driving a truck. The fact is, being in the army is an experience that fundamentally changes people, and I knew it would be very difficult to get into the mindset of someone who's been there with any degree of accuracy. It was much easier for me to put myself in Russell's position, since that was easier for myself (and, I'd wager, most of my readers) to identify with.

One thing I was very conscious to do was to write a story that had the opposite problem of the usual TCB story fare - making humans a Mary Sue race. I set about doing this in many ways: they fail to capture and punish Celestia. They set up internment camps to hold the ponies, even those who never did anything wrong. They really are, in many ways, physiologically inferior to the ponies. They suffer relatively high losses and win mainly through sheer numbers. But damnit, they survive.

And there's hope for friendship - true friendship - between the species in spite of everything. A friendship not based on enforcing conformity or making the "others" into a carbon copy, but on mutual acceptance of each other's differences, and a willingness to treat each other as people. Being able to look past the war, and differences in body and ability, and see that underneath it all there's a person surprisingly similar to themselves.

I'd like to think that much, at least, is in the spirit of the show.

Who here has seen the movie Threads?

For the uninitiated, it was a cautionary tale about the horrors of nuclear holocaust released when the world was still in the depths of the Cold War. It pulls no punches, showing the true terror and hopelessness such a scenario would entail. Watching it left me with a sense of total and utter hopelessness for all the characters I had come to care about, having just spent the last hour and a half watching them fall one by one in a world where humanity was on its last legs, and those were giving fast.

I get a similar feeling reading most TCB stories, and that's why I can very rarely enjoy any of them. It doesn't even matter if Celestia really is xenophobic and genocidal, or if the barrier is expanding, because the basic idea is the same: the inevitable destruction of everything you ever knew and loved within years. Given the premise, it's really hard for me to give a shit about the specifics of any character's situation.

But see, while Threads was gripping and terrifying because it presented an all-too-plausible situation and devoted every ounce of itself to portraying the sheer bleakness of it, and has secured a position in my list of favorite movies, TCB gives us a setting that could never happen using as its background a show that's extremely idealistic, and (in most cases) just uses that setting as a background for adventures, or slice-of-life stories, or whatnot. Which, you know, I found it kind of hard to give a shit about when the end of the world was right around the corner or had already occurred. I found it impossible to care about anything that happened, because there was no hope. And the way it was almost always written, it wasn't terrifying. It was boring. It was just a bunch of stories whose plots and characters I had no investment in, because the big question - does any of this matter? - was usually answered as soon as I read the summary.

At the time I began writing Not Alone, hope was something painfully absent from the TCB genre. The only fics that had any at all (that I can recall off the top of my head) were Still Human and What Would Really Happen?. I sought to correct this. I wanted to write a fic that dared to have some hope that humanity would survive the appearance of Equestria and the Bureaus - a fic whose events would say that, with all our virtues and all our faults, with all our strengths and all our weaknesses, we are worthy of life, as we are.

(And for those of you wondering, the next chapter - which is also the last - should be ready for prereading within a few days.)

Much as I hate the requirement, I've upgraded Not Alone's rating to Mature and it has passed moderation. The issue seems to have been chapter 18, "The Battle of South Africa."

My original plan was to cut and edit content until I could get the rating dropped to Teen, but I realized that would ruin my attempts to portray the battle scene honestly, so it's there to stay.

Thanks to everyone who supported me while this was going on! Now if you'll excuse me, I need to get some sleep.