Wrote something as a palette cleanser after I felt annoyed at the coming chapter of Fear. Just a quick warning: it was written (and will be written) pretty much solely for my own enjoyment. If you like it, cool; if you don't, too bad. It's basically going to be my 'selfish' story, wherein I do largely what I want and update largely when I want to. Think of it as a way to blow off steam when I've had a tough time writing something more aimed at an audience.

Other than that, not much to say; a basic summary of the chapter I uploaded is 'TheVulpineHero1 introduces the bare minimum of plot, promptly abandons it, and spends the rest of the chapter happily derping around with description and character moments while not actually explaining anything'. It's a Flutterdash story because why not. Hopefully it gets through moderation, and is up for you guys to enjoy (or not, as the case may be; I didn't put a lot of effort into making it interesting to people who aren't me) later today.

I just did the first draft of the next chapter of Fear, which I started immediately since last chapter was late. It's a fairly long one, at least for me; I feel it could be better, but hopefully proofing can help that out. I'm just glad the party arc is over now. I like the general premise, and I always enjoy using accidental foreshadowing to make my plots weird and yet fairly sensical, but I feel like the impetus of moving the plot along swiftly kind've robbed me of the time I need to derp around with comedy and character moments, which is what I enjoy about writing Fear. Oh well. tl;dr Fear shouldn't be long now. I won't be starting the next chapter for a little bit since I'm bottomed out on the series at the moment, so I'll probably switch to the Music thing I've wanted to do for literally forever.

Otherwise, I'm still not dead. Yay!

See title. I ended up splitting the chapter to make the workload easier and give you guys something to read. Now to go back and answer all the comments I missed whilst I was feeling guilty for not updating.

See title, essentially. I've been struggling away with it for a while now, and thus have produced very little in the past several weeks; I can get maybe 300 words a day if I'm lucky before it feels like I'm smashing my face against a brick wall. I have not, of course, been wasting my time. Even though I can't produce very much in terms of actual writing at the moment, I've been doing idea generation quite faithfully, so the moment I can get anything down, I'll have more than enough to write about.

As for the progress I've actually made: about 1200 words of Fear, comprising mainly of a Twilight segment and a Spike segment (it's weird how much screentime Spike is actually getting in Fear nowadays), before switching to Music postseries thing in an attempt to break the doldrums and doing 1000 words of that. I've also been adding very quietly to that one oneshot I might not ever post, and that's at 1500 words or so. So, nothing, essentially.

I notice that the site is now quite different (I didn't look at it for a couple weeks, my bad). Seems a lot more like twitter/youtube with the feeds that require more loading once you get on the page, which has always seemed dumb to me. Oh well. The site is the site, and that's just something users have to deal with, I suppose.

So, yeah. Just confirming I am still alive, and there will be updates eventually. (I always feel like I should apologise whenever I have writer's block, since that keeps people waiting for updates. Then I realise that I do this for free, and I'm not actually obliged to keep on doing it for any reason. But I still feel like I should say sorry. It's weird. Oh well. I honestly doubt too many people care, anyway.)

Yep, it's time for another update blog to soothe worries of my death and say what's going on with various stories.

I've been having a little bit of writer's block (insofar as I can be considered a writer), so things have slowed down a little; I have, however, begun the next chapter of Fear. I was having a bunch of trouble starting it off, but eventually just defaulted to making a one-off gag OC and then seguing into a Twilight section off the back of his misfortune. Although it's been a while since I was due to start this chapter, I had a bunch of great ideas in the interim (seriously, two of the major things that will happen are things I came up with in the break, and they fit the previous contents of the story a lot better than what I actually had planned -- to the point where one-off jokes in previous chapters now work as foreshadowing), so I wasn't exactly wasting time. If I'm honest, this kind of 'indy ploy' writing is almost my strong suit, due to my reluctance to plan anything out on paper. I'm looking forward to seeing people's reactions to the finished chapter.

Let's see... In regards to the weekly audience participation thing: don't worry, I didn't forget. I just discovered that I was ridiculously out of practice in writing short stuff, and the things I wrote weren't good enough for me to willingly post them. Again, writer's block didn't help. Those of you following the Drabble Bag will have noticed an influx of 100 word practice pieces after that, which (apart from being a fun little game between me and another person) will hopefully result in a tuned up back of tricks, eventually. I'm still going to make use of my weekly slot, but not for audience stuff at this juncture; if I'm going to be doing that kind of thing, it would be disrespectful to the people who sent in prompts to give anything less than my best, and current offerings are just that. I might end up making and posting some drabble collections; we'll see. Sorry about that.

In the B-side slot at the moment would be the post-series oneshot for Music...except, not. Y'see, I eventually decided that the idea was a little too big for me to comfortably express in a oneshot. Seeing as Music had a lot of focus on slowly drawing out and building upon the characterisations despite a lack of plot, I don't want to do the opposite in an attempt to make it all fit. To that end, I'm thinking of making it a three-act story (or even a short 'real' story, depending on how much space it takes). Since I talk endlessly about it whilst being scant with details, here are a few tidbits for the curious. Firstly, the cast will be somewhat expanded from the usual format we had in Music, with appearences from members of the Mane Six, as well as notable ponies like Lyra, Bonbon and Derpy. In fact, one of the reasons I decided to expand the piece was because I wanted to spend a little time with these characters, make sure they had some development and some spotlight as opposed to throwaway cameo roles. Secondly, it will tie up a number of the floating plot threads that I intentionally left in Music. Thirdly, there will be Octamom, and it will be glorious.

Well, after some thinking and some feedback, I've decided what to spend my new weekly slot on. We're rolling with the audience prompt story idea, since I enjoy interacting with you guys and the challenge that it occasionally presents. Here be ye rules:

1) If you submit a prompt and I use it, you'll be credited accordingly in the A/N for that chapter.

2) If at any point I have more prompts than I need (hopefully this will be the case!), I'll pick ones I like.

3) I'm not going to impose limits on what characters this thing will involve. However, in order to keep things simple for me, what I'll do is pick a 'comfort' pairing, and any prompt that doesn't specifically involve other characters will probably end up being written for that pairing. Not always, but probably. So if you really, really want to see what I would do with certain characters, make sure you specify them! (As a few of you might have guessed based on the content of the last blog post, that comfort pairing will probably be Octascratch.)

4) There will not be any clop.

5) Since it's a one-per-week thing, please try not to totally spam prompts. After all, other people might have a prompt they want done, too!

Other than that, let's just have fun with it. I might throw in a bonus chapter every four or five chapters or something, but we can work out stuff like that when we get there. I'll be doing it on Fridays. I will be starting it today (by my clock at least; the first of March, 2013 to all you folks in different time zones), so if you've got any ideas you'd like to see, feel free to let loose in comments or PMs. I'm looking forward to trying this out!

Okay, so. In order to get the full import of this blog post, you would have to be familiar with my scheduling habits. Thankfully, these are not very complicated. I have two slots. In each of those slots is a story. I then try to alternate between the slots. Sometimes I break stride if a story isn't working and I need to refresh myself by moving to the other, or if a story is going really well and I feel I can update more than once in a row quickly. It's very simple, a-side b-side logic.

I'm thinking of expanding that schedule so it now has three slots: an A-side, a B-side, and a weekly thing. Ideally, the weekly thing should be short and easy to write (best-case scenario: can be reliably done within a day), so I don't get too distracted by it and hold up the other projects. That way, you guys get more content, and I get more variety in what I do. Everybody wins.

So, going on the basis that I'll probably end up doing all this (since I tend to get somewhat overzealous about such things), the only questions that remain are: what's the first thing that should fill my new weekly schedule slot, and what day should I do the weekly thing on? Suggestions I've already considered for the weekly thing slot are:

– Some kind of sequel to Music. Since Music already pretty much dealt with all the plot, I could focus more on the slice-of-life aspects. Which is basically a fancy way of saying, "I could take Music!Vinyltavia out for a joyride and just do all sorts of scenes and stuff from the relationship post main story." There probably wouldn't be any hard chronology, and the individual pieces would most likely be 500-1500 words in length, involving a single event or something.

– A new collection of stuff, featuring one pairing. Pieces would likely be wordcounted to 500 words each, because I like the challenge of doing a worthwhile piece in 500 words.

– Somewhat of a curveball: a collection for reader-made prompts. You send in the prompts, I'd pick one, do whatever I wanted with it, and post the result. (I did something similar back in the FFVII fandom, and that went on for like 150 chapters or so. Good fun, though.)

If anybody has any other suggestions, feel free to let me know; I'm interested in what you guys think about the whole idea. As for the day I'd be doing all this on...eh, probably Thursdays or Fridays. Wednesday is a pretty meh day, even if it is named after Odin. Tuesdays are weird, and Mondays? I think not. Either way, let me know what you think!

(Still can't be bothered to do Fear. I'm thinking about starting the post-Music oneshot early.)

Well, Music's done. Thankfully, since the last blog post I happened to remember that I'm British, and therefore don't actually have emotions, so I'm not sad anymore. However, I still sort've...can't be bothered to write Fear? I don't know what it is. Maybe I need to do more planning, rejig the events a little. That usually works.

Since Three Mares In A Boat is a story I wrote, I guess I should do my usual thing and say stuff about it. But honestly, what is there to even say? I was feeling mopey after Music finished, so I wrote a very silly, pointless story to cheer myself up. Admittedly, it was started long prior to now; it was, in fact, one of the oneshots I dug up at christmas and decided could be made into something better. It only had 900 words then, but those 900 words were funny enough to earn it a spot on my 'do not bin' pile. Other than that, it is as it appears; a brief comedy oneshot, and not much more.

So, plans! I would be remiss to not talk about plans, seeing as I do that in approximately every blog post ever. I was planning to do a Twilestia oneshot, but have pretty much canned it in the wake of the Twilicorn thing. To be clear, I don't really feel very strongly on Twilicorn one way or the other, but the concept of the oneshot was an exhaustive and detailed look at the relationship, romantic or not, between Twilight and Celestia. It was a relationship I felt was complex, and therefore interesting. Naturally, Twilicorn will change the dynamics of that relationship, and it'd feel like copping out to just do it with pre-alicorn Twilight, so I'm going to give it a bit more time deciding whether I want to keep looking at that idea.

I am, in the background, working on a oneshot involving Flutterdash of all things, but for various reasons I'm taking my sweet time with it. I want it to be nice and polished when (or, indeed, if) I decide to post it. It's somewhat more 'feels' based than most of what I do, so yeah. (I don't do feely stuff very often. I prefer the funnies, and when the funnies are not available, practising character development by doing slice of life-y things.) I'm keeping details spare in case I decide not to post, but it's going on.

I'd also like to do some drabbles when I can grab a little time. I'm a lot more used to writing at length nowadays (heck, even the later chapters of Music got to 3000 words, and that was a series where I kept things deliberately short), but I think I've lost the concision and poetry of writing in shortform. I've not really sat down and had a good, long drabble session since I joined the site, and that just isn't cricket. I know a lot of people don't especially like the shortness that drabbles involve, but I enjoy them as a form of practice and entertainment. I might do some 500 word set pieces, since that length gives me a little more time to expand but is still short enough to require concision. I could possibly do something a little more experimentalish by trying to write a coherent plotline in 500 word chunks, but meh. Decisions, decisions.

And, yeah. That's pretty much all I had to say on the matter. In other news, I started rewatching season 1 of GITS: SAC recently. Man, I really like the show, but it's so easy to get lost. The reason I'm rewatching is because last time I got to about episode seven, had to stop watching for a few days and then had no idea what was going on anymore. Still, I really dig the whole cyberpunk setting that's established, as well as how in-depth some of the sociological stuff is. (Plus, music by Yoko Kanno = love.) I'd also love to go back and rewatch Baccano!, if only because I adore Isaac and Miria so hard it's not even funny. They're just so loveably derp. The setting there is pretty great, too, but I just love the characters in that series. Especially poor old Jacuzzi.

Well, Music Makes The Heart is now officially over. I may tinker with it when I've got a little distance, but for all intents and purposes, that's all he wrote. I said a little about things in my AN on the epilogue, but I'll go into a little more detail here.

I've never really been very good at ending stories. Mostly because, due to the nature of life and fanfiction, I don't tend to finish a lot of the ones I start. In fact, Music will only be the second multichaptered story I've finished. (The other one was the first multichaptered story I ever wrote, back when I was young, enthusiastic and had no idea how to write a story). It's been a while. I started Music before I even came to this site, and even though the story itself is pretty short, it still took me nine months to finish it. In effect, Music has been almost a constant in my life during that time. It's difficult not to feel sad that it's finally over.

I've said this before, but I'm always surprised at just how...'big' Music got. Taking a quick glance at the stats as of the time of writing, it managed to gather around 12,000 views overall, and had 1022 views for the most-viewed chapter. It also garnered 176 faves/tracks. That, to me, is insane. What's even more insane is that it managed to make the featured box a few times. Despite all that, I have a hard time picturing Music as 'popular', even though a lot of people seem to have seen and liked it. I always think of it as a very quiet story where nothing much ever happens, because nothing ever really needs to – a little story I shared with my friends, and a few familar faces in the comments section. Comforting is the word I'm looking for, but that's just my own impression of it, coloured by the fact that I found it so relaxing to work on after straining to make jokes in Fear. Probably my favourite description of it comes from Midnight herald, who called it a 'patchwork little story'; there's something about that sentiment I really think captures what Music was all about.

Let's see...Time to give credit where credit is due. First is Donny's Boy, who noticed the story way back in the FF.net days, and was full of encouragement from the very beginning. I originally started Music as a practice piece, and wanted to end it after ten chapters; without DB's prodding, I almost certainly would have. Next is Omgzors, who very kindly made the picture of bamfglasses!Octavia that I ended up using as the cover pic. Third is my irl friend LiamsShadow, who I almost certainly bored to death with all my ranting about the story. Lastly, I'd like to offer my thanks to all the people who chatted with me in the comments about this and that, and really made the story feel like it had its own little bunch of, for want of a better word, 'fans'. Since I enjoy jabbering in the comments so much, that was a real pleasure for me.

So, what's next? Well, my schedule has hitherto been quite simple: write Fear, write Music, repeat. I've broken that a few times when it worked for me, or when I had something else I really needed to write (Kaleidoscope, for instance), but now that slot that Music occupied is free. I have a few things I'd like to try my hand at, notably a few oneshot concepts I haven't really had chance to try out in between trying to keep a semi-decent upload schedule. So, expect just 'random stuff' in the place of Music updates for a little while. Once I've got a little distance, I'll start writing the post-series oneshot I promised Music would have, which will be fun. After that, I have plans to start an adventure story which will involve Pinkie Pie. Of course, I could always go on an unannounced six month hiatus to celebrate finally finishing something...[/kidding, folks]

All in all...yeah, I'm still a little sad that Music's done. I'd definitely be interested in making another Music-esque story in the future for some different ponies, but it all depends on whether I can find another nine months to waste on it. I had a ton of fun working with the background ponies and developing the characters and relationships of them. Hope you guys enjoyed it too.

I was considering just having a final sprint and letting Fear sit for a while, but that's at an important point, too, and considering how long the waits between chapters for it are already, I think it'd be a bad move.

WELP

As an angry black dude from a popular video game once said, "There ain't no gettin' offa this train we on." Next stop is the epilogue, baby. Choo choo!