Taking Advantage of the Blog Feature

I figured that since I've posted the first six chapters of Ajax Directive, I might as well start utilizing this feature to talk about some meta things about this account or Ajax Directive.

Potential Question #1: Why Falling Pictures Productions?
Answer: This was just a silly name I came up with as a kid when I wanted to make giant movies. Typically I go by InsaneLeader13, but Falling Pictures Productions was the name I game my youtube channel in the end, and I figured I'd reused it here.

Potential Question #2: Why the OC pfp/Why is the OC pfp not personally linked to you when searching on DeviantArt?
Answer: Back between late 2014 and the middle of 2015 I spent a decent amount of time chatting on Equestria Daily's Nightly Discussion threads, and I did a bit of very casual roleplaying. There was a group of maybe 15 to 20 of us, and one of these people were nice enough to generate ponysonas/OC's for free for many of us, both in the Rainbow Power form and normal designs. I have long fallen out of contact with all of those people sadly, but I assume that the original creator wouldn't be against me using what had been a old roleplay OC as my PFP. If so, feel free to contact me, I wouldn't mind reconnecting with an old friend.

Potential Question #3: Why Fallout Equestria for your first/only story?
Answer: When I write, I like to write within some sort of limits. Open boundaries become boring but strict limits choke out potential, and there's a happy inbetween somewhere. For FiM itself I'd argue it went to strict limits (assuming everything is canon) once you got to the movie and the final few seasons, and for G1/G5 they're both way too open ended to really make use with. Fallout Equestria, being only canon to at minimum the first season and at maximum the first two season plus a few sporadic S3 episodes, along with KKat's OG work, is the perfect kind of open area to toy with. That doesn't mean I'm against using things from outside those limits, but their use can now be left to just references or altered to however I like! Also, Ajax Directive was born of an escapist fantasy that I made in my head in a rough time in my life, but over the seven years since it has gone through so many alterations and changes that by the time I seriously put fingers-to-keyboard, it held only a few faint whispers of the original escapist fantasy aside from being FOE, one of the setpieces, and less then a handful of characters.

Potential Question #4: Why the schizophrenic upload schedule?
Answer: When I finally got moved to start seriously writing Ajax Directive it was in January of 2022. From then until now I have somehow maintained a writing schedule of one chapter a month, and I hope to continue this trend, though I'm not beholden to it. However, writing and editing are different things. I'm going back and editing the chapters many months later so the excitement or agony of writing one of these chapters has long cooled off. There's also one more reason, which is the focus of the next question.

Potential Question #5: Have you even written before?
Answer: Yes, a long time ago between 2008 and 2013 I was a very prolific fanfiction writer for several fandoms. However, I refuse to share most of those works and hope that they stay forgotten. In 2013 I had a series of revelations and lots of advice given to me by a few people that were far better writers then I could ever hope to be, and being in their sheer presence killed any motivation I had to further writing for nearly nine years because my work then was exceptionally amateurish. My hope is that my current work will be significantly less amateurish and removed far enough from my past fanfiction writing history that it will stand on it's own. That doesn't mean I don't still go through days or weeks of anxious agonizing while writing or editing because it's embarrassing for my better-but-still-amateurish works to share space with far better written stories.

Final Potential Question: Will you write anything else?
No clue. Writing Ajax Directive is a chore and pleasure in itself. I have many other stories that take up space rent free in my head, but very few are fanfiction, and most of the pony fanfiction concepts I have in my head have either been done by better people, or would be better served as short greentext dumps rather then serious stories. But I've had motivation to continue writing this story far longer then anything I set my mind to before, and I dare not derail that by starting something else. At the rate Ajax Directive is going, this will take another four years to finish.

Thank you for spending your time reading my short blogpost on hypothetical questions no one has asked yet. Future blogposts will be more tightly related to the story, rather it be through exploring the story on a more meta level, inspiration, or other things.

One final note. Music is an extremely heavy inspiration for me. Almost every chapter title correlates with a song, and every chapter has it's own distinct theme song (some will have two). Hyperlinked below is the unofficial soundtrack that has this in mind, but for now it only has songs included that stretch out to the end of the first 'arc'. These tracks are subject to randomly changing or being shifted around as inspiration shifts or I find better fitting music.

Fallout Equestria: The Ajax Directive - Unofficial Soundtrack

May the Night Last Forever!