New Story Announcement: Midnight Starlight

I'm pleased to announce the newest story now published on my page: Midnight Starlight

The title should be self explanatory, it follows what happened to Starlight and Sunburst in the New Lunar Millennium. Now uhhh, there's a bit of a story behind this story. It feels weird to be publishing this story finally, as it's technically the story that's been in progress for longer than any other story on my page.

Over the course of four years it's been started, scrapped, restarted, written, trashed, restarted again, paused, rewritten and now I actually have a chapter out. I first started waay back in 2019 by mostly spitting out ideas onto a document with little idea of a plot or even of a broader world to insert them into. That didn't go anywhere and writers block soon overwhelmed me.

While on a holiday in 2021 I was deprived of a computer, and thus had no way to draw digitally or engage in any of my other creative outlets, which left me with one thing I could do: Write. Being able to literally only do one thing must have encouraged me somewhat as I wrote out practically the whole first draft over the course of the holiday. All I needed then was someone to look over the first draft to catch mistakes and suggest improvements. I sent out a call on Twitter to anybody interested in looking over it, some expressed interest but only one prospective editor was actually committed. I won't name them in case they don't want to be "outed".

Anyway, I sent this draft to the editor and... they trashed it. They went through line by line explaining every poor writing decision and mistake They detailed how the writing was dry. They told me how the characters were uninteresting and unengaging. And they had some very very harsh words for the plot. Never before or since in my entire time as an illustrator or as a writer has anything I've made received such a trashing, and I'm happy I got it. It sort of kicked some well needed sense into me, and the editor provided some valuable resources I could use to improve my writing.

All that said it was basically the end of my fic writing career until halfway into 2022 when I tried to restart but fell flat. It wasn't until late 2022 that I made a non-pony video for YouTube that required me to write a proper script that I got into writing again, and the success of that video (its at like 45k views, very positive response) gave me the confidence I needed to write fics again, starting with Culture Shock.

Anyway that's the really long and dumb story behind this story. I hope it's worth all this buildup.