Another year, more of the same...

It seems my various distractions lately have even prevented me from making my annual blog post on the day I had intended to. This past year, while I did successfully complete one more chapter on my main story (and even managed to do it before the year was halfway over as I had really hoped for), that was unfortunately all I was able to deliver to show my efforts. Kind of strange to look back and realize that, had I somehow managed to keep up with my overly ambitious original goals, then by now I would probably have been nearing the conclusion of the twelfth and final main story of my LEGO Equestria Girls series.

So where exactly is my progress at right now? For the next chapter of the tenth main story, I will say that I'm probably at the halfway point towards completing it (not yet at the part I've been really eager to finally put down in writing, but I am definitely getting very close to it now). I was originally going to have the end point of this next chapter occur a little later on, but I've decided to shift that final portion onto the following chapter, not only so that I could hopefully get this chapter done a little sooner, but also because after really thinking about it, my original plan for that later chapter probably may have resulted in it being a much shorter chapter than all the others in that story. I'll elaborate more about it in the author's note once I eventually finish and post this next chapter. As for the next side story, I did manage to get the first few paragraphs done at one point, so at least I'm not stuck on a blank page with that one. I plan to complete and post the next side story right after the next chapter of the main story, so my goal for this upcoming year will be to get both of those completed so that both of my ongoing projects can have at least one new chapter added in 2024.

Once again, I won't bother sharing any of the other things I've been doing with my time. I'm sure you're not interested in hearing any of my random excuses. However, I will say that in literally just the last few days, I made a discovery that gives me a little hope for optimism this year. You see, I've done all of my writing on Microsoft Word, which in recent years has been through the Office website, which allowed me to access my writing progress on different devices. Over the past couple years, what I've done with that is work on all of my writing on my tablet (where I'm less likely to be distracted by something else), then upon completion of a chapter I would then access it on my desktop computer where I would copy and paste the whole thing onto this site (conveniently giving me the opportunity to do some final editing before finally making it available for you to read). I used to assume I could not have that document open on both devices at the same time, but after a little messing around, I realized that any changes I made to the document on one device would also appear when later accessing it on the other device, even if the page is technically already open on both devices.

Thanks to this epiphany, my writing progress will hopefully become a little easier for me. Years ago, I used to get progress done by jumping around to whatever parts of the chapter I already had in mind and then fill in the gaps later, but the limitations of writing on my tablet forced me to make progress entirely in chronological order, which inevitably caused me to stall out at some points. Now that I know I'll be capable of going back to my preferred method of writing, I have reason to believe my rate of writing progress might soon be picking up, despite my various distractions. Probably not enough to complete the story anytime soon, but if I can somehow complete at least two chapters by the end of this year, that will make me very excited.

Well, here's hoping that I can make further progress this year. And I certainly hope many of you are still interested in my fanfic series and will continue to provide comments and feedback that would encourage me to keep going.