(Not so) Short announcement · 5:35am January 27th
So quick announcement, I'll be putting most of my stories on hold for a while as I finally have the time to pick up writing more often and I want to get my rewrite of Returning Home out. Now the reason all my stories are being put on hold for this is because I'll be not just rewriting the story but expanding upon it. For those of you that didn't follow the development of Returning Home, or came in after I finished the story, then you probably don't know but I left a lot of stuff out. The story was originally going to be a lot darker with chapter depicting the war on both sides being a bloody and costly conflict.
There were a lot of planned scenes showing just how evil Chrysalis was and going into details of what the changelings of my world were capable of, one of them being they could convert ponies they had sucked all the love out of into fellow changelings but these story ideas were were cut, mostly because I wasn't a skilled enough writer at the time to do what I wanted with them.
Another of the biggest scenes that I inevitably decided to drop and still might at the very least change were the battles of Baltamare and Fillydelphia, which were mentioned in the original story but never explored or really covered about in depth. It was a background thing in the original and again it was because I wasn't a skilled enough writer at the time to do what I wanted with them. In these chapters Baltamare would be destroyed by the changeling swarm and the General of the Royal Guard who was leading the cities defense, General Stone Wall, would be killed. In the preceding chapters the Royal Guard would be pushed back to Fillydelphia in a desperate retreat to try and hold the front lines and throughout the chapter Rarity would take the position as acting commander to try and lead the troops. This whole segment would would end in the battle of Fillydelphia where Rarity was going to be killed by Chrysalis and later resurrected and mutated into a changeling to fight under her.
Another thing to note is that as time went on both who the Individuals that were the Elements were more flushed out and built upon but I never addressed this and as the story went on my plans for them changed but I never went back and fixed/retconned the earlier chapters to reflect this.
On the note of the Elements the training they gave to Twilight was barely touched on and while I purposefully relegated that part of the story to the back I've come to realize over the years that this was a major mistake and while I want to story to mostly focus on the Equestria and Changeling war I should give more detail to her training. I might write a side story focusing solely on her training in the future or in tandem with the rewrite but this part will definitely be touched on more in the upcoming rewrite. I plan to heavily work on that aspect as well as build up and show more of the personality Twilight creates as she is trained.
In short this is a major overhaul of my story that I want to place my full focus on. This means that my other stories will be taking a full back seat and I'll be working solely on this rewrite. I hope you all are just as excited as I am for this as I will be posting new chapters for this soon however I do thank you for your patience on my posting and release schedule, especially since I'm not as active as I use to be. For now enjoy this announced rewrite and the new cover art that will be posted for the rewrite.
Coming Soon, the Rewrite of
Returning Home Arc I: Fall of the Hive
Can’t wait to see where you go with this new version of it and cannot wait to read it
I am very happy to hear this. It's a wonderful story and I'm glad you can finally start working on it again. It had me hooked from the beginning.
Quick update to people in the comments, I've almost finished the rewrite of the prologue and chapter 1, it's taking some time because the chapter has been divided into multiple part and has already become 3 chapters and might even grow to be 4 or 5. I never realized how many details I've left out.