#1 - future plans

this is a quick and dirty 'log' style blog post to keep y'all up to date on what i'm cooking so far

first of all, let's address the elephant in the room before i go any further into my thoughts on lost sun; i wrote some pretty damn terrible fanfiction as a young person that i deleted some time ago, and a lot of blog posts as well. i think it's important to remember that when we're young, we make very silly mistakes and do things we later come to find cringe-worthy. that's part of the nature of growing up and being a creative. it's like a little drawing you made as a child for your mother, and she adores it but you can't help but find it utterly embarrassing in every way.

i deleted these things during a time in my life when i thought i was going to be leaving the brony community permanently, and i wanted to get rid of the things i'd made because i believed them to be of subpar quality. i kind of regret this because if i hadn't done that i would have these things to look back on and remember how far i've come. i think a really important lesson that we all need to learn is that it's not cringe to be young and ignorant, and someday when you're older you'll look back on those times and wish you had saved something from them. a picture or a piece of writing, something to remind you of how far you've come and where you've been in life.

anyway, life talk with rose out of the way, let's talk shop about lost sun.

lost sun is a culmination of stories i really wanted to write, although toned down heavily from my initial imaginings to be more broadly accessible and palatable. as much as i love my graphic descriptions, that's not really what the spirit of lost sun is about. it's about friendship, it's about accepting others, but it's also about becoming a better person. it's also about heroism, and things beyond your control, and fighting fate, and things like that, but that's less the core message and more the content to deliver the core message.

sunset shimmer is a character that's very personal to me because i heavily relate to her arc- i wasn't the queen bitch highschool bully, but i was the burned-out prodigy highschool student who was toxic and vile and thought everyone around me was incredibly stupid compared to me. i had big ambitions and i thought the people around me were lesser because they had, frankly, more realistic and attainable expectations of life. i was in a toxic situation where i didn't feel comfortable talking about my feelings and my interests to the only friends i had at the time. eventually, this did change. i learned to open up and later i met people who i deeply valued as friends, and this was enough to drag me out of my pit! it didn't change how horrible i had been, but i could try to make up for that, and i did to the best of my ability.

it's a story that's personal to me and it's one that i'm writing for myself. it helps that there's not a great amount of good, longer-form sunset shimmer content on this site, so i'm hoping i can be able to fix that.

all these things aside, my schedule over the next few days is looking a bit tight so i'm not certain how long chapter 3 is going to take to come out, but we're looking at an april 8-10 release at most. after that, i'll put out the following chapter in a couple days, and then perhaps take a step back to make sure everything looks right before i move on to the real meat of the first arc. the schedule is going to generally be slow but steady.

that's all for now folks, tune in next time when i'll talk about possible side stories/oneshots in the same universe as lost sun, and what my plans regarding those might be in the future.