Rant + Story News · 6:16pm Mar 1st, 2013
Long rant incoming. Don't hate me. 
When I first started working on my fic series (over a year ago, now... yikes...) I sorta kinda had an idea it'd be difficult to write something large scale and tie it into the show seamlessly. To try and solve that issue, at first, I aimed at locking the story at a certain point (the original Starfall story was supposed to take place between seasons 1 and 2), and would just note to ignore anything that happens afterwards. At the time, I kinda hated this approach.
As I wrapped up When Stars Collide (which isn't posted here just yet), I wasn't content with ignoring what may happen later in the TV series. And so, as I started to develop Dominion of the Night I decided to focus on making sure that regardless of what happened in the show, Starfall could in some way sit on its own somewhat unaffected by the changes that happen from season to season. To do this, for better or worse, time travel became a core part of the story...
The bad side of doing this meant the story would no longer sit in the same universe... and so rather than being the seamless tie-in I wanted, it's now an event that sorta sits on its own but could (and tries to) be connected in a lot of ways to the show. On the other hand, there's no longer the same restrictions on the story and if someone points out that I'm not following canon I get to point at the "Alternate Universe" tag.
Still, time travel didn't fix everything like I was hoping it would. The third season of FiM created so many new problems... and while yes, I could just ignore them and move on, some of the changes were so drastic they forced me to rethink how certain events would play out in my own story. For example, Discord's return and being switched to good (even if it does turn out to be only temporary) was something that was going to happen in the final book of the Starfall series. It kinda loses its effect if it's already happened in the show. To add to that, there is a serious war caused by Luna's fall to evil that comes about in Dominion of the Night, but her ability to dream walk adds a whole new dynamic to how this will take place.
And then there's Twilight's alicorn makeover. Without totally derailing this, first let me say I have no problem with her change - as I've said before, and I probably stand with only a handful of people on this topic, but I like alicorns quite a bit. (However, how it all played out... well, that I'm less happy with. But that's another rant for another time.) But yes, making her into a princess created a whoooole new issue of working events around her pre and post wings, which will get tricky, especially since a large part of the story deals with the future.
And so, with all that said, and though I'm still not fond of the idea, I've decided to return to my original plan of locking the story to certain seasons. The tl;dr version: Starfall will now only be tied to FiM seasons one through three.
As for the release schedule, Dominion of the Night will be finished sometime before the fourth season airs, and I should even have When Stars Collide's rerelease done before it as well. However, the third and final story, Pillar of Time, will almost definitely start to release sometimes around when the next season begins.
