Been a While

Hey, what's happening everypony! I wanted to write this blog to let you guys know that I'm not dead!

...Somehow.

Anywho, I wanted to write this little report because I realize it's been months since I posted Journal 3 and I've still left Journal 4 just laying around and never got around to modifying it. Plus I also started Journal 5 without doing those fixes and revisions.

Why has this been happening?

First excuse, Star Wars The Old Republic. It's been dominating the grand majority of my time and I've played it religiously almost every day. Kinda unhealthy really. I think I've been playing it far more because I decided to renew my subscription for a couple months and I'd hate to waste them. So this is probably the majority reason why I haven't been around.

Second excuse and it's the one I've also used equally as much, College. A lot of my work effort (and even a lot of my writing effort) has been put toward assignments for my classes. It's also been stressing me out at points to the point that I end up resorting to playing Star Wars to wrap up a day's hard work. Then I get addicted to the game for whole weeks at a time and I don't really do anything else.

Last major excuse is that there's been some stress around the house. See, my dad lost his job a few weeks ago and that put all of us in a hard position, so I'm currently trying to find a part-time job and my mom's paying to keep up the house between 4 people, myself included. She ends up taking a lot of her stress out on us and it's been making me also resort to SWTOR to try and blow her off, cuz I'd hate to have her stress mixed with my own.

So what does this mean for Price of Loyalty?

Honestly, I'm not sure. I've gotten very mixed opinions toward the story and one negative opinion was rather harsh, and made me realize how little thought and planning I actually put into the story in regards to some of the World Building. I adamantly tried to argue that it wasn't my major focus because I wanted to write a character story. Specifically, a redemption story. I didn't want to waste far too much time working on building the world, and I figured I'd save that for stories where I explore aspects of the world I've created since Price of Loyalty and its' planned non-canon sequels became a character-focused series. If you want to get more of a scoop on what those two side stories are going to be about in more detail, check out what's in the box below. Otherwise if you're here for PoL, skip the big quote box.

Both are going to be different explorations of the technology introduced in The Price of Loyalty and set some time after PoL's ending. The first is going to be the exploration of artificial intelligence, or artificial life, through a major breakthrough of CrystalTech. This ends up leading toward cybernetics, robots, and the controversy surrounding them. A lot of the story is primarily inspired from Deus Ex: Human Revolution and EA's reboot of Syndicate. I want to explore corporate espionage in the story and maybe dabble a little into conspiracy, but this is a story I want to think on a great deal to develop because unfortunately the same story's been done a million times, I just want to find a new way to tell it before I try it, specifically, in the plot department. The second one I want to explore is space exploration. In this story, space travel has just been invented, and it'll be a story that centers around the first venture into space. However, instead of making this an adventure-y exploration story, it's going to be a survival story reminiscent to something seen in Battlestar Galactica, Stargate SGU, Gravity, and so on. Whether or not this will include conflicts with alien life remains to be seen, but admittedly while I liked the idea of survival in space, the recent film Gravity made me definitely want to explore this a little more. It adds a dash of something I plan on using in PoL's non-canon sequel.

For those of you interested in their time periods, I haven't decided. They're originally just independent stories without a specified time period, but they're both set some time after PoL's ending. I really want to do these because this is a universe I'm growing more fascinated by in the possibilities department, and if I may be honest and selfish a moment, I want it to open doors for other writers to explore as well. I can't describe how excited I'd be for someone to take the technology in the universe in interesting directions or even go back in time to write about past events mentioned in PoL. It'd be really cool if someone took a jab at a Children of Men approach in the universe if I don't decide to take a whirl at it myself. But anywho, it'd be a huge honor if someone wanted to take opportunities like that after I finish these stories.

Back to Price of Loyalty.

I'm struggling to want to write Journals 4 and 5 because they're honestly the shittiest chapters in the story and also the slowest. I really hate the idea of writing them because they're build-ups toward what I really wanna be getting to in Journal 6. While it MAY be an interesting prospect and even tense to see how the Equestrian citizens react to the Confederacy's, that isn't my major focus of the chapters. It's to build on the relationship between Walker and Ashen before the big game changer I'll be introducing in Journal 6, which is where the story will start rolling for real. However, even those are a bit of a slog, and I have to decide what all information I want the reader to know before we get to Journal #6. There are three bits I'd like to include in them, one being a slice of Ashen's history and a peek into his younger and more naive days, hoping to build relatability, the second being something about Walker that is actually minor, but it comes up again in the final act of the story.

The last tidbit is the one I'm struggling to figure out how to approach. Journal #4 has a segment where I discuss in some detail how this universe's version of magic works, leading to how CrystalTech works. The problem is that it's an info dump. It was originally intended for four purposes, to show something about Swift's character, an additional reason why Nightbreeds are so out of place, introduce an element that's going to come heavily into play in the non-canon sequels, and finally, show how a specific piece of CrystalTech is going to work in just a few chapters so that it won't seem like it's coming out of nowhere. The tricky part is trying to execute this particular scene and make this less of a dump and more of a passing of useful information between characters and theoretically build their characters slightly more as well as the world. That doesn't change the fact it stops the story though, and I can't think of another instance in the story where I could share this information.

This is the one scene that is making me really grow to hate Journal 4 and why I hate the idea of going back to it because I have to fuck with that one, single scene and try and make it work. If I can get past this and figure out how to trim out as much of Journal #4 as possible, then things will be smoother sailing. Like a puzzle though, it's gonna take some time to figure out and perhaps some experimentation, but first I need to get that willpower to experiment on it.

That said, I'm gonna force myself this weekend to sit down and work on Journal 4. If I can get myself to stop playing SWTOR for at least a few hours and spend at least a few hours on Journal 4 for the next few days, then hopefully I'll get it done.

We'll see how it goes though and since we all know how my track record is, I can't promise the fourth Journal will be published next week. What I will promise though is that since my Semester is almost over and that I've built my need to write again, it will be worked on. Wish me luck though, at least on the rending myself from Star Wars part.

Anyway, that's all I got for today folks. Thanks for reading!