Story updates and news! · 2:58am Sep 17th, 2014
A hearty thank you to everyone who is still following 'Our Girl Scootaloo'! It's been nearly three months, but the next chapter for part 3 of 3 will be coming out in a few days, and it's going to be a doozy.
We've followed Scootaloo's efforts to win her six new friends over, and convince them to help her with medical research in the name of saving lives. When diplomacy failed, we saw her reach out to the 'Make a Wish' foundation to drive home the terrible cost of their inaction in a way that numbers and statistics never could, and in the last chapter, the champions of loyalty, kindness, honesty, generosity, and magic got a bitter taste of life in the human world. A world without Mama Bear.
The next chapter will deal with these repercussions, and their unavoidable corporate, economic, and privacy facets. The Mane Six will come face to face with the inevitable loss of their identity that has been looming for several chapters now, and a minor plot arc you may have forgotten about will burst into Applejack's life as the solid foundations of that life shift under the tsunami of change brought on by the meeting of two worlds.
For those of you who might be wondering why it took a quarter of a year to write a chapter, there are two reasons. The first answer is my newest story The Brightest Shine. I've consistently struggled with character development, so when the idea came to write about the war of the windigos and the origins of the Crystal Empire, it served as a good opportunity to improve by creating and developing eight original characters.
This canon-compatible story starts off with the pegasi tribe of Hearth's Warming Eve fighting a losing war against the windigos we all know from that story. Retreat southwards seems inevitable, until whispers come of a unicorn weapon that can hold back the winter, so Steady Hoof and the three remaining ponies of his once proud unit are dispatched to investigate. Meanwhile, Shining Mind, her two unicorn researchers and their Earth pony assistant have indeed created a tool that could turn the tide of battle: an artificial sun that already warms their kingdom and holds back the winter. The fact that their rushed construction also burned half the city to the ground is but a minor setback to Shining, and she is adamant that her team will have the situation under control soon... Preferably before the fusion reactor melts all the way through the stone tower that supports it and explodes.
With the last of their food stores burned, the enraged Princess Platinum has already evacuated her tribe southward, abandoning the researchers to fend for themselves. What will happen when four battle hardened pegasi meet a unicorn with the physics skills to build a sun and the pony skills of a wet dish rag?
For those of you following this story, the next chapter is going to see the plot move as old expectations are shattered, goals changed, and a new purpose is thrust upon everypony by their fresh understanding of the deepening cold.
You may also be pleased to see that 'The Brightest Shine' is the first of my stories to feature a dramatic reading, hosted chapter-by-chapter on YouTube. I got my wife to read it, partly because it turns out I can do 'big kitty eyes' and partly because it proved convenient to have something like six to thirty hours of her reading aloud stored in convenient mp3 format. You see, the other reason for that quarter-of-a-year delay was the premature but luckily safe arrival of a two-pound, thirteen-ounce baby girl, who is not only delightful and cute, but uncommonly easy to entertain by reading one's fanfiction aloud. She is much bigger now, starting to grasp and reach for objects, and while I am enjoying the engineering challenge of childproofing absolutely everything (the advantage of a non-Pegasus daughter is not having to pad all the ceiling fans,) it is also wonderful beyond belief to have this tiny little girl sitting on my lap, watching me type and, given her mother's genetics, probably judging the crap out of my spelling and grammar.
Whether or not this means I may someday have to write something other than post-Asimovian hard sci-fi (with ponies!) in order to have something that won't give The Kid nightmares remains to be seen. What is clear, though, is that my new audience member is very cute, endlessly full of vomit (we suspect she gets it from wherever Pinkie Pie gets balloons and confetti,) and inexplicably soothed to sleep by the sound of her parents' two clicking keyboards. (She sleeps through the night now! All humankind rejoice!)
So that's the news, ladies and gentlemen. New chapter of 'OGS,' new story 'The Brightest Shine' with optional audio, and adorable new baby.
It's been a really good quarter of a year.
To be perfectly honest I stopped caring about OGS a long time ago.
Yay!