State of the author and love and loathing in (roughly) five and a quarter seasons

Okay... with the (not so) witty title aside, let me take a moment to say hello to everypony and everybody out there in FimFiction land and report to you all that I am in fact still alive and kicking in the non-literal sense of the second.

Wow... it's been over a year since my last blog post and update so it would be safe to assume that my stories and my fanfiction career (such as it is) have died at this point and that would be an incorrect statement. Believe it or not, I've been around and catching up on a lot of reading, but between getting engaged, finding a new job, dealing with issues amongst friends and family IRL, building onto my house and a number of other things I won't go into, it goes pretty much without needing to be said that my writing time over the last year has been zero or less. But that doesn't mean I haven't been plotting, planning and/or scheming... because I have

First off, for those of you who are wondering, Not All Scars Are Seen is not dead and I should have a new chapter up sometime next week if nothing foreseen happens.

Second, I have looked over the stats for my stories and all I can say is WOWZA!

While all of them seem to have been at least moderately popular, by far and away my one shot Aces High has blown all of my expectations out of the water. At the time of this posting it has been viewed 5,565 times and according to the statistics: "Aces High is ranked 141st on Fimfiction. It is the 44,186th longest story and can be found in 859 bookshelves, being tracked by 489 users ".

Yes... that was over FIVE THOUSAND views and over EIGHT HUNDRED favorites. On top of that, out of Forty-four THOUSAND plus stories on this site (I'm going by the "It is the 44,186th longest story" statement as I really have no clue how many stories are actually on this site) is the one-hundred and forty-first MOST POPULAR story on the entire site. I didn't even know they tracked that and that basically just blew my mind.

In my wildest dreams I never expected a story of mine to be THAT popular and all I can say is a very heartfelt thank you to everyone who has read it, that really really made my day!

Finally, I've been seeing a lot love/hate for the 100th episode of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic and it seems to me that it literally is you either you love it or you loathe it; I have yet to see an actual in between view of it. I actually thought about doing a review for it - or at least an opinion piece - but I decided against it. Far more eloquent (or opinionated) authors than I have already done so.

Me personally, I loved it.

Anyway, peace to all of you and thank you again to everyone for both your support and patience. Hopefully I'll be able to deliver on my promise and get things rolling again, while also getting new stuff done sooner.

Take care everyone!