On Writing and eBook Production

Well, I've gotten into reading Fanfics recently. I've read more in the last few months than my entire life previously.

It's mainly due to both getting print versions of some fanfictions (Fallout Equestria, Pink Eyes, and Past Sins). And also, my Kindle. I am loathe to read a story on my computer monitor, so an eReader makes sense, no? Since I had it, I decided to look into ebooks for fanfictions but only the more well known ones have them, so....I found out how to produce them myself. For one-shots it's a simple matter of a few clicks and voila. For multi-chapter books it's a bit more involved, but still easily done, though doing it easily required a program like LibreOffice (nice program, that) on top of Calibre.

That said, I've now converted over a dozen stories to eBook form, and those that have more than one chapter also have a table of contents. I also added the cover images the authors used. I did very little editor type work, saving what I made a note of within the books themselves. Edit: Oh, and I only just noticed that there is a way to do it even quicker. I am not a clever pony....

You can find the books I've currently converted (and more details) up on my User Page. If you're looking for someone to convert your book to eBook format, I'm your stallion *adjusts monocle*.

Now, on to the Writing portion of this post...Yeah, I abandoned "A Different Perspective" and that does bug me. It was doubtful I was going to come back to that, but the fact that the show ended up covering a very similar scenario (down to the somewhat implausible "Try out a spell even though you don't know what it does." bit). Admittedly, considering the universe I really ought to have done the Cutie Mark switching thing, that was a huge missed opportunity for me, though I wouldn't have been able to do the whole "Confused about who is whom?" thing.

However, back on track, I AM working on ideas for a more...ambitious work. It will be a Human in Equestria deal (yeah, I know, a lot of people hate that). I am taking some pains to avoid Gary Stu-ism. I've not quite decided on some things, namely an ending (how to resolve the main issue), romance (whether to have it in the story, or save it for a possible sequel, and if I do have it...who will the character be paired with?). I've a lot of ideas but I definitely want to resolve the important ones and prepare chapter outlines before I get started. That was the problem with "A Different Perspective", I wrote that freeform, just on a whim basically. I prepared nothing ahead of time, just wrote what came to me...Stream of consciousness writing has its uses, getting into a groove, but having no clear objective definitely factored into my abandoning of the project.

The Genres and tags for the story in question will likely be "Human" (duh), "Slice of Life", and possibly "Romance". I might include some "Adventure" and "Comedy" elements, but probably not enough to warrant those tags.

Very few people are likely to see this blog post, I expect. I only have a few followers, with only one whom still seems to frequent this site. Still, I felt I ought to semi-formally announce the business with the eBooks and more importantly, my intended future novel project. I'm not entirely sure how long it will be, but definitely longer than what I projected "A Different Perspective" to be (which was about 6 chapters). My list of ideas (most, if not all I think are good enough to work into the story) will definitely take at least a dozen chapters to cover (I've got over 3 dozen ideas ATM, a few are important ones, others are just ideas for scenes, with some that are at least tangentially related to other ideas).

So yeah, bit of a big blog post here, enough that I probably should have split it in twain, but following a blog post with another just a few minutes later would have felt silly XD