So, with all that done, what's next?

Okay, I have caught up socially from my hermit days, mostly. Let's talk pony fics.

Ponyville's First Warrior Meet.

The Flight Camp sequel. After so many edits and rewrites, I've finally started work on the actual Meet, which is meant to be the meat of the fanfic (get it? Meet, meat?). Doing this in a slightly different way than usual, here's hoping it works out. There's a lot of training in the first bits, the CMC learn ninja fighting along with Rumble and Spike, and the Meet then involves Naruto-esque fights with a lot of dialogue spliced comedically in between. That's the long and short of it. The dialogues are easy, the fighting is not.

It's also the fic that's taken the longest to finish, having been started soon after Flight Camp was done, which is close to when I joined this site, even. Followers may have noticed the teasers thrown around about Whimper and Luna and the Kid in Alicorn Armour. It will get resolved eventually, I promise.

Rainbow Dash and the Shameless Self-Insert
Was going to be a oneshot, but ended up needing expanding. And splitting up. See, it's about the novel Rainbow Dash said she was writing in Spike At Your Service. That story is about a pegasus going through some of the things Rainbow did on her way to the Wonderbolts, but exaggerated to cartoonish proportions. So it has very vile, nasty caricatures of her friends: an Earth pony who thinks any use of magic or flight is cheating, a unicorn who always has to do everything by the book and insists other ponies do the same, that sort of thing.

And then Rainbow Dash loses the transcript. Cue a lot of panicked searching and subtle references, as well as some d'awws when she tries to rationalise everything she's written.

The Rumble Episodes

Inspired by Raiders of the Lost Mark, and caused by my brain throwing out random ideas while writing a comment to arcum42, this is going to be three fics, all centered around Rumble and the CMC with their marks.

-First one's Apple Bloom-centered, and mainly serves as introduction to Rumble and Thunderlane's character, as well as setting the scene for the actual central conflict. The story concept right now is that Apple Bloom asks around about fillies and colts who can fly, and after finding out from Featherweight and Diamond Tiara that there's really only one kid who can fly ("But I thought you said every pegasus her age could fly?" - "Yeah. I lied. That's kinda what I used to do, remember?") she makes her way to Rumble, and asks how he trained for tornado duty.

So this story is mostly Hurricane Fluttershy, from Rumble's perspective. It's also going to be a bit of a headcanon show for what Apple Bloom's cutie mark really means. Not to spoil too much, but AB's angle is that of sympathy and togetherness. Current working title is "Rumble's Big Day."

-Second one's Scootaloo-centered. The story is that Thunderlane and Rumble are training in the same spot as Rainbow Dash and Scootaloo are. Both kids pile up failure after failure, and the adults both criticise each other's approaches. Obviously, they end up switching teachers. But there's a second point to it that I shan't spoil. Suffice to say the switch works a lot better for one than it does for the other. Scootaloo's talent is shown to be related to motivation, to going from apathy to really wanting something badly. Just not the obvious way.

There's two songs planned, not sure how well those will work in a fanfic, but we'll see. One is sort of modelled after Pinkie's/Diamond's lament, the other is taken straight out of Dr. Horrible's Singalong Blog. No title yet.

-Third one's Sweetie Belle-centered, has the biggest actual conflict. There are bits and pieces scattered around the three stories implying Diamond Tiara's up to something, which gets resolved here. Sweetie Belle becomes the only Crusader to actually fix Rumble's problem through her talent, which is getting him to speak up about what's bothering him. His issue is pretty clear from the get-go, by the way; everypony sees it. It's just too spoiler-y to go into detail at this early stage.

I haven't quite settled on an ending yet, but I've kind of got an end point to work towards, which is close enough. Working title is "The Long Drop and Sudden Stop."

For these stories, the outlines are present, concept is pretty much finished. They're meant to be like Grabby, in a sense: stuff that would work in actual episodes. They're separate stories because they have their own separate themes and clear beginnings and endings. Haven't started writing yet, mainly because of time constraints and the need to do a little more research.

A Trip Down Memory Lane

The first fic I'll finish and publish next. Princess Luna goes into the astral realm to mend the damage Starlight Glimmer has done to the timestream. She gets a tagalong in the form of Discord.

The two turn out to have a lot more in common than they thought.

This one's more like Empathy or Necro-Semantics, in that it's very heavily character-focused and introduces some new concepts as well as bringing up things that may have been missed at first glance, such as: why is it Luna feels so bad when she had such a short reign as Nightmare Moon? Or what was Discord thinking when he let Tirek take over? How does he feel about changelings, has he heard the CMC have got their cutie marks yet? What would Discord say if Luna brought up the topic of Nightmare Moon? More to the point, what if he saw her in the flesh, whilst travelling through time?

It's kind of Luna and Discord talking about 'the good old days', you might say, one cheering the other up and becoming depressed in the process. This one's being written, concept and outlines are done. And much like Empathy, it ends on a hopeful d'aww moment. Much like Necro-Semantics, it also ends on a random funny. It's Discord, what do you expect?

Yu-Gi-Oh fic.

Cancelled. Sorry, I can't get my head in that game enough to write anything interesting about it. I'm not up for card games anymore, simple as that.

Bastion sequels

Hoo, boy, this one's a biggie. At least five sequels planned with him, and the side story about how the changeling city state is founded. The latter is the one least defined, I might be able to make it work better with Season 5 canon added to the mix. Of the five Bastion fics, three are outlined in detail, core scenes present and good idea of how they're tied together. The sixth and undefined one is planned as a political thriller, involving other races who've been wronged by changelings somehow. The races are taken from Warcraft and Dr. Seuss, make of that what you will. The one Bastion story I really have trouble with is when he's sent to camp with Scootaloo (no points for guessing which camp. You're wrong anyway). There's no place for the plot to go right now, just a lot of disconnected scenes that work well on their own, but lack coherence. And wham lines like "You just ate his only weakness."

So, tl;dr: there's a Lunacord fic coming soon, Warrior Meet coming in the not-so-distant future, Rumble fics coming in between, and Bastion fics in the slightly more distant future. Random note: my feed has over 5000 notifications now. I feel like that should mean something.

Happy holidays, everyone.

Cracker out.

Comments

[Bob-dude]

Rainbow Dash and the Shameless Self-Insert sounds like an interesting read, can't wait to see it myself.