TA Widow's Search
MLP: FiM
Drama
Mystery
Sad
In the wake of her ex-husband's death, one mare must come to terms with her guilt as she attempts to find the truth about his death. Could bipedal creatures from the stars really be involved somehow?
Crossover
Human
OC
Other
Moondancer
Flynt Coal · 21k words · 69 4 · 1.6k views

About A Widow's Search and what's next · 9:09pm Jul 30th, 2016

Hey there, Rooster Ponies!

Glad y'all seem to be liking A Widow's Search, a side story to I Against I, Me Against You. As is tradition, I'm gonna talk a little bit about writing it and stuff okay? Okay.

So, this story went through several changes for a number of reasons, first and foremost is the fact that it was originally meant to come out before Act 3 of the main story more than a year ago! You see, the original purpose of this story had been to explain how Arcane Star's journals ended up in Twilight's possession near the start of Act 3 (and that is still kind of covered in the final version of the story), as well as to set up the Forerunner ruins in the Frozen North as having a significant role in the rest of the story. However, because I was busy at the time actually writing Act 3 of IAIMAY I had originally gone to my good buddy Shinzakura (who provided the totally awesome cover art ~~where all the ponies are their proper species what are you talking about?~~) to write the as of then unnamed Widow's Search, since we collaborate on stuff all the time anyway (and considering it features a mother-daughter conflict, I may or may not have done the writing equivalent of type-casting him for it). Unfortunately, Shin was (understandably) far too busy with his dozens of other projects, both pony and real life related, so Widow's Search was put off indefinitely.

However, I still really wanted to write the story even though by the time I would finally complete it, the revelation of where Twilight got Arcane Star's research and the mystery surrounding the Forerunner ruins in the Frozen North is made moot by everything else that happens in Act 3 of IAIMAY. So instead, I decided to have most of the foreshadowing in the new version of Widow's Search primarily focus on things that will be significant in the eventual IAIMAY sequel. For example, Agent Changeling and the mysterious "Disciples" weren't going to appear at all in the original version of the story (and I made sure to toss in several other bits of foreshadowing to things as well. There's a certain word that appears in Chapter 2 that if somebody translates, will increase the "oh shit" quotient by a fair deal for anyone familiar with the Chorus Trilogy ).

Writing this story was also probably the most challenging undertaking I've done yet, and writer's block was a more frequent problem than usual. Not only was I treading unfamiliar ground by focusing the conflict on relatively grounded slice of life with extremely flawed characters, in my infinite wisdom I decided I wanted to try my hand at writing in First Person Perspective. I think it worked out in the end, and I'm glad I tried it, but I think I'm going to stick with third person for my next story.

Which begs the question: What will Flynt Coal's next story be about? Well, I don't want to give away too much, but...