Shimmer: La Jument Revolutionnaire - Completely Rewritten. · 7:18pm Jan 9th, 2017
TL;DR: This story had a lot of problems, so I rewrote it from scratch. It's now better in pretty much every way, but it will require any existing readers to restart from the beginning. The story includes many changes and new scenes that will leave any reader who does not do so lost. I apologize and understand if this upsets anyone who has been following the story, but I feel it to be necessary for this story to meet the standards I want it to.
Updates with the rewritten content will be at one Chapter per day, until it runs dry, at which point we'll be back to the regularly scheduled updates.
Thank you for reading! Hope everyone is willing to give the rewrite a chance and enjoy!
Long Version
Anyone following this story may have noticed the rather fast updates suddenly shrivel up. The reason for that was, upon starting to write Duel Nine, I realized the story was just bad. Not only did it have a lot of technical writing errors I should have caught, it was overly rushed, with scenes I intended to include somehow completely missing, and a number of other smaller and larger errors that I'm frankly quite embarrassed about.
Instead of just silently quitting the story or trying to fix it retroactively in new chapters while pretending nothing was wrong, I've decided to fix it properly by rewriting the entire thing from the ground up. This involved not only the addition of between one and three scenes in every chapter, but the expansion and retooling of many existing scenes, at times to the point where the only recognizable thing is the setup - and sometimes, not even that much! More time is spent with the different characters and their motivations, and the word count reflects this - at the time of this writing, the new versions of the first eight chapters sit roughly at 72,000 words, while the original had 38,500. Nearly everything is rewritten in a style and attention to detail I feel better captures everything I want this story to convey, so even the few scenes with very little actual changes should feel new to read. Other changes include some adjustments to improve the general flow and pacing, such as the removal of the aside-scenes with the Cutie Mark Crusaders, and (hopefully) more dramatically intense and fulfilling duel scenes to capstone each chapter.
Thank you for reading!
Dang, right when I was about to read all the chapters I missed over the holidays!
Looking forward to the new and polished stuff though.
(I will admit, I did like the CMC scenes because I'm a sucker for the Shadow Play Girls but they're not really something that works as well in writing.)
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Sorry about that! That's some awful timing, I'll admit, but it's probably for the best.
At least you won't be waiting long for the improved stuff!
I removed the Cutie Mark Crusader adaptations of the Shadow Girls mainly because having them work how I want and still be in-character is outside the scope of my writing ability. Conceptually I still think it's a fine idea with plenty of comedic potential, it's just not worth it for me to try and do it myself because of that.