Ever have one of those days that suddenly shatter your entire perspective on the world?

Yeah. They’re fun, huh?

I’m not going to turn this into some “woe-is-me” thing. Basically, some stuff went down. Bad mojo. Intensely personal and intensely difficult. Stuff that’ll probably have me reading Grading on a Bell Curve and a few of my own blog posts about Hope and Faith.

Tip: Never discount the wisdom your past self might have for your present self. Now, let’s be honest, we’re usually ticked at our past self for saying “Oh, it’s totally fine to stay up until 3 AM even though I need to get up at 6,” but occasionally, they can say some good things.

Just some food for thought.

I’m going to have to step away from some things, but I’m going to keep writing. Writing is one of my best coping mechanisms. It’s also far more productive than drinking! (I also don’t like the taste of alcohol. At all. So… there’s that too)

Okay, let’s talk status and a few cool things! First and foremost, the best editor ever, a guy by the name of Ebon Quill, released not one but two stories in the last couple of weeks! I already mentioned the first one, Slouching Toward Canterlot (which he’s currently working on expanding), but the next one… is serious business.

It’s also canon for Wavelengths.

It’s called Little Truths, about a young Lemon Hearts and her first year at Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns. She decides to do something somepony’s never done before: get the crown for the Autumn Liege. With some help from Sunset Shimmer.

You want to know the full backstory of what happened in The Alchemy of Chemistry and Bards of the Badlands? This is it folks. After reading it, I strongly recommend you read my comment on it. I don’t want to spoil anything for you by having it here.

Other cool things happened too, like that the Wavelengths Timeline got plugged not once, but twice this week!

PaulAsaran did a review of The Application of Unified Harmony Magics! I am so very thrilled with this. This guy’s a tough reviewer, but my perspective is that he’s got a solid grip on things. And I’m totally freaking thrilled that he liked it!

He pointed out the biggest weak points, but it was solid enough that he enjoyed it anyway (I also happen to fully agree with him on the weak points, which can be oversimplified to pacing). And it means that Princess Celestia: A Brief History has been added to his “To-Read List!” So hopefully, he’ll enjoy that even more (even if that also has some pacing issues toward the end).

But even bigger is Vren55’s astounding plug of the entire Wavelengths Timeline series! Seriously, I’m freaking ecstatic about his words! He put Wavelengths up there with The Witch of the Everfree!

I confess that Sunny’s panic attacks were originally inspired by The Witch of the Everfree. And seriously, if you haven’t read that yet, you need to turn in your Sunny card. Once you’ve read it, you can have it back. It’s fantastic. I just read it again this weekend. It’s almost as if Sunset starred in a Michael Bay movie that was good! (Yeah, yeah, I know, hard to imagine, but it’s happened!)

I’m reading these comments over and over again. It’s the first time anyone’s looked at Wavelengths as a whole before!

But my favorite part about both comments highlight the fact that at no point in Wavelengths will you find some huge infodump about what’s going on and why things are happening the way they are. This has been a conscious decision from the beginning for a few different reasons. First and foremost is the one that vren55 hits:

Readers may find that Novel does very little intro for such a complex universe in his stories, or if he does, it's via dialogue or shown, but at the same time, I like that he's not attempting to justify or explain the divergence. To the characters in the story and story itself, it just exists, you don't need to ask questions why, it just does.

- Vren55

This is a big deal. To the characters in Wavelengths, this is their reality. Only in The Cloudsdale Report does it get revealed that not all is as it seems.

Novel Idea starts us off by explaining everything that has happened for Sunset in this different world. Well, not exactly, because that usually amounts to, y’know, explaining, usually in a long and dull mass of details. Fortunately, Novel Idea avoids the first big error of the author needing to get readers up to speed by instead letting the audience figure things out through the ongoing events, discussions and the thoughts of the characters. I can’t tell you how happy it makes me to see an author who knows how to do this correctly.

-PaulAsaran

I admit that I learned to do this by seeing how not to do this. There was a book series called Area 51 that recapped every single story with each progressive book. Toward the end of the series, there were literally 2-3 chapters of backstory only. And since I read them back-to-back… Yeah. Got old super fast.

I occasionally do this too much. Heh. Sometimes I leave stuff out. But the nice thing about the Wavelengths Editing Team is that they’ll call me on it and sometimes my extra readers will too! I try to fix that.

Okay, so enough about those squee moments. I’m still working on the Retrospective of And a Sky Full of Stars. I didn’t like where the Retrospective was going (it was getting too preachy, even for me) and then stuff went down making it really hard to sit down and give you guys the goods as to what happened with that story.

I might see if I can get it done tonight and I’ll publish it later this week.

I’m also going to be working on my follow-up for MrNumbers’s amazing The Mare Who Once Lived on the Moon. Seriously, this is the longest follow-up I’ve ever done, so it’s taking time to get it all properly set up. Many gifs are being used! Many!

Let’s see… oh! I have a new story that will hopefully be coming out soonish. Not part of the Wavelengths Timeline, but just like And a Sky Full of Stars, it ended up being something totally different that I’ve written before. Hopefully you folks like it. I don’t want to say anything more about it just yet, but it’ll be cool.

Prerogative is going under the editing knife this week, so hopefully that’ll be read in April. I’m actually going to commission a custom cover for A Study on Chaos Theory as well. So yay!

Oh yeah! I’m very pleased to announce that SunLight Sliders has officially wrapped!

Now, I know a lot of people have been waiting until the entire story is done to read it (I don’t blame you. I hate reading incomplete stories. Hate it). The good news is that you won’t have to wait very long to do it. Someone very, very, very, very talented is going to be doing a custom cover for the story and as soon as that’s in place, we’ll do one last polish pass and release the entire thing all in one go!

Not only that, but the final version will have an expanded Chapter 1 where we get to spent a little bit more time in steampunk wars and actually prep the story to go properly. Looking back, I realized that one of the biggest issues was that the original purpose of the MacGuffin used was forgotten… pretty much instantly. But it’s okay.

I also just realized that this may have just been me being nitpicky and weird. Eh, I survived organizing this thing. I’m allowed to be weird.

Oh! That reminds me, according to DrakeyC, The Albinocorn is now officially the King of Sunset Fics (as if he had any competition). Oroboro was the Prince, but that’s been retconned to Princess. DrakeyC is the Archduke and the Retainer of Sunset Art (Yay?). I protested this, feeling as organizer, I should be included (I’m allowed to be petulant once in awhile).

To whit, DrakeyC offered Archmage or Librarian. There was only one possible response:

However, I did change it from Librarian to Royal Archivist. Sounds cooler that way.

I think that’s all for today. This weekend has been… difficult. Extremely difficult. So I’m going to putter around with a new story idea I’m playing with (not really in the right mindset for the next Wavelengths story at present), maybe work on that follow-up or Retrospective… or something like that.

I’m gonna go do things! At the place! With the words!

I’m gonna go over there now…