I got a job! Yay!

I told you my time would be getting limited soon. I just started at the Round Table Pizza around the corner from my house today.

In contrast to what I hear about most minimum-wage jobs, it's actually very fast-paced and gives me very little thinking time. Which means less writing than there already was to begin with.

On top of that (as I'm only getting about 14 hours per week), I'm also going to start freelancing my meager programming skills to supplement my income. I want a car, a new computer, and the financial security that would enable me to go places. Like, for example, visiting friends who've gone off to college.

So I would advise that you don't hold your breath.

If you're just joining us, welcome. For some reason, when I resubmitted the story for posting, it didn't go up on the homepage. I've emailed one of the mods and I have yet to hear back. The comments and views thus far were from the people who were already tracking the story or watching me.

There isn't much to say about the history of this little thing that's kept me up a few nights in the past. I started on it a little over a year ago when I first got the idea. It gained some momentum on Ponychan, but I terribly misunderstood some harsh but well-meaning criticism, and that screwed me.

I said "F*** them. This is gold. They're idiots." and kept writing. When I had realized my terrible mistake, six bad chapters in, I announced that I would be rewriting it and revoked the submission. I then spent about seven or eight months either procrastinating or filling up a metaphorical trashcan with metaphorical balled-up wads of paper.

I finally had something I could be happy with. I submitted to EqD, but I told them straight-up that I didn't want any feedback, just a yes or a no. They said no. So if anyone asks why this isn't on EqD, I don't know. And honestly? I don't care. Not anymore. I'll finish it for myself, and anyone interested.

Like I promised last week, here's some Weight of the Sun trivia.

The story was actually inspired by the first Battlefield 3 cinematic trailers. I went nuts over BF3 when it was first announced, even though I didn't have a computer that could play it at the time. My brother got me into the series with Battlefield: Vietnam and then we played Battlefield 2 together for quite some time. When the BF3 "My Life" trailer came out, it got me to thinking. I hadn't seen many stories covering current day soldiers, and the ones that did either weren't very well written or were just unrealistic. That's where that came from. James shares some similarities, including facial structure, with the main character of the BF3 singleplayer campaign, U.S. Marine SSG Henry Blackburn, but that's not his true inspiration. I'll talk about that in a later post, possibly the concluding one, because of how important it is.

James' full name is "James C. Reichert". (I never decided what his middle name actually is, so it's always been an initial or simply omitted.) The surname pretty much just popped into my head, although the surname of actor Judge Reinhold (Dr. Neil Miller from The Santa Clause, Detective Billy Rosewood from Beverly Hills Cop) was a jumping-off point.

I tried to think of what I could do to make this story stand out. Thus far, I had only seen HiE stories that were either brony self-inserts, or completely non-bronies. I thought it'd be interesting to try the middle ground, leaning slightly towards the former. James knows about FiM, but he's only seen one or two select episodes (one is obviously "Boast Busters") and he only sees it as a kid's show. So he can conveniently have familiarity with some characters, without knowing everything about the universe, and he can retain some cynicism. Bronyism might be mentioned later on, it might not. We'll see.

That's about it for this post.

Check out ZahiraZephyr on Soundcloud. She has a strong, beautiful voice and she makes awesome covers, one of which was just featured yesterday on Eqd. I was honored to mix her vocal cover of "Becoming Popular", and I'm looking forward to doing more work with her in the future, including on the Weight of the Sun audiobook.

Check out my channel on YouTube, youtube.com/thetoplogician. I've got mostly Minecraft redstone stuff on there, and I'm planning to do a lot more, but I might move that to another channel to make room for ponies. So just keep an eye on it. I might start doing vlogs in the future, and I plan to do some covers as well with my alto saxophone. I might do a collab with Zahira. I dunno. That's actually an interesting idea.

To the new people, thanks for checking it out. I hope you like it. To the returning people, thanks for coming back. I hope it's better than it was.

Have a nice night,
Logician