State of the Author: November Edition

Well, guys, it's finally here. I said I'd finish IYGALL by the end of 2017, and as of now, only three parts remain until the finale. That's the main point of this post, so I'll get it out of the way as soon as I can: IYGALL will end in the first week of December. That means two November releases, which may or may not be weekend ones, and one definite weekend one at the end. Around that time, I'll be doing something called Lovely Farewell, which basically involves me working on an aftermath blog (which I probably will get sappy in) and taking questions from all of you. But this won't be the end for Coco and Babs by a long shot (just the end of their drama). Check out the rest of my plans for the end of the year and beyond.

* Pommelseed 2.0
This is what I'm calling the set of stories that'll come after IYGALL. These will be much more episodic and will release anywhere from biweekly to monthly. The main series for this project will be If You Have a Little Hope, which is the official sequel; this will (ideally) come out late December right on the heels of IGYALL's completion. Any oneshots, such as a Hearth's Warming Eve one I'm planning, will be listed on their own. Either way, I might put out slightly less Pommelseed content (due to Paging Doctor Sparkle and my IRL novel work), but it'll still update every few weeks.

* Light Pollution
This will likely be completed near the end of the year, or possibly in January 2018. It will likely not have a replacement series, as it was meant to be a companion series to IYGALL all along.

* Actress Square
Hopefully, hopefully the first book will be finished and submitted to a publisher by the end of 2018, but no guarantees. Either way, it'll be my biggest priority among my works, but not to the point where I leave FiMFiction for good. As usual, all those interested in it can ask about it (and ask about excerpts) in PMs. Right now, I'm 66 pages in, and I hope to reach 100 pages by the year's end.

* Paging Doctor Sparkle
Going strong in 2018! I'm considering moving canon events around a little in this AU and exploring Twilight's unicorn counterparts. Right now, it's firmly entrenched in S1, but I feel like one of the best ways to develop Twilight further after Redheart will be exploring Starlight Glimmer, a pediatrician who kind of...illegally manufactures a pill to help foals earn their cutie marks as soon as they can. So, it'll probably go even more into AU territory, but you guys seem to like that about it. (Sunset, for those wondering, works in the same Canterlot hospital as Twilight and got promoted as soon as she left.)

* Separate Ways and What Comes Before a Butterfly
Uggghh...this is where I have to deliver the bad news. I always thought about continuing them once IYGALL ended, but currently, it doesn't seem like that'll be the case. Butterfly will stay in hiatus, as that'll be the one I'd pick back up in a heartbeat out of the two of them, but Separate Ways is cancelled. There's no other way of saying it. A lot of its concepts got recycled into Amour Fragile, and more importantly...I just don't ship Big Mac and Trixie anymore. It was a crack ship I wrote about on a whim because I didn't ship Trixie with anyone, but now that I do, I just can't imagine going back to it. I still have plenty of concepts for Butterfly, though, so I hesitate to kill it off just yet. It's more about whether or not I'll have time to do it.

With all that covered, I will say that I'm tempted to write another oneshot this month. Following my slice of life-comedy-slice of life pattern (that all my oneshot releases seem to have recently for no reason), the next one will probably be Passive Resistance. It's a movie oneshot inspired by a novella I read in French class a few years back called La Silence de la Mer (The Silence of the Sea) about a family forced to house a Nazi soldier during WWII. They choose to rebel against this decision by refusing to address the soldier; even when he talks to them, they remain silent until he goes into an existential crisis about how everything he believed about Nazi Germany was a lie. Naturally, it won't get this intense, but it will include Coco taking an oath of silence and confusing the heck out of the Storm King's army in the process. (As an author, I'm still not sure if I can pull this off completely without Coco dialogue or if somepony will force her to break out of it somewhere along the way.)

So anyway, those are basically my plans for this year and beyond. Hope everyone enjoys the upcoming months and lives them to their fullest!