2017 in Review

Amidst all the worst that this year had to offer, there was so much good. I have spent seven years among this fandom now, and I hope to see you all continue reading in the future.

I'd like to take a step back and bring you with me to talk about what I accomplished in 2017.

The biggest story that 2017 brought to me was the expansion of my involvement with Fimfiction publishing. The spring of this year was by far, the greatest time that I've had with writing. Thousands of words were going up each week, and I felt the urge to keep writing. More and more, the days passed quickly and I was soon rewarded with a feature for my efforts. Bushkeeper may not be my magnum opus, but the story tells me that I am doing something right. Before we get to the reason why 2017 was the best year for my writing, I'd like to cover every story published and updated, all in chronological order. If you are only interested in the statistics, see after the second horizontal rule.

---

On January 2nd, immediately following the celebration of the new year, I began to work on my dream of hitting 50,000 words in the year. I forced myself hard into the writing, working on the now unpublished Equestrian Scavenger with the desire to finish my first multi-chapter story. There were multiple edits, and many chapters repurposed and discarded, but I felt that the story was keeping my writing flame alive.

On January 11th, I decided that working on one story just wasn't my kind of thing, and I jumped into working on Caravel once again. I threw myself into Twilight the Great Gray as well, and made efforts to outline the rest of the story and solidify the first chapters' plot. One chapter was updated to the story, and unfortunately, the rest of my interest in TTGG plummeted as I facilitated itself in my other stories. Midway through the month, I devoted myself to my schoolwork in an effort to finish off my biggest projects.

On February 4th, the decision was made to shift most of my focus to Caravel. I burrowed myself hard in the story, and managed to scramble out three chapters within the month. These were the only updates to Caravel this year, but they were great all the same. The next weekend, I began to work on a pet story for the Fallout is Dragons Podcast. Much of that week was spent stressing over a family issue and work, so writing was moved to the next week.

On February 18th, I began to publish the chapters for the pet story; Drinks to Dragons (Thank you Masterweaver, for your role as Javolt and sharing the story with the rest of the party). In the same day, I published the latest chapter for Caravel, and began writing Cold Currents Following these efforts, I became occupied with the biggest player of this year: Bushkeeper.

On February 20th and 21st, a few major events took place: I published Cold Currents, earning myself one of my first real reviews as part of a roundup (Thank you, Loganberry); and I released Bushkeeper for the world to see. Uploaded at 3AM, I had no idea of how big the story would become.

To lighten this blog post, I will summarize the following months' story releases: April saw the release of The White Duchess; May saw the release of Unwarranted and Interracial, two personal favorites of mine; and June saw the release of Drivers, a lackluster comedy. Sorry, Bad Horse and Admiral Biscuit, I've let y'all down.

Now Bushkeeper... Bushkeeper, Bushkeeper, Bushkeeper... This story, was both a blessing, and a curse. Let's start with the positives. I broke my goal of getting a story featured. It felt amazing. I was on a high horse for the month of March, and it became my life's work to update the story with two chapters every weekend. And I did! It was amazing, and it showed me and the few followers I had before the sudden jump due to the story's popularity, that I could actually continue doing a story further than three chapters. The funny thing about Bushkeeper, is that I had planned for the story to end within ten chapters. The same day that I published the story to the site, I wrote an outline for the ending. For those of you interested in such an ending:

Wikipedia-esque article about the Bushkeeper and how it’s a creation story for Equestria, mostly followed by pony villages on the fringes of Equestria. Epilogue ends with Celestia reminiscing about the fact that the alicorns were largely heralded as the founders of Equestria, but that even if she does not know the true truth from before her birth, she knows that her family is but a line of Bushkeepers, and even if they are not the same name anymore, the Bushkeeper is family she would love to meet.

This was a cheapskate's ending, and one I will not follow.

The rest of the outline has thus far been scrapped, as the story has been deemed a 'never-ending' one; somebody even put it into a group. That won't be the case come 2018, and this is where I'd like to say my story really begins.

There is one looming negative to Bushkeeper. I have obsessed over it. After the spring, I couldn't be bothered to write anything but Bushkeeper. I stopped writing in the summer, stricken by the thought that I had to update Bushkeeper to not make the readers angry. It was the only story many people seemed interested in out of my repertoire, and I desired so much to please that crowd. I guess I just wanted to be noticed on the site, and who wouldn't? I've always had a dream of being that anonymous author that somebody can look at my work and say 'hey, I like this writing a lot!' This thought process consumed me, and I was only just able to get out stories that I wanted to do in May; Unwarranted and Interracial. Bushkeeper is a great piece of popular attention, but it's not a great story; it sucks. There is no form of solid rope for the reader to latch onto and follow. There is no real reason for half of the things that happen. There is no real effort to fix much of the internal issues that many commenters have identified, such as continuity errors with the story's locations compared to the actual TV show. It's just...

My point is, I hate Bushkeeper. I absolutely despise it. Somedays, I wish I could just wipe the slate clean on this account, and continue on without having Bushkeeper as a part of my library. But I won't do that, because I've already invested so much time into it, and brought on so many readers; I still reach averages of 75 views a day on that story, even after weeks and months without update. I want to change it, and that's what the new year is for.

Despite it all, Bushkeeper has really showed me more than 'I'm doing something right.' It has showed me that I can write so much more than I thought I could. My goal for 2017 was to write and publish 50,000 words; approximately 52 hours of writing at my speed. This year... this year was unbelievable—I wrote double my goal. I honestly cannot believe that I have written so much this year, and the statistics I've calculated will show you that much. I estimate that I have written about 150,000 words when taking into account stories that weren't even for Fimfiction. As someone who occupies themselves a little too much with their gaming hobby, as well as work for my future move back to the United States of America, I am super happy with the amount of writing I did this year. I have most definitely spent well over two weeks worth of time devoted to sitting at my computer and thinking over my stories, not to mention lying in bed late at night scribbling in notebooks.

I said I would never make promises again, but I will give my goals for 2018:

• Finish Bushkeeper, Twilight the Great Gray, Caravel, Drinks to Dragons

• Outline the next Bushkeeper-length story: The White Duchess

• Revisit Twimelines

• Write another story without humans

• Publish 5 new odd-shot one-shots

• Experiment with a few works in short story format; 1 chapter < story length < 10 chapters

• Have another story hit the feature box

• Reach 100 followers

• Reach 300,000 published words

• Rework my user page

• Reorganize my writing drive into different years and categories for ease of access

I believe these all are very much achievable in a year's time.

Now, for the most anticipated portion of this blog post; the statistics for this year! I can't believe what I've done this year, and I am all so much more prouder than I was; I underestimated myself in all of the other seasons besides winter, because I really didn't undercut my readers in terms of posting.

---

2017 Story Statistics
New Stories: 7
Unsubmitted Stories: 14
Unsubmitted Chapter(s): 8
Submitted Chapter(s): 51

New GDocs: 102
GDocs that are On Hiatus: 93
GDocs that are Only Outlines: 4
GDocs that are Currently Being Edited: 5

2017 Submitted Wordcount: 102,274
Unsubmitted Wordcount: 13,427
2017 Total Wordcount: 115,701

2017 Submitted Wordcount: 102,274
2016 Submitted Wordcount: 19,474
Subtotal Wordcount: 121,748

Unsubmitted Wordcount: 13,427
Subtotal Wordcount: 135,175

Abandoned Chapter Wordcount: 7,811
Total Wordcount: 142,986

Additional Numbers
84% of my submitted horsewords for Fimfiction were written in 2017
6.73% of my horsewords are not submitted to Fimfiction as of 2017
3.64x as many GDocs were created compared to 2016
4.25x as many chapters submitted compared to 2016
4.00x as many chapters unsubmitted compared to 2016
2.33x as many stories unsubmitted compared to 2016
1.75x as many new stories compared to 2016

2015+2016: 18 months to submit 19,474 words, which is about 1,081 words per month. Total-wise, 18 months for 29,333 words, which is about 1,629 words per month.

2017: 12 months to submit 102,274 words, which is about 8,522 words per month. Total-wise, 12 months for 115,701 words, which is about 9,642 words per month.

---

Thank you for 2017, and I hope that we can all have a blast in 2018, and maybe even make another work that will bring more to enjoy my stories. After all, that's all I aspire to do: make you happy. This has been 2017 in Review, and I wish you all a Happy New Year!

Source