Quarterly Report for 2018 · 9:59am Apr 1st, 2018
Blog Number 38: "On the Threshold" Edition
No, before you ask: this is not an April Fool's Day prank post. That holiday is a pain in the backside and I refuse to have anything to do with it.
In lighter news, we are all now three months into the new year, so time for a business-esque quarterly report! Lovely, eh? 
No wait, where are you going!? 
Welcome back, Contents Page! (Not a user, before you ask: I checked). Yes, we have a contents section again. Pick and mix as pleases you, fellow reader!
- Springtime Sequel-Slash-Sandbox Switcheroo!
- Pinkie Pie Collaboration in Deep Freeze
- Lyra Heartstrings, or The Concept of Having Your Own Version of a Background Character
- Adventure Belongs in a Book
- Holy Molivity, Now THAT'S Productivity! WOOHOO!
Springtime Sequel-Slash-Sandbox Switcheroo!
Firstly, I have signed up for the Springtime Sequel-Slash-Sandbox Switcheroo!, as hosted by Tumbleweed, which can basically be described as Fanfic Secret Santa with recursion. In English: we get assigned a fellow participant in secret and must write a fanfic based on any of their fanfics, and for their reading pleasure.
Without going into details, I have been assigned a tricky one. As much as I've worked out a plan to meet their output, it's somewhat unorthodox and I'm only glad I managed to narrow it down to one fic so quickly. Since the fanfic output was a little hard to deal with, I took some supplementary inspiration from their blog posts. Not usual. Probably not smart. But it's worked for me, and I'm at least hoping it'll be entertaining enough in its own right, give or take its credentials as a fanfic of a fanfic.
Not to put too fine a point on it, I'm uncertain. Cautiously optimistic, but uncertain first and foremost. My only defence is that this was a tricky user for someone of my inclinations, and I'll say no more than that for fear of giving it away.
Pinkie Pie Collaboration in Deep Freeze
Sadly, Ceffyl Dwr's Pinkie Pie Collaboration is in cryogenic sleep. My chapters for the project remain unwritten. I don't want to make excuses - myself, I regard this as the result of poor discipline on my part - but I at least should say that inspiration and motivation just refuse to do anything about it, and the last thing I want to do is force either.
I stress this is an explanation, not exculpation. I don't like excusing things. If someone says they're going to perform a task or service and they don't, especially within a given time frame, then that is failure, pure and simple. No point sugar-coating it.
In the meantime, I've also put those particular story notes in suspended animation. Sooner or later, I hope, inspiration and motivation will come back and thaw it out. My hopes are not high this'll happen anytime soon, but I will keep an eye on the work behind the scenes, just in case.
Lyra Heartstrings, or The Concept of Having Your Own Version of a Background Character
More cheerfully, I've released two fics within the last week which have, albeit in other forms entirely, been begging for treatment from me for years. They're both special enough that I've eschewed sticking them into the Statistics section at the end to give them instead a full treatment here.
Music is the BEST! is my first major attempt to tackle Lyra Heartstrings as a character, and repeat after me: "I've had this character concept for years, since 2013 to be precise". I feel like I've been saying that a lot recently. Also, please allow me a moment of indulgence, because this fic to me represents something rather personal.
If I may: while I pay some attention to fandom interpretations of background characters, I never treat them as anything other than suggestions, to be picked up or discarded according to my own taste. For instance, the Lyra-and-Bon-Bon shipping means nothing to me, regardless of how popular it is among the fandom at large, simply because it never struck me as particularly compelling even when the show started referencing the phenomenon.
No, I had other ideas for her. Every fan, I suppose, has their idiosyncratic version of a background character inside their heads, and for me, Lyra Heartstrings is... hard to describe without going into another long paragraph, but I think "creative child on a permanent sugar rush" meets "Mozart if he was outright spiritual" will suffice for now. What I wanted to convey in my fic especially was this mixture of imagination, recklessness, and unique artistic sensitivity (to the point where she feels isolated by it), and if I'm really lucky I'll get around to delving deeper into her psyche come my next Lyra fic.
It was also, I'll admit, more than a little influenced by the success of When Space Met Time, though largely because it's a childhood friendshipping fic about one of the Canterlot unicorns. That said, between the vaguely Ireland-inspired biographical details (the fiddle and folk music references, mainly), the first-person perspective, and the focus on her influence across two relationships during a narrow window of time, I think this is sufficiently different to make it a strong enough work in it own right.
And frankly, though for reasons I cannot reveal without spoiling a project in the pipeline, it was also an excuse to get my depiction of Sparkler/Amethyst Star out of hiding. For the record: I vastly prefer "Amethyst Star", even if the two "st" consonant clusters basically turn it into "Amethystar" when you say it out loud. Given time, I hope to make clear why I prefer this, but spoilers, spoilers and all that.
So far, I've written about her in two fics. The first, Rarity's Genesis, isn't really a good showcase for her; she's frankly unrecognizable to me and was featured more because she had a Rarity-like cutie mark than anything else.
By contrast, Amethyst in Why the Gift is Given was much, much closer to my own particular version of her character. If all goes well, she too will have a more thoroughly developed role come the next fic, though don't hold your breath. Anything could happen.
Adventure Belongs in a Book
Elsewhere, Adventure Belongs in a Book is my first epistolary tale, a format I'd never actually tackled before. So far, it seems to have gone down very well.
In truth, the Daring Do-Twilight Velvet connection has intrigued me ever since the pre-Season Four days, when everyone speculated that the latter wrote the stories of the former. What I like about the set-up is just how odd these two are when they're stuck together.
One's a Canterlot pony, a thrill seeker, and obscure mother of arguably the most influential pony in Equestria. Until "Once Upon a Zeppelin", she was basically a blank slate, but now we know she's a thrill seeker, and since her resemblance to a previous incarnation of Twilight is too good to pass up, I think I've got enough anchors in canon to make something interesting out of her.
The other's an Indiana Jones stand-in with a literary secret that frankly still doesn't really work in canon, but which at least provided a lot of material for me to co-opt in the story. Truth be told, Daring Do is one of those characters who's such a gleefully weird addition to the show that I'm only surprised she hasn't received over a thousand fanfics yet.
Myself, I generally like to depict her with more of a scholarly bent, sort of like Professor Indiana Jones if he preferred teaching in the classroom to getting shot at by exotic people. Although figuring out how to keep Celestia from solving everything (while leaving an opening for Twilight) was a pain in the backside, I'm largely pleased with the final result.
Holy Molivity, Now THAT'S Productivity! WOOHOO!
Overall, my Personal Novel Writing Month project has so far been a resounding success. Every single month from November 2017 onwards, I have exceeded the 60,000-word target I set myself at the beginning of each month.
You've seen the effects yourself; ten fics in three months, I think it's safe to say, is atypical of me, surpassed only by the twelve fics (thirteen if you count Healing Properties) I wrote for the first quarter of 2017.
In addition, this year's output includes fics which are on their way to becoming novels. Lure of the Flower is not far from completion. Indeed, this fic is currently my pride and joy, not only promising to become my debut novel, but being such an engaging challenge for me that I actually enjoy writing it! To cap it all, Sell Me A Lemon and Dame Trixie and the Countess of Wyrd at least were more ambitious than last year's Petalback or Metal Celestia, which is a good sign of where things are going. Hopefully, several long-denied dreams will come to life over the next few months.
Although that said, in some respects the 2017 output was more impressive, featuring fewer unfinished works and achieving some impressive sizes of its own. More to the point, 2017 carries a warning. Last year, it was around this time when things went south.
With the first quarter down, the real test begins. Since I picked up my pace in 2016, the late spring and most of the summer have collectively and repeatedly proven to be deserts of productivity. Not behind the scenes, you understand; I was generating and developing projects as fluently as ever last year, or else The Nightmare Stigma and The Mare in the Magic Hat would not have been available for publication in August. But the work coincided with a rise in bad habits, dead ends, disappointments, and (frankly) a lack of focus.
So my aim in April, May, and June of this year is to change all that. I will continue the PerNoWriMo project by aiming to write 60,000 words at least, before the end of the month. Hopefully, this will be enough to keep the material fresh without heaping too much pressure onto my head.
If all goes well, that will hopefully translate into a steady stream of fics over the coming months. Though, for the love of Pete, do not quote me on that. 
That's all for now. Impossible Numbers, out.
Statistics
Er... should I really be calling these "statistics" by now? 
List of Reviews
Super Trampoline was kind enough to give my Eights Week a brief discussion in his Slightly Drunk Story Reviews! A bit odd for me, this one, as I'm more used to written reviews (insofar as I can be used to something occasional), but eh, I'll live. He also gave the fic an encouraging recommendation, which is always nice. 
Fics Accepted By Equestria Daily
Still no word back for White Lightning and the Elite Pony. To be perfectly frank, I'm not confident it'll get in. It has little in the way of an identifiable arc and works more as a characterization exercise than as a complete story. I only sent it in the first place because I had a moment of optimistic curiosity.
New Stories?: Two. Both discussed above.
New Updates: Several for Lure of the Flower.
Story Count: 74.
10 in 2018.
26 in 2017.
16 in 2016.
2 in 2015.
0 in 2014.
8 in 2013.
9 in 2012.
3 in 2011.
My Total Story View Count: Rendered obsolete due to new site changes. I keep it here just in case they revive it.
Age: 2,301 days, or 328 weeks and 5 days.
Working: 19 days in December 2011, 2x366 days for 2012 and 2016 leap years, 4x365 days for 2013 and 2014 and 2015 and 2017, and 90 days for 2018 so far combined.
My Follower Count: 177.
My Followed Count: 151.
