cks you designed to be ~exotic~ or whatever, and those rabid jerks at Disney can only grit their teeth now!
State of the author, road-map · 11:29am Sep 8th, 2018
So... woke up to this question in my Discord this morning:
So, I woke up from a dream where Dorky offered to write up a spoiler post since his pone fics are unlikely to be finished in the next decade. If I asked you this, how will you respond?
You know what? Seems a fair question with how slow things are going, so thought I'd outline my current plans for my writing, and for my stories.
TL: DR version: Still recovering from my old jobs, but hoping to put out a Halloween/Nightmare Night special to get back into writing, named [Slice-of-Unlife]. Will then refocus on Dark Horse, and I hope to get out at least one chapter before the year is over. Also, have started work on an original novel.
More details (including long term plans for my writing and the other fics) behind the cut.
Baring the unfortunate buss heading the wrong way while I'm walking home, and other RL life crap like that, IF, I repeat IF I ever genuinely gave up on a fic/fandom I'd do that spoiler blog thing. The readers deserve that much closure, at least. Never been a... well, pardon the pun, but a fan of the people that just get fed up, and bob away with all the troubles & cares of an unmoored boat in the night.
Still, I can't ignore that I'm A,) still not quite recovered from my old jobs, and how they nearly burned the creativity out of me REALLY freaking freaked me out. And B,) I'm trite but true, not getting any younger, and if I'm going to get myself a real writing career now's the best point to focus on that. While I'm unemployed for a bit, and actually have the time it takes to tap out a novel.
Don't think moving out of my parents place before I'm 40 is that far-fetched a life-goal even for a millennial in this darned economy.
...I hope. 
Anyway...
So my current road-map looks about this-ish at the moment:
1,) Finish the next Dark Horse chapter & the Halloween stand-alone short at my own pace. Before the year is over, and... well, Halloween, hopefully.
2,) Finish the first proof of concept for my original novel 'Unicorn Wizard.' (Placeholder name, heavily Dresden inspired urban fantasy set in either Stockholm or Kiruna, Sweden, but hopefully with it's own spin on things. Nearly done with concept, actually, but I'm not quite ready to share anything from it yet.)
3,) Finish Dark Horse. Hopefully by next year, but I'm even personally iffy on achieving that goal.
4,) Clean up the concept into a proper outline for 'Unicorn Wizard,' and write the real deal. Again, hopefully by next year.
5,) Time, energy, and the size of the stack of rejection letters is going to change how I go forward after that, so after that things get fuzzier.
If Sweden just isn't ready for an urban fantasy/detective novel fusion staring an unicorn PI, I'll probably go the self-publishing backed by Petreon route that Worm did. That means re-translating the whole thing, as well as all the other work inherent in such an endeavor.... but might just mean my other online writing also gets renewed attention, and thus would make it much easier to justify the time spent on horse-words.
If I DO, and that's a big 'if' I do get published, I'm going to have to strike while the iron is hot trying to keep that ball rolling. That means a lot of attention on that side of my writing, and doing so in Swedish.
If both those fail, and 'Unicorn-Wizard' crashes and burns utterly... Well, I'm going to have to start all over with a new tale, and that's, again, going to take time & effort.
So... Yeah. As-is, the one main fic at a time thing stands from your guys POW. Just thought you'd deserve to know why, despite me being unemployed again.
And finally, time & energy permitting my plans right now (subject to change, bla, bla) for the stuff over on FiM-fic. In order of current, personal priority:
1,) Dark Horse, as mentioned.
2,) Deal with the 'low-hanging fruits,' and finish Rare Source of Irritation and My Life As My Ironically Bad OC.
('Low hanging' because they're planned to be shorter then the other stories. Nothing else.)
3,) Finish the current arc of Horse Feathers. Maybe... 3-5 chapters, or so? So that it semi-ends on a more positive note, at least, just in case of further long-term hiatus.
4,) Finish Sufficiently Advanced. Since that one already has a planned start, middle and end, I foresee the least trouble with this one.
I have however been thinking hard about writing out Human!-Lyra, since the more I've banged my head against writing her, the worse figuring out an actual arc for her has become.
If that happens, and right now it's leaning heavily that way, there will still be a 'Mane 8' on the human side of things. The last member will just be changed to some-pony else, if you follow.
If you came to that one because you saw her tag... Well, sorry, but thought I'd give an heads-up right now.
5,) Finish One Man's Curse, Is Another Mare's Blessing...
Or, well, at least help it limp over the finish line. My first ever fan-fic so it has a LOT of troubles I'm hesitant about now as a more experienced writer... but at the same time it was my first. And you only get one of those.
So... yeah. Seems oddly fitting that I'd have mixed feelings on a story all about mixed blessings, but even so I do hope to go against the throng, and at least have some sort of ending to my Five Score start of Dorkness, if you pardon the pun.
6,) Finish-finish Horse Feathers.
Imagined at least three arcs more for it. 'Shenanigans/Adventures in Equestria, and CMC Stowaways & Björn getting dragged into a Dresden plot as they map the roads home.
...And the third one being such a humongous spoiler I'm not even going to name it in tags. Sorry if that's teasing, but I feel it's true.
Realize this is going to be pretty mixed news for quite a few of you, but hope that I've still here, and that I've devoted a lot of thought to how to keep this ball rolling with the rest of my life brings some comfort, at least.
And as always, thank you for reading. 
Good luck with the Unicorn Wizard story, it sounds interesting.
Good luck with the original story! Also, glad to see Horse Feathers on here, it's probably my favorite story on the site.
Usual disclaimers: I will pretend I don't know you if that story publishes and there's DRM on it. :P
It does sound interesting, and knowing your writing quality, I'd be interested in reading it. Assuming there's a version of it in English. Despite efforts, any attempts at making me multilingual didn't stick (and I sadly would not know Swedish no matter what).
REALLY hoping to see the stories here update, though. Horsefeathers, SA, One Man's Curse, and Ironically Bad OC especially. Those were more light and humorous so far, and I prefer that to the original Dresden material. (I still liked Dark Horse, but that too is rather dark for my preferred tastes.)
To my intense disappointment, "talking to people on Fimfic" is the closest I ever get to a "MLP" dream
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Thank you.
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I must admit I sincerely hope for real book versions, and I do all my writing in English out of habit now so even if I'm not personally involved translations should be decently easy even from Swedish...
But, well, it's a rare debut book that goes hard-cover, let alone multi-lingual. And that's even if I do make that leap from writing fan-fiction to original fiction while sticking the landing enough for publication at all.
Granted, The Circle of all bland things managed all three just a few years ago and that's also a Swedish urban-fantasy novel, but want to keep my expectations realistic, you know?
Here's hoping.
And that's fair. I've got a soft-spot for Dark Horse since it's let me push myself and grow so much as a writer, but I'm not going to deny it's really, really dark in spots.
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I hear that self-publishing with Amazon (and possibly other companies) is fairly easy. Also go poke the author of the Nyx stories, or go to Royal Road Legends and ask Alkaliho how he's doing it -- they have actual publishing companies that they are working with. The reason I mention DRM is that a lot of people enable that when self-publishing on Amazon, and it can't be disabled later. If DRM is combined with the option that gets you more publishing benefits, but requires that the book be taken down elsewhere... you end up unable to read the thing, and if you buy it, you don't actually own the book. It's more like you leased access rights to the book, which can be revoked at their discretion (and you can't copy it without stripping the encryption, which isn't allowed).
I have to say THANK YOU for saying you want to start "Sufficiently Advanced." As I tried reading Dark Horse, but it's a bit confusing to me... Horse Feathers I might try, till I see S.A. started.
I might be one of the few that has read and reread the S.A. chapters multiple times, always hoping to see an update...
Cheers mate, and Thank you most humbly.
Gryphon <><