Takka Takka Takka: November 2018 - Back in the Saddle · 5:22am Dec 10th, 2018

Hi there. It’s been a while, hasn’t it?

My last Takka Takka Takka was “Emergency Stop” back in June, where I announced everything was being put on hold. Even then, I didn’t know that the Emergency Stop wouldn’t just be for my writing, but for my entire life.

But most of you already know about that. I’ve written about it extensively in “The Quiet War,” Part 1 and Part 2. While there’s at least a third part that needs to be written for that, this month has been dedicated primarily to teaching myself how to write again.

But before we get into that, let’s talk NaNo.

NaNoWriMo November Word Count: 53,705

Projects in Progress:
The Shattered Sky: Each Night I Dream of Home

As usual, I’ve created a 50K Victory Infographic, including a temporary mockup cover for Home.

What was the winning word this time around?

Scrivener 50K Word: a (yes, it’s freaking ‘a.’ I’m so annoyed it couldn’t be anything GOOD)

Finally, here’s my Scrivener Word Counter:

Last year, I had a great quote from My Kind of Crazy, all goofy and fun, back when I had the singular pleasure of writing Skystar and Pinkie, who remains my number two OTP after SunLight. However, Home isn’t that kind of story. There’s plenty of funny parts, but a lot of them are contextual or spoilers.

Instead, I’m going to share the prelude for Chapter 15: The Manticore’s Den. Each chapter of Home has a short prelude written by a mysterious character, a character who we’ll slowly learn about during the course of the story.

I am a fool.
Do not take my statement to be self-disparaging. It is not. It is a simple truth. I failed in what I set out to do. But I did not fail due to a lack of martial prowess, keen intellect or sharp wit. I had prepared for my quest as well as any of the great heroes of legend. I even had wised teachers lending me aid, advice, counsel and wisdom. I was as prepared as any single pony could be.
I am a fool because I embarked on my quest alone. If I had not done so… well, you would not be reading this document. And the world would be a far different place.

It’s a classic adventure fic. We need some ominous!

Financial Issues

I haven’t mentioned this before, but I am on medical leave from work. This means my finances are real low and we’ve been in a lot of trouble lately. If you can spare something, I’d appreciate it. Patreon & PayPal.

Recap

Most of you folks know I haven’t been writing much in the last six months. Things have been a bit busy with everything on fire in my life. Many of those fires are now nothing but embers. Many, but not all.

The thing about a mental breakdown is, if you’re doing the recovery ‘right’, you’re going to learn a lot about yourself. About what you’ve hidden from those you care about. About what you’ve hidden from yourself. If you’re willing to dig, you’re going to find a lot of lies buried so deep, you can barely understand how they can’t be truths.

Now, I’m not going to dive heavy into this. As I said, I still plan on writing Part 3 of “The Quiet War,” where I go into the truth of how close I got to the abyss. But I feel an overall recap is needed.

For years, I’ve used writing as ‘therapy,’ or at least claimed it was therapy. That’s a lie. Yes, it helped me survive, but I didn’t end up in the care of someone who knew how to help me. That took… shockingly… a therapist. Kathy became that person, as did close friends like Heartshine, Monochromatic, Ebon Quill, Jay, Cursori, Jyki and many more. While only one of these people were licensed professionals, each were critical in helping me survive the nightmare leading up to my breakdown. If I hadn’t had them (and indeed, most of the rest of you and yes, I actually mean that), I wouldn’t have lasted that long. Or maybe at all.

I know none of you blame me for going on hiatus. I still didn’t like it. I missed writing. I got so lost with everything else going on in my life that I just couldn’t afford the mental time or energy to handle it.

Still, a lot was accomplished this year. We’ve had SkyPie, Bee and I managed to finish A Study on Chaos Theory, probably the most brutal Wavelengths story yet. While I’d love to get a holiday story out, I don’t think that will happen. I might get another story out though… and I’ll admit that’s going to be rather different. It’s going to be a collab with an author who writes very differently than me. And I’m not going to apologize in advance, or else he’ll probably hit me with a newspaper.

Newspapers are scary.

But no matter what, it was good to come back to this.

NaNoWriMo 2018: The Tenth Victory

I’ve thought a lot about the main content to this blog. Usually, I talk about my daily word counts and usually those numbers are 2,000-3,000 words.

Well, it’s time to come clean.

This year, that didn’t happen. I had numerous days where I didn’t get a single word in. In fact, I had to change my goal from 75K to 50K because a lot of other things, I didn’t even clear 1,000 words. I wasn’t even sure if I was going to make it until halfway through the month.

On November 17, I finally shattered the wall preventing me from writing well. On the 16th, I did 1,781. The day before that it was 513 and the day before that was 353.

But on the 17th, I hit 4,342. After that, I cleared 2,000 words every single day. Some of those days were hard, but a lot of it had to do with me figuring out the story.

You see, I had next to nothing prepared. For one of the first times, I wasn’t continuing an ongoing story. I was starting one from scratching on November 1st.

What was my prep, you ask? Well, I did write a short short called “The Believers” involving two of my main characters, Dusky Dream and Orange Fritz, as they argue about their beliefs. I’ll get deeper into the world in a bit, but the key here was for me to figure out the world itself. I needed that… and hopefully enough to get be back into the swing of writing.

Beyond that, The Shattered Sky: Each Night I Dream of Home started out not with characters, but with setting. I usually do things the other way around. Or, sometimes, the characters come out almost instantly after the setting. This time, I’ve had this setting sitting in my head since BABSCon 2016 when I sat with a friend trying to encourage them to create a stronger universe for a Pony video game they were considering. I remember liking what I came up with and scribbling it down. It’s been sitting in Scrivener for a long time.

I spent a good part of October driving the Wavelengths Editing Team a little crazy by peppering them with questions about the world I was about to dive into. Best part was that everyone gave me a little something different. Some I asked for information about characters (I had no characters planned). Some I asked for general story advice (or offered it). Some asked about mythical figures, about civilization as it stands. I got this massive whirlwind of thoughts and ideas, then I cherry-picked what I liked.

And then, I did the hardest thing of all: I wrote.

Yes, yes, I know. I’m the poster child for writing diligence. I’m the one who yells from the rooftops that you can always do it. It just takes time and effort! It just takes WILLPOWER! Well, that’s still true, but sometimes, it takes a lot more than that. It took deciding to do it when I had no motivation, when I’d rather do anything else.

This is probably one of the hardest NaNoWriMos I’ve ever done. I selected an open-world AU story because I didn’t want to get bogged down with fact-checking or info-dumping. I wanted free reign. That worked for me and against me… because I was building a world from the ground up. A brand-new world, where I had to balance the history of Equestria (a history we don’t actually know very well) with what I wanted to do for the story.

It was a big job. Huge. And it took me half the month to find my stride.

But I did it.

That being said, this is the tenth NaNo I’ve won. So, I’m going to do something different today. Today, I’m going to go back and review the last ten years. I’m going to tell you stories. I’m going to spin you tales. My memory isn’t fantastic, as you well know, but hopefully, it’ll be enough to let you enjoy a walk down the lane to find out how and why I’ve done what I’ve done.

NaNoWriMo: Ten Years Running

In 2009, I did my first NaNoWriMo. Even back then, I wasn’t following the rules.

NaNoWriMo was about starting a story from scratch and starting it exactly on November 1. Many writers like to start right at midnight. I think even I did that the first year, but I didn’t start with a new story. (And I should note that people continuing the stories are now fully “accepted” into the ranks of NaNo now. We were just rebels back then)

(Screenshots from the various Journeyman Project games)

Instead, I started with a very old story. Inspired by the old video game series, “The Journeyman Project,” this story was a massively complex time travel story. Starting in the year 2247, it deals with a time travel agency under political siege. With the first time travel response team having died in an accident six months prior, the second team is having a lot of trouble being anywhere near prepared. Of course, that’s when they’re called into action. Multiple assassinations leave half the team dead, forcing them to take on untried and untested members to round out their numbers before they jump away and reality is destroyed.

After that, things pretty much go straight to hell.

I had written the first draft of Descent back in 2001. In 2009, I rewrote it. I remember starting in a trailer outside a friend’s home. We were on vacation and it had snowed outside. But I had done the work, dammit. I was going to make this work.

Redemption

In 2010 and 2011, I wrote the middle book of the trilogy, Redemption where the team realizes the stakes are higher than ever before. Old friends appear as new enemies, members are lost deep within the time stream, to points thousands of years in an alternate future where humanity was forced to flee our side of the galaxy, we discover that there are incredibly powerful forces at work in the universe… and Earth’s history is just another battleground.

This book became… rather bloated. A subplot started to become far larger than the main plot. The main plot started to get confused and lost as I juggled heroes and villains, and too many character who were somewhere in between.

Though when the main hero has a psychotic break and attacks his acting second-in-command… well, that was a good scene. Heh.

However, the series eventually became too complex for me to handle and I decided to put it aside. Time travel series are often very difficult to manage, especially when you’re aiming to make sure everything fits neatly together. I do hope one day to come back to it, but I needed to grow as an author first.

Scribe (Summer, 2012)

In Summer of 2012, I developed what I believe to be my very first truly original universe. The title of the universe is “The Crafters of Taylin” and I wrote the first of these stories, a novella called Scribe. I found myself in love with this universe and quickly spun out a history that went back 15,000 years, multiple races, different religions, cultures, corporations, trade guilds and so much more. It explores relationships, aspects of gender, class and the fear of the unknown. All this plus a fantastic magic system where the emotional resonance between a person and a piece of art, music or literature can physically transform them… or even literally change the world.

In the Corridors of Light and Dreams

2012 saw the birth of In the Corridors of Light and Dreams, the second of the Taylin series. A massive story about a city in the midst of an industrial revolution. Superstition runs rampant as the recent development of the printing press causes a massive uproar. This novel follows a young member of the Library of Light, desperate to ascend in rank, but constantly being denied for a multitude of reasons (a lot of my frustration as to my lack of advancement at Apple informed this character). We’ve got a classic love triangle, plus a slowly unfolding dark plot to rip the ancient city apart from the inside out… and what lives in the core of our souls (and yes, I mean that literally).

2013 continued the tradition of Taylin. While I finished the first draft of Corridors, I decided to continue. I wrote another brief novella, this one set out in a small town far away from my main city. It was entirely inspired by Twilight’s line to Rainbow Dash in Read it and Weep: ”Wow... I knew the book was good, but I didn't know it could drive a pony to petty theft.”

What Lies Beyond Steam and Magic

Then, I was time to expand the universe with What Lies Beyond Steam and Magic. This time, I pushed the industrial revolution into overdrive with the launch of the city’s first prototype airship. The hero from Scribe returns, but this time with a critical mission: a group has assassinated or attempted to assassinate national leaders from all over the world. Joined by the heroine from Corridors and a cast of both new and old faces, the airship Rose will be forced to set out across the great continent known as the Western Reaches in a search for answers… answers that will lead them to a secret buried beneath the earth for since the ancient war that once determined the course of imagination itself.

Beyond Steam and Magic did win, of course, but I ended up not finishing it. I wrote myself into a corner as I wasn’t willing at the time to stop and actually do the worldbuilding I needed to do. In reality, when you have a massive world, you need to actually take the time to talk about it and think about it, instead of rushing ahead. I hear outlines help for that sort of thing. I should try that.

The other thing I should mention… is that every story I had… I didn’t have an editing team. I didn’t have people to really bounce ideas off of. Sure, Painted was there, but world building isn’t her thing. I had some friends who enjoyed writing with me… but little else. This would continue for one more year.

Stormhaven

Stormhaven is special. And it’s one of my favorites. In 2014, I decided to do the same thing I did in 2009. I rewrote an old story of mine from the ground up.

Stormhaven was originally going to be a webcomic in the same vein as El Goonish Shive or The Wotch. All sorts of wacky transformation stuff with the classic “High School Teen” vibe. However, it became much bigger in the retelling.

Stormhaven is sort of the reverse of Harry Potter. The main character, Daniel, is a magical protege, born and raised in privilege. His father is on the Wizard’s Council for the US. He’s got it all, good friends, gorgeous girlfriend… and a habit of screwing with “Normals” (IE Muggles). When a prank gets out of hand, Daniel is essentially banished to a tiny Normal Town on the coast called Stormhaven. He’s apprenticed (with a little bit of force), to a retired Warlock named Rogers. And there’s a little catch with his apprenticeship… one Daniel doesn’t like one bit. Still, he’ll have to put that aside when he accidentally uncovers a dark force slowly working itself into the very heart of Stormhaven, forcing him to make a choice between saving the Normals he loathes so much or allowing something unspeakable to come into the world.

Stormhaven, I hope, will be published as a YA book someday. I know it needs some more work, but it’s probably the closest thing I have to a ready-to-go book.

Oddly enough, I thought I had worked on this right after I got my first response from Equestria Daily about The Application of Unified Harmony Magics. I guess not! I must have decided to READ Stormhaven during that vacation in Reno. Heh.

Gardens of Equestria: Dances of Light and Shadow

Ah, this quiet, quiet story from 2015. Well, time to tell you all a little bit about it. This was the first NaNo I did after my concussion, preventing me from even looking at a computer screen for more than a few minutes without a headache (if I didn’t adjust the color and several other things).

Not only that, it was my first pony-related NaNo. This is before I even showed up on FimFiction as more than a PR voice for GoE.

As you know, GoE is based on Fallout: Equestria. Right now, the state of GoE is in flux (I’m not quite ready to tackle where things are at right now), but this was fairly early into the production of our game. And, being a bit of an overachiever who doesn’t know when the hell he should stop and take a break, I had planned three DLC-sized mods for the GoE story!

That’s right, the first mod would be set in the Mojave, as it’s a mod for New Vegas. No surprise there, right? Well, the second and third mods would be based in the Boston area so we could go to Fallout 4.

One catch: these two places are on the other sides of the country and it’s not like you can take a train, plane or automobile. In addition, I wanted to advance some of the bad guys and good guys stories’ from the New Vegas story, This Coming Storm.

So, I came up with a bridge novel that would go between the first game and the second one.

I’ll tell you all upfront: unless someone else picks up the torch, the second and third DLCs/games/mods/whatever aren’t going to happen. However, if I’m going to spoil the entire end of GoE, I’d rather not do it like this. If that ever happens, I’ll be doing some sort of special blog/short story/novella. (I always have contingency plans). So (almost) no spoilers here.

So, here’s the non-spoiler version. Dances of Light and Shadow is a unique story where we deal with the “human reflections” of the heroes and heroines of Fallout: Equestria in the Mojave. There’s a reason they’re here on our side, but that reason is a spoiler, so we’ll leave that be.

Dances starts with a mysterious call for help by a group in a nearby research facility the Courier (player), Littlepip, Calamity, Velvet Remedy and Steelhooves helped save during the events of This Coming Storm. The Courier had decided to return to their new life after the events at Hoover Dam (the end of New Vegas, if you haven’t played it). In fact, the group also calls for Watcher and Homage, though that takes a little convincing.

Eventually, the team sets out, only to come into a section of the facility they didn’t explore the first time around, called the Steelstone Complex. Upon entering, however, they get ambushed by a man calling himself Premonition... who—among other things—seem to be able to wield magic. And worse, he’s restarting a long-forgotten project designed to help alter people’s minds. Specifically to do whatever he--and his sinister boss--want.

What follows is a desperate chase through the massive labs of Steelstone to finally face off against Premonition and his lackeys. Sadly, Littlepip and company aren’t able to take out Premonition, but they manage to destroy the mind-altering device… but not the programming core. With a flash, he vanishes and they pursue…

Only to end up halfway across the country.

Right about there is where I left things off. Of course, the story is far more detailed, going into the forbidden experiments within Steelstone, each of them starting to slowly develop magical powers of their own and even Littlepip getting flashes into his companion’s lives (including the details of what happened when Human Calamity is exiled from the Enclave!) I had a lot of fun reinventing the entire world of Fallout: Equestria in a human context, all the while making Littlepip wonder what was actually real. For example, with reality all mixed up and even history seemingly altered… does that mean there was a human Twilight Sparkle before the bombs fell?

Pretty wild stuff.

This story is also the first story I have with a record of me finishing early. I’m fairly sure I finished most of the rest of the stories early, but according to my stats, I got my NaNoWriMo Victory on November 23, 2015.

Sadly, to date, I don’t think anyone has actually read it. Maybe one or two members of the GoE Team. Maybe. If that was the case though, it would be a Director, as even the main staff were kept in the dark for most of the story of GoE.

In addition, I have to admit that this story will likely not be released. If it were to be released, it would be immediately canceled after the fact and it would need a novella beforehand explaining the events of GoE. That might be worth it, it might not.

We’ll just have to see, won’t we?

Wavelength Theorems

2016 was a big year and the birth of Wavelength Theorems. This baby landed with a winning score of 76,300, having passed the 50K mark on November 19. Yeah, I was on fire for this beauty. In fact, was actually already deep into the story when NaNoWriMo started (61K).

Wavelength Theorems is the finale of the Wavelength Timeline. As such, I can’t give you all the details… or many details at all! I couldn’t stand spoiling it for you. I’ve put too much time and effort into Wavelengths as a whole to ruin the story. But that’s the thing… I actually started Wavelengths not with Applications, but instead the very end of the series. However, to make everything work out in Wavelength Theorems, I needed to figure out a lot of things. You guys see how I usually work. I want logical conclusions. Rational explanations. For example, why is Moon Dancer so different than the canon Moon Dancer we all know and love? Well, she’s a result of having Sunset Shimmer as a best friend for years! (Poor thing).

Many people wonder about the implications of The Cloudsdale Report. Well, Wavelength Theorems is what brings all that to the fore. People wonder what timeline Wavelengths actually is? That’s actually planned to be answered a few stories before the finale, but the finale drives it home.

Gah, I really wanna tell you all about it. I really do. It kills me to keep this a

I wish I could recapture the passion of this story, the sheer drive that pushed me past the 75K mark and inspired me so well, but we all know that’s a hard thing to do.

So, let’s talk about the one where I burned it even harder.

The Brewing of Saddle Arabian Teas

2017 was my biggest year ever. 80,918 words in The Brewing of Saddle Arabian Teas. I wrote up a massive blog post about this last year, as I was finally active on FimFiction for that NaNo. Hell, I even took over EqD’s NaPoWriMo that year (and a special thanks to Marvel & Ponder for doing that in my absence this year). I did a ton.

You folks have heard me spout about how much work I put into it. My word counts. My totals. Blah. Blah. Blah. Hell, that year, I also did what became Diamonds Amidst the Snow and started My Kind of Crazy.

Now, it’s also time to tell the truth.

I cheated.

Sorta.

One of the reasons I didn’t do a Wavelengths story for NaNoWriMo this year is because as I was starting to edit Teas and I was sorta blown away just by how bloated the story is. Characters would infodump endlessly. I would pursue massive storylines that make no sense or don’t pay off in the slightest. Now, Teas, is a globetrotter, where Sunset and Twilight are bouncing between multiple different locations, so there’s a lot of world-building happening, but there are points where I want to reach in and just shove a sock in a character’s muzzle!

And I did that to fulfill my word count.

This is the danger of NaNoWriMo. Quality does not equal quality. I once had an associate back YEARS ago who would do 2,000 words a day without blinking. However, he didn’t edit. He didn’t stop and process his stuff. As a result, a lot of times he didn’t get a lot of views. You know how brutal my editing process is.

In truth, there’s a good possibility Teas will be almost entirely rewritten. It’s a mess that I can’t fix easily. It’s also why I was dragging my feet at the beginning of the year about it. Frankly, I didn’t want to put the energy into it. I’m not sure if I’m ready for that yet. There’s a few short stories I’d like to release before I tackle that monster.

So, the story? It’s there. Honestly. But I’m going to have to trim down a lot. Entire chapters (meaning 3 to 6 thousand words) may be removed. But it’ll happen. When I’m ready.

And that leads us to… Shattered Sky.

Shattered Sky: Each Night I Dream of Home

Now, at long last, it’s time to show off just what Home is.

First, I’m going to reveal what I wrote for the basic concept years ago. Much of what you’re about to read isn’t really canon anymore, but it helps set the stage.

Five hundred years ago, the great peace brokered during the founding of Equestria fell to pieces. Advances in technology finally put earth ponies on the same playing field as pegasi and unicorns. Rising tempers and extremist groups formed, demanding significant changes from the Unicorn Council who raised the Sun and the Moon.
But the Pegasi weren’t ready to choose a side. Believing themselves above such conflicts, many retreated to the clouds, but they weren’t safe from the growing conflict below.
Then came the Night of Storms.
Nopony knows who was responsible. Some believed it to be a pegasi experiment that went wild. Some say it was the unicorns, attempting to take the power of Cloudsdale on their own. Some say it was an earth pony cult, determined to wrest control of their land from the finicky sky.
Whoever was responsible, at the end of the Third Era, an explosion tore apart the great “Heart of the Storm” in the center of Cloudsdale. The city trembled as pegasi magic went wild. The weather bucked its carefully controlled bonds. Storms rushed in from all directions. Pegasi were knocked out of the sky. Harvests were destroyed in minutes by hailstorms and floods.
Those who escaped the initial blast and escaped the crumbling city of Cloudsdale fled to the surface as the great storms ravaged the land. Without Cloudsdale, the weather of the world truly went wild… and doomed all ponies to a life of struggling against the endless storms.
Five hundred years later, ponykind teeters at the edge of the abyss. The truce between the three races has all but evaporated. Unicorn magic has begun to fade, though nopony knows why. Earth pony crops are failing. And the pegasi still mourn the loss of their sky, unable to fly more than fifty feet into the air lest they be tossed by the great Skytear, the terrible wind that floats above their heads.
In the midst of all this, four very special ponies find themselves called to the ruins of the long-forgotten city at the base of the ancient Canterlot mountain. A cloaked figure gives them a calling out of a myth.
Find Cloudsdale. Find the lost home of the pegasi. Find it before the final war of desolation descends upon the land. Find it… while there is any hope left at all.

So, yes, I’m doing my own post-apocalyptic universe, but don’t immediately think Fallout: Equestria. Yes, of course that was an inspiration, but a key element of the Fallout universe is that ponies (or people) are essentially living in the ruins of the Old World. In Home, ponies physically can’t. They’ve been driven underground (and no, there were no pre-prepared Vaults) for the most part. Surface travel is possible, but wildly dangerous. Mutated monsters aren’t a threat, but wild and savage storms are… or worse, maddened elemental spirits.

Ponies have made a home in this dangerous land, but that home is under siege, both from without and within. Technology has developed very differently (necessity is the mother of invention after all). Weapons exist, but nothing like the firearms you know. We’ve got “pulse hooves,” sonic gauntlets a little like the weapon Shuri uses against Killmonger in Black Panther. Weapons designed not to kill, but to stun or stagger. There are advanced armored vehicles called “buckle-trains” designed to handle literally any type of weather you can imagine (and usually can handle it).

Oh yeah… and this is going to be an OC-only cast. (GASP)

But as it says in the description above, this is a world very much divided by race. There is no love lost between the three races and those willing to overlook horn, wing or lack of horn or wing are few and far between. Most of those are the Couriers, those who travel the dangerous Surface for trade, communications, salvage and sometimes less savory objectives. Dusky and Fritz, who I mentioned earlier, are two such Couriers. Sadly, sometimes they do have to do babysitting.

In our starting line up, we also have the slightly-too-cheerful Bright Beacon, a pegasus mare who excels in tinkering and alchemy. There’s also Silent Step, a gifted unicorn mare thief with a knack for infiltration of electrical systems and some rather odd codes of conduct. And finally, Scrollwork, a young but extremely well-read Archivist who’s never seen the Surface with his own eyes before.

This group will be the ponies faced with a world beginning to crumble… and the ponies given the chance to save it.

What’s more, Each Night I Dream of Home is huge. I am seriously considering not completing the entire story before publishing it, but instead publishing it in acts of 75K or so. It’ll require a lot more planning, but otherwise, you folks won’t see this for a long time.