April Update · 6:49pm Apr 25th, 2019

Sorry to disappear for the past few weeks. My update is that work is a royal pain the flank right now, and I'm not finding much time or emotional energy to write at the moment. Work continues--slowly--on the climactic Firefly chapter for the Battle of Outpost Epsilon, and after that, as promised, I'll shift over to Unleash the Magic - Nightmare Night for a couple chapters. Work, unfortunately, is not likely to let up for at least several weeks, and after that, I'll be looking forward to what I hope will be a two week vacation at least partially spent at the poker tables of Las Vegas in late May/early June. So unfortunately, new chapters will be coming slower than usual for the foreseeable future.

Speaking of Firefly, the voice actors have been selected for first five chapters of the live reading of Before of the Storm: The Rise of Firefly, which is going into production shortly. I'm pleased to say I've gained at least two roles of my own for my first VA job! More information on that will follow as the project reaches fruition and audio chapters start to be released.

I've also been doing yet another editing pass on Turnabout Storm, as I listened to it recited using the site's read-out-loud function on a long road trip and heard of lot of things that made me grimace; still more missed typos as well as plenty of clumsy prose and narration. So I've been going through it yet again, listening to it recited while scanning the document directly (which I can heartily recommend as an editing technique) and this time, aside from the corrections, my emphasis has been removing the overuse of ellipses and more of the Lavender Unicorn-type stuff for other characters--no more 'human lawyer' unless directly called for, and a lot less things like 'country mare' or 'fashionista'. I'm also removing some of the more "tell-y" things (i.e., showing versus telling; you want the former, not the latter) I did in narration and other stuff I now consider unnecessary or disruptive to reading flow.

If nothing else, the story has provided a very good benchmark on my progress as a writer over the years, as some of the things I thought were great a few years ago now just make me grimace. I should be grateful for that, at least.

In other news, we're into the ninth and final season of MLP, and I've been both pleasantly surprised and disappointed by the three episodes so far. The two-part opener was compelling and grabbed my interest, the second episode seemed basically an excuse to sell a new toy castle set, and the third is one of my all-time favorites, proving that even if I don't like the direction the show went for the final two seasons, it can still produce high-quality stuff. I'll give my thoughts in more detail on it later, but for now... back to my day job.

Firefly fans, for the long wait, I'll try to post some kind of update/teaser for the new chapter this weekend.