I'm still here.

Alright, enough being coy with the profile changes and some subtle hints dropped over the course of way too goddamn long.

Yes, despite the mountain of inactivity and a large banner that hung on my profile for however many years claiming I would never come back, I have started writing again.

Now before I start getting everyone's hopes up, let me make something clear. This isn't going to be my "grand return to fanfiction". I have no waving banner nor triumphant fanfare and I don't even expect anyone waiting to celebrate my homecoming. I expect no one to read this blog post that I'm making; hell, I'm the one that drove any potential followers off by scrawling "I'll never write anything ever again!" onto the welcome mat of the vine-ridden, decomposing barn shack of a profile page covered in webs of spiders that have inhabited it for so long, they're probably entitled to squatter's rights.

In fact, if I had been planning some heroic return to my beloved home of kissing horses, I probably couldn't have picked a worse time to do it! The show is coming to a close; Bronycon is having its final huurrah; and so many beloved Brony Musicians from my youth have moved on to greener and more stable pastures (mostly video games or anime or whatever). There's really just no way around it: My Little Pony is a fandom that's been running on fumes for years and is soon gonna start breaking down. Not to say interest in the show will ever disappear, of course. We're far too established to ever be truly forgotten, but any and all interest moving forward will likely be from a more historical approach. It'll always be something to be looked back on and never again to be looked forward to. And, as sad as that all may sound -or may be- its a fate that was always meant to come one day.

So, why then? Why on the brink of my formative years' apocalypse would I descend from the fucking ether to start making rambly blog posts and only vaguely hint at future projects to come?

No, it's nothing about keeping the fire alive or giving some sort of loving tribute to what is easily the most important piece of media in my life. I'll leave things like that to the more talented of the fandom's artists and storytellers. No, the truth, really, is more simple. I'm coming back because I have to!

Eugh... I can taste the melodrama dripping off that sentence. I never really liked seeing anyone else say things like that, it always just had this heavy-handed sense of fate or mysticism to it. No one has to write fanfiction, barring some sort of twisted blackmail or other weirdly specific impending doom. And, yeah, even as I just wrote it, I can still feel it being just the tiniest bit fake. I want to come back to fanfiction, because for the first time in so very, very long. I actually have something I think is worth writing about.

Well, 2.5 things to be precise.

And that's why I can't call this a "return". Because, in reality, I'm just passing through. I might stay for a bit; make an extended holiday of things; take some time to reminisce and make a few more contributions before I head off on my way and continue on my journey to wherever the hell I'm actually headed in life.

But for now, I'm still here. I should probably stop all the posturing and just get to the announcements already.

I'll be posting my first fic in years sometime mid July 2019, I would've liked to post it earlier, but I unfortunately seem to have accumulated a set amount of other, more pressing personal projects that I have to address before then. (I can't really tell. Is that what "having a life" is? I'm not trying to be cheeky; I genuinely don't know.) If you were a fan of my older stories, then you'll probably like this one, it's gonna be as nice and sweet and warm as all my past fics used to be. In fact it's meant to be a bit of a send off to all those old fics that were once written by a young man who just wanted a way to escape from his fast-food job and angry band-leaders by writting about horses kissing. But mostly, its going to be preparation for what comes next.

I can't give a set date for when the fic after that will come, but I give you whatever value my word as a known slacker has that it will be posted! It'll be a much longer story than the first one, and hopefully more meaningful. It'll likely be a significant departure from whatever you or I have grown accustomed to calling "my writing style", but I think I can make it worth everyone's time. That story will be called Counterpoint, and it'll be the most important fanfiction I ever write.

Oh, and, I have sort of the beginnings of an idea that could come about at a later time, given that it actually starts fully crystallizing, and also I decide that I want to hang around the FIMfiction circles longer than I'm currently planning. It's up in the air right now, so I'll make no promises. But if it ever does exist, it'll be a continuous, ongoing story. A slice-of-life if you will.

Well, that's really all I can say for now. As I said earlier, I sincerely doubt that this blog has any real audience left other than me reading it some years later so that I can fondly regard how naive and innocent I was back then (that is to say, right now). But as I said in a post so many distant years ago, having written everything down helps me feel that it might actually be a little more true.

And if there is anyone reading this and I'm not just rattling off into the void, then I suppose it is worth saying:

Danke!

-Edelweiss

My sincerest thanks,

-SparklingVinegar