Nothing to see here · 6:28am Jan 3rd, 2020
Peeks head out of rock...
Hi... It's been a little while.
Checks...
... Okay, it's been a long while. Just shy of 5 years apparently.
I'm not going to try and explain away that absence, but the main reason that I stopped - probably - is that I lost interest in the main storyline of MLP.
I do plan to eventually watch all of it... but it's just not as interesting to me anymore. Instead, I fall back on the fan projects that came out of MLP - namely Lullaby for a Princess, Children of the Night, Mentally Advanced Series, Rainbow Dash Presents, etc.
That's consumption anyway... Production is a different matter.
So... writing...
There are actually two stories that I've been trying to write while I've been on this extended hiatus - one for longer than the other though. One of them, Status, is a TwiFire ship fic (which is in my top three ships for Twilight - the other two being TwiDash - obviously - and TwiLuna) that has a prologue and most of a first chapter... possibly.
The second, Bloody Murder, is one of my other attempts at trying to poke into writing a murder mystery. All I'll say about this one is that it was originally inspired by Lucifer, is currently sat at a 2k word prologue that's about two thirds complete, and has Vinyl Scratch as the main PoV.
You may notice that neither of those stories are for existing things - like Limited for example.
I may recommend skipping this next bit if you want to have no spoilers for where Limited was originally going and may still go.
I have been sat at one hundred words with the next chapter of Limited for about three years now... Limited is... it's one of the very few stories that I do want to see finished and that really gets under my skin whenever I see that it's not done yet. The issue with Limited, though, is that I've written myself into a corner in some areas. It's not an inescapable corner, but it's one from which the original ideas that I had cannot survive.
Honestly, with Limited at least, I feel like I'd prefer a second run at the whole thing rather than a continuation. Limited started with an idea that Twilight would have a checklist of things to do and would try as hard as she could to work through them all before she ended up being saved by the miracle of true love's kiss (or the scien-technical excuse would have been to bleed off the build-up of excess magic with the very interested pegasus marefriend).
Over time, it changed to be a very deep character study of what makes Twilight tick. If I were to say which chapters I hate versus those I love, it would be that I love Square One, If I Ruled the World, and the Chain (each with their own gripes though), and that I despise St. Petersburg and Repetition. The tone of the story changed from when I started writing it, and I don't think that, by itself, is a bad thing; it's just annoying to look back on.
For other stories that I'd like to work more on... Born a Unicorn has now taken on a deeply personal connection since I, myself, came out as trans. That story may well end up being my own emotion dump at times, though the story itself is geared more towards support and self-encouragement. I do possibly have another line to go down with alicornification too - the idea of analogising it to hermaphrodism - of being both but neither.
Twilight, originally in Born a Unicorn, envied the pegasi for their freedom. Flight has been a largely symbolic aspect of freedom in our own society as well as Twilight's mind, but it's not the be-all-and-end-all. Flight, by itself, is not freeing if there are rules and regulations tagged onto it.
This was one of the challenges I had when trying to adapt it into alicorn Twilight - what does being a pegasus give a pony that being an alicorn does not? Is that even a path that I want to go down? Why not let Twilight be happy as an effective hermaphrodite?
For that last question... I don't think it's a satisfying answer.
So... transgender issues 101... or, well, 1,001 for this probably... this doesn't go for everyone, but keeping the thing that you were dissatisfied with in the first place is not generally something that makes you suddenly satisfied.
Anyway, that's kinda by-the-by. If I was to list things that I'd started that I haven't finished, then that would keep me going for another half a page or so. I don't necessarily think that the story is set up to go in that direction though, so we'll see.
Anyway... What was this blog post about... Nothing much really. It was more of a checking-in thingy to see whether people who followed me about five years ago are still active on the site and seeing things? Maybe? Who knows.
The long and the short of it for having things to read is that they are on their way... soon... one day.
On that note though, if someone does actually read this, do they prefer to read a whole story in one go, or on a chapter-by-chapter basis. This is basically the difference between me releasing as soon as everything is ready (i.e. immediate, infrequent), or releasing once the majority is ready (i.e. long-way-off, frequent releases at that point)?
Well honestly it depends on the story. The TwiFire I can do all at once. The Murder Mystery however is gonna need at least four chapters of build up.