The Gate has been closed... but it's not the only one. · 5:34am Jan 27th, 2020
I kinda hate to do this, but... The Gate has been cancelled.
The story of a large number of ponies going to Hogwarts, ignoring numerous signs they should have seen... and dominating the wizards. It's actually a halfway decent read, towards the end- when I started getting halfway okay at character development and that.
... Yeah. It's like that. I didn't cancel it because of that, though- I cancelled it because it's been on writer's block for weeks... and I just built an outline to describe it, and realized that the story arcs are, on average, 2 or 3 chapters long. The first one- ponies getting their Hogwarts stuff and all- is probably the only exception, at 6 chapters. With that pace, it was doomed to collapse sometime... and I figure I can save everypony a lot of pain by giving it a quick, painless death now, before it becomes so ridiculously convoluted that I can't stomach the idea of rewriting it.
An in-place rewrite is most certainly not going to happen; the needed changes are way too large, and start at the very core of the story- the very core of how it was written.
However, I now have about two hundred thousand words under my belt that I didn't have before- and I've had people telling me that Princess Flight in Just Like Magic of Old, which I started writing shortly after The Gate hit writer's block, feels like a real person. So those couple hundred thousand words must've done a lot to improve my skills, even if JLMoO has a description that doesn't even begin to describe what you'll find inside that story. I think that's something that all of my stories (save Element of the Island and Mount Nightmare) fell victim to: By the time I wrote the description and published the story, I didn't know myself what direction the story would go in- and so gave it a vague description... that I never came back to update.
Now, I pride myself on the little continuity nods in my stories- there's one in The Gate that spans some fifty chapters, and it took the only person to notice it some 3 or 4 re-reads to spot it... and he was still missing one little clue, and so just a little bit off the mark. Yet, in that same story, Professor Quirrel is caught by the ultra-competent Royal Intelligence Agency (who are masquarading as the Royal Equestrian Secret Service)... and subsequently let go. The second time of which, Dumbledore is even present to tell them it's Voldemort on the back of the guy's head- yet he's still around to attack the stone! Oh, and my early-story inexperience at writing convincing characters was retconned as a side effect of the Gate!
Then of course, there's the last little bit. The Gate, like every other one of my stories, is written in present tense. I've always preferred it because it's easier for me to feel the action if it sounds like it's happening around me, now.
But it's a crutch.
I'm at that point in my writing career that I no longer feel the need to write in present tense, to use the format of the work to create an artificial feeling of suspense that also happens to mean my brother can't stand to read it. I'm at that point that writing in present tense feels... wrong, like it would be better written in past tense. Because I no longer need that crutch to make a good story... and can, once I shed it, continue growing into the rarefied heights of ponies like Starscribe and Admiral Biscuit.
So, you can expect a sequel in the coming weeks. Written in past tense. Don't know when- because this time, I'm going to be planning out the plot ahead of time, and it's going to be detailed. I'm going to tweak it, then I'm going to write it. There will likely be a few interesting spots, where something is so simply because I need it to be to be able to make the next half-dozen plot points... but those spots will be consistent. If I'm writing, and I realize a certain subplot I had planned wouldn't be possible because the characters would never do that... then I change the plan. it's not fixed, but it gives me more than a couple chapters to plan out, lets me make far more complicated plotlines. Far more... well, interesting.
See you around, and happy reading!
I was enjoying the story and look forward to more of your improved horse words. :) (also really enjoying just like magic of old)
As for the closing of this story, better to have a plan of action than to be one of those stories that are [incomplete] - last updated 4 years ago.
Good luck on the sequel!
You're welcome, everypony.
And there is good news. Just 16 hours after that decision, I already had the plot ready for the entire first arc of the rewrite... and both of The Gate's editors conscripted in to do the same for On the Implications of Parallel Worlds. You can probably expect to see it going up sometime next week, but nothing's been set in stone just yet.