A Glimmer of Hope, Updated

Update: A Glimmer of Hope is now featured on Equestria Daily.

Well, I won’t say it’s perfect, but it’s done. Here’s announcing the completion of A Glimmer of Hope, Third Edition.

Here are the major changes to the story:

1. It seems to be commonly agreed that Roaring Storm was a poorly-conceived and poorly-written antagonist. So he’s gone now.
2. Relatedly, the overarching time-travel / future Equestria plotline has been excised. It had no real pay-off and distracted from Hope’s story. Time-travel remains an element of the plot — Starlight is still looking for that time spell — but not an overwhelming one.
3. I never liked how the preface was written, so I got rid of it. The story begins in Seaddle and the lead-up is told in flashback later on.
4. The last version had Hope redeeming Sombra during the Siege (as per the comics) but losing him afterward. In the new version, Hope fails to redeem Sombra. This doesn’t alter much in the early going, other than sharpening Hope’s tragedy, but changes the climax of the story quite a bit.
5. I ended up getting everything wrong about Starlight, didn’t I? Even so, I decided to keep my version, as it still works for the story and we’re in alternate universe territory no matter what. But I did make her slightly less important overall. She’s gone from “co-protagonist” to “main supporting character.”
6. The climax (chapters “Hopeless” to “Post Tenebras Spero Lucem”) had to be almost completely rewritten. I tried to keep as many of the major story beats from the previous version as I could, but the new version still looks quite a bit different.
7. A few other scenes have been added or entirely rewritten here and there, particularly in the second half of the story.
8. And, of course, with all the cutting I did (Roaring Storm, the preface, et al.), the story grew by 40,000+ words. Admittedly, most of that comes from the new climax, but I also tried to expand wherever the story felt like it needed a little more depth and better pacing.
9. All the Arrowverse references are gone. I knew when the story came out that they were a mistake.
10. The story has new (and actual) cover-art. I’m not going to pretend to be a gifted artist, but I’m fine with how it turned out. It’s certainly better than what we had before.

This marks the third version of this story I’ve written, so I’m calling it the third edition of A Glimmer of Hope. The previous version was the second, and I’ve never shared the first. Some of the changes represent things, such as Hope not saving Sombra and the story beginning at “Seaddle,” that I had originally included in the first edition but scrapped when I decided that the story needed to follow the comics more closely. Others are completely new, because I wanted this story to represent an evolution rather than a reversion. But, overall, while I’ll probably never be entirely satisfied, I’m much happier with the story now.

In other news, my recent story, The Absence of Light, was recently featured on Equestria Daily on — Will wonders never cease? — January 26th. It is the second story of mine, after The Light of Despair, to be so-featured.

So, long story short, it’s been a very busy January for me with these Radiant Hope stories, but it seems to have reached a favorable conclusion.

Comments

[Gordon Pasha]

5197374
Glad to hear it. I hope you’ll enjoy this read-through.

No, you’re right. The Arrowverse things were a bit too much. I didn’t integrate them well for people who don’t watch those shows. It’s hardly the only non-MLP reference in A Glimmer of Hope and probably not the last time I’ll put such references into a story. But how I did it was just sort of clumsy and too distracting and I hope to avoid any of those sorts of things in the future.

(Also, I forgot to mention in my note above, but I didn’t try very hard to make the story line up with current canon. Once I decided to keep Starlight as I wrote her, I kind-of accepted that the story was going to have a “post-Season 5 time capsule” feeling no matter what I did.)

Ah, The Light of Despair. It never did get much attention from readers (other than you, obviously) despite being my first story to be featured on EQD. But it is still probably my favorite of the three Hope stories on here. I too did like how concise it ended up being. Being a reasonable number of words, and not a 184k juggernaut like A Glimmer of Hope, made it a much stronger and easier to read as well.

Thank you for your thoughts. I’m glad you’re still enjoying my work.