The Night's Stars Update (Important) · 9:00pm Feb 4th, 2020
Alright. I'm going to be upfront and admit I'm nervous about writing this blog post, but it's something that I need to do.
If you've been paying attention, you might have noticed a few things, namely, I only published one chapter in The Night's Stars in January, and that this chapter brought the story's word count to ~356,000 words long.
I'm going to do my best to avoid spoilers, and any significant spoilers will be marked as such in this post. In the interest of being honest and upfront about things, I'm going to go ahead and get this out of the way: I screwed up the pacing.
Twilight was not supposed to panic as much and as long as she did. Discord was supposed to show up ~120,000 words into the story-and Twilight and Nightmare Moon were supposed to hug in Nightmare's chambers in the rebuilt Castle of the Two Sisters. Now, whether the story is better or worse for this and the perhaps unique pacing, I leave that to you to decide, however, it wasn't what I originally planned. There are a lot of things that haven't gone as planned. Some of them for the better, I think.
As I wrote above, the story's a bit on the long side right now. And if you've read a few of my other blog posts you might be aware that I have a pretty solid chunk written ahead/drafted. I don't normally do that, and I think this may have contributed to some of my plans not working quite as I intended (and the issue with Twilight panicking too much). So, I have chapters written ahead. Most of them are edited, though a few aren't and one of them more or less needs to be burnt to ashes and rewritten from the ground up.
The 79 hidden chapters include published, unpublished, and scrapped chapters. Keeping this straight is a bit of a challenge.
Overall, I have ~17 chapters written ahead, of which 1 needs to be rewritten and 2 need edits and revisions to fix possibly continuity errors (I changed the chapter order and I may need to do some revisions to these two chapters.) And this totals out at 536,547 words long at the time of writing this blog post. Or, in other terms, those 17 chapters are about 180,102 words long. Which, if I keep to my general update schedule, means I have over half a year written ahead.
So, if it wasn't apparent before, yes, this is going to end up being long. Longer than I intended.
The good news is I'm still working on this story and fully intend to finish it. The bad news is I just spent the weekend finally writing the chapter where Nightmare Moon confesses to having a crush on Twilight. As has been said by one of my pre-readers, "It's slow-burn." My response is, "There's slow-burn, and then there's this."
I am frustrated by this. It was not supposed to take this long for that to happen. I have only myself to blame. I'm sorry, and so, though I don't really have a right to, I'm asking for patience.
I can't give an estimate for how long this story will end up being because I have developed the possibly unique capability of turning what should take one chapter to complete into something that takes three or more chapters to happen. Manehattan, for example. I'm trying to work on this without screwing up the pacing further.
I have enjoyed writing this story for the most part, though there are times when it frustrates me more than other times.
Some of the problems when writing The Night's Stars have been difficult to address. Consider, for example, the whole ordeal of Twilight's reaction to Nightmare Moon before Discord. Obviously a romantic relationship before then would be more of an abusive relationship than not, and I don't want to go down that route, which is its own problem given Nightmare Moon's anger issues. There's also issues of age/age difference, the fact that Nightmare Moon, as Twilight's teacher, has power over her, and of course, that by having banished and imprisoning Celestia, Nightmare Moon has more power over Twilight. So these are a few of the issues with developing a relationship between them (Nightmare Moon has disproportionate power over Twilight, for example) and as such, it doesn't happen overnight (unless you want to think of it in the joking manner of, "But it's permanent night, so..." in which case I will smile and roll my eyes.).
There are also quite a few plot points I'm working on addressing at the same time. For example, did you know my original idea could be summed up as, "Follow the show, but change it to where Nightmare Moon won, and ship Nightmare Moon and Twilight"? That probably gives away some spoilers. Another thread was, "Write Nightmare Moon as competent instead of an over the top egomaniac that does stupid things like gloat when she's about to win, thus making her end up losing." I have an ending in mind for the story as well. There are several scenes I find myself thinking about quite often, which includes the ending and scenes that I can't mention because of spoilers. There are also some scenes that I can't fit into the story because of the pacing. Maybe I'll write semi-canon side-stories or blog posts with scrapped scenes sometime.
Overall, while there have been frustrations and setbacks, I'm generally pleased with the story, though the length has me worried. I feel like I've lied to everyone-myself included-with this story because of how long it's taking to ship Twilight and Nightmare Moon-which was a major contributing desire to writing this story-and I don't like this. So again, I'm sorry. Please bear with me.
If you have any questions, please ask them. I'll answer them as best I can. If you have any comments or complaints, then please voice them.
Taking breaks is fine, especially if you're not satisfied with the end product. Whichever way you decide to take the story, I'm sure we'll support you.
I don't mind long stories, on the contrary I find them more interesting, so don't worry about the length of the story.
I don't know if the question has been asked before but will you continue with "Civil War of Harmony" after the end of this story.
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I do intend to finish Civil War of Harmony, but I've also been saying that for years. I have to admit that the last time I read through Civil War of Harmony was over a year ago, I think, and I cringed, but I don't like the idea of leaving it unfinished. It's relatively close to being finished, too.
When I first started reading, I though that Twilight was way too scared of NMM and that she worried way too much, up to the point that I was getting frustrated with Twilight and it started to bore me. And I still think that the pacing before the riot part is too slow, although I also think that Twilight's feelings are justified. Normally I drop stories that bore me, especially longer ones, so I don't spoil myself when I possibly reread them later, but I didn't do that with this story. I played with the thought of dropping it, but then I saw that I had already read over 150k words, which is already more than your average novel. Although the story became a bit stale at times, I was never really bored and didn't realize how invested in it I have become. And in retrospect I wouldn't want to cut down the first 150k words to 70k anymore, but maybe to around 110k.
The story is long, really long, but I was never bored and my frustration with Twilight helped me to identify with NMM a lot more. I was not really frustrated with the story, but I was feeling NMM's frustration, at least that's how I see it. I really like this story, if you couldn't already tell, it's easily in my top 10 of all fimfics and definitely my favourite story that get's frequent updates. And I think the story being so long is actually a reason for that. I am way more invested in this story than I could be in one that's a third of it's length. I'm really looking forward to every update, because I know that it won't be a ten minute read, but a 10k+ words chapter.
When I think about the length of The Night's Star, I don't think about how boring or how toilsome it was to get this far, I think about how much time I spend in this awesome universe and if I had the choice to make this story 200k words shorter or leave it as it is, I would definitely choose this version.
I enjoy the length.
Honestly, i think my only concern with the story at this point is the update schedule. Spacing out the updates is fine and all, but if you already have that many chapters written out, then it seems like the editing work and changes are going to just keep increasing more as it goes on. The more chapters that get backed up, the more work it'll be to change them when an upcoming update chapter gets changed. If you're not careful you'll either write yourself into one heck of a corner, or get so bogged down with adjustments that everything will just slow down even more over time. Maybe a slightly quicker update schedule would prevent the issue from growing out of hand? Of course, that's up to you, as the author, to decide on. I'm just here for the ride and i don't plan on getting off it anytime soon. I've read fics over 2,000,000 words long before so good luck gettin rid of me lol.
>That one spoiler
oh boy, can't wait
Just try not to take so long releasing chapters. It gets to the point where I forget what's happened in the last chapters.
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I generally try to release a new chapter every other week. I.E. next chapter should be out on the 20th, assuming things cooperate, and the following chapter should be on the 5th. My general goal is to spread it out so that I have chapters written to fall back on if something comes up, or more preferably, to finish The Night's Stars and then be able to publish chapters from multiple stories simultaneously.
"Alright, now the prologue's finally finished!"
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In general, I don't have much issue with needing to go back for this purpose. I tend to build on what I've already written. The biggest issue regarding rewrites that I can remember-and my memory isn't that good-has been Chapter 31, where the scene I had written just didn't make sense in the context of the story, and chapter 34, which I moved two chapters earlier, which has created some problems with Chapter 35 and 36 that I've not yet addressed (I need to go back, reread, and edit Chapters 35 and 36). I pretty much need to rewrite chapter 40, but creating plot holes in it isn't one of my worries.
Though I probably should make a few minor adjustments to some chapters preceding Chapter 40... When I was first drafting it, it felt like it came out nowhere.
Please keep going the way you have been. This story is one i have been following like obsessed. One of my favorite things ever is a what if Nightmare Moon won scenario and then it eventually leads to shipping between Twilight and Nightmare Moon. I love the slow burn, it makes Twilights character way more believable and it makes Nightmare believable as well. Going from enemies, to neutral, to friends and finally to lovers is supposed to take time. I also rather enjoy the thing that Twilight is slowly swithing sides. So while she is still in the center, seeing her side with Nightmare when things hit the fan and forging a bond with her that has been tempered and will become unbreakable. It is an amazing thing to read and be a part of. I am sorry you feel like you have lied to your readers. But this, this is good. And for the better at least in my opinion the way you make the story right now. I am here til the end and this is becoming quite rapily my favorite epic of Twilight x Nightmare Moon shipping. And will likely gain the spot as my most favorite ship fic ever. Keep up the great work Orion! I am eagerly awaiting more.
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Thank you for this comment.