The Olden World is finished. What will I do next? · 9:27am Mar 19th, 2020
I just had the least-productive week of the last three years of my life.
It was fun. Relaxing, almost, and replete with a whole lot of nothing. I sat around and pretended to be a mildly useless and extremely satisfied lump, had my vacation from the daily horseword grind that turned out not to be so endless after all, and gave the vaguely burned-out kind of thumbs-up you give when you've exhausted yourself too much to go on, yet also don't need to because you made it and reached the finish. But in truth, I was a very useless and not-as-satisfied-as-I-hoped lump who finished TOW only to rediscover the reason I started writing a daily in the first place: not creating anything makes me feel like I'm doing nothing with myself, and that's depressingly pointless when I could be doing what I love and writing more horse.
tl;dr that was a well-deserved rest, but hanging up my keyboard just isn't my style. So it's time to talk about what I'm working on next.
First and foremost: to the surprise of hopefully no one, The Olden World will have a sequel.
There are a lot of unresolved plot points, particularly involving the nations Starlight never visited, and from the beginning I never really thought I could wrap this whole epic in a mere thousand chapters. At the same time, TOW has been my pet for years now, and it just isn't possible for me to pick up immediately where the first story left off and start trucking along again like it could go on forever. I actually planned for that at multiple points, weighed it out as an ending, having Miniglim make the opposite choice in the final chapter and return to the north just so I could keep on writing. This was the case up until about seven months ago, when I wrote the ending to Act 3 and got a buildup off my plate I had been focusing on bringing together for over a million words and suddenly the end of the story itself was the next thing on my horizon. Up until that point, I had an outline of how the ending would go, how things would transition, how I would pull it all off, but I never polished it because it was much more interesting and immediately important to polish my plans for the Act 3 finale instead. And then suddenly Act 3 was over, and I had to face up to the fact that the plan I had just wasn't going to work.
Several factors played a role in that decision. The biggest one was my ponies' character arcs, which were all at points where they would stagnate if I didn't use the opportunity I had given myself with Grandbell and was setting up in Kinmari to bring them to an end. I love Maple and Starlight and Valey more than anyone else, but while I'm proud of and happy with their character arcs, they weren't designed to be infinite. They deserved some sort of resolution to their issues. Valey deserved to regain her self-confidence, Shinespark deserved to return to her rightful home, Maple deserved to be Starlight's real mom, and if I tried to draw them out into another thousand-chapter sequel, I'd have to either deny them their resolutions beyond their abilities to interestingly grow from it, or give them the resolutions and then deal with keeping them more interesting than just passengers who were along for the ride. I could already feel that I was pushing them beyond what was reasonable and things were starting to get strained. I saw why Skirts had to let the Jury go after their own thousand chapters of tagging along in Austraeoh - the exact same thing would have happened to them.
There were other reasons, too. I felt like ending a story with Starlight continuing and effectively getting no ending would basically amount to chickening out of the ending I set up in the very first Interlude, and knew if I backed out of it now, I wouldn't be able to make it good later. I was legitimately tired - my life has changed a lot in three years, and I'm honestly not confident I have another three years of daily in me. I wasn't about to send TOW to die as an unfinished tragedy because of that. Then there was the fact that if I deliberately tried to keep as many plot threads as I had open on the table so they could be used for a direct continuation, I'd wind up with a really underwhelming ending, and I didn't want the end of Act 3 to be the best that it got, as proud of it as I am. And then the last reason that towers over all the others in the end is just that I've had my fun with TOW and want to go write something else. So I sat myself down while Starlight and her friends were stranded in the foothills of Griffonstone and had a lot of long, hard brainstorming sessions and gave myself the ultimatum that if I couldn't come up with a sequel I wanted to write, was able to write and that TOW would deserve, I was going to have to finish it where it ended and not give it a sequel at all.
And I did come up with something. All this is to say, TOW will have a sequel... but it's going to be different.
Miniglim's tale is done. The sequel, The Immortal Dream, will be set eighteen years after Starlight's adventures in the northern world and three years after the return of Princess Luna and the awakening of the Elements of Harmony. And it will begin in the north again. It won't be Starlight's story at all.
The Immortal Dream will instead star a trio of new OCs who didn't appear in TOW, working as young rocket scientists on a joint venture between the Theocracy of Yakyakistan and the rising technological empire of Neo Ironridge... a venture based in the remote middle-ground colony of Icereach.
If there are any dangling plot threads from TOW a setting like that feels like it has the potential to touch on? It probably will. Circumstance will send these three out on an adventure of their own, and they'll have to chase - or perhaps be chased by - mysteries of the west that Starlight had to turn her back on decades earlier. There will be plenty of new characters, and some familiar faces as well scattered throughout as the new heroes slowly learn the story of Starlight and her friends... as well as piece together what happened to them afterward, in a manner that might be comparable to Littlepip learning about the Ministry Mares in Fallout: Equestria. And, of course, the north is the north and Starlight is Starlight, so don't count on her and Twilight and the others not getting involved again at some point.
It's also going to be in first-person, just because I feel like a change of pace.
I hope this sounds as exciting as it is to me. It's going to be a very different animal to TOW, with a faster pace and smaller persistent cast size, and I've been working intensely on the three main characters for the last six months to ensure they'll play off each other as well as any returning characters as beautifully as possible. To compensate for that faster pace, however, it's not going to be a daily. I've ran my race and crossed the finish line, and I'm ready to not need to automatically cancel on anything my friends try to schedule in the evenings anymore like I have for the last three years. I'm still hoping to keep up a respectable wordcount, of course - slower than TOW, but with real editing and revisions instead of a quick once-over to show for it. But the chapters themselves will be around ~20k, give or take a bit, and the overall story will probably come to around 500-600k in total. It's certainly not going to be finished in a year, at least.
Despite this length reduction, it's still going to cover a similar content scope to TOW, and with more major climaxes and plot twists if anything. This will largely be thanks to the increased pace, which will come from better revisions, tighter planning and less filler afforded by being able to edit and not needing to finish a chapter, rain or shine, or else. It will also be due to keeping a much smaller active cast in general - TOW Act 3/4 were about a bunch of sky hobos living together because they didn't belong anywhere else, but the new protagonists won't be so fortunate to be able to carry their world on their backs. There also won't be any more megalocations the story gets stuck in for extensive periods of time.
There's a final decision about The Immortal Dream I made that's relevant too, and it's one I spent a long time going back and forth on: while it will be a sequel to TOW, and obviously contain spoilers for TOW, I'm going to write it so that reading TOW first isn't necessary to read it and follow along.
I have some doubts about doing this. It's going to say so on the front page, and fimfic being fimfic, there will be fools who see that, go look at TOW anyway, see its length and don't even give either one a try before thinking I'm a liar who's trying to bait people into skipping some contiguous atrocity just to get views on their sequel. It's the way things are, especially if I wind up getting more views on this than on TOW. But at the same time, given that it starts with a completely new cast of characters in a location TOW never visited, and given that the Austraeoh books really did lead perfectly into each other and Skirts still got a lot of people joining on the latest one and skipping the previous ones... I feel like it would be a whole lot more dishonest to have the start of the story look like it can be read on its own, then hit someone tens of thousands of words in with a twist or plot device you just need need need to have read TOW to have a hope of grasping. That's a much dirtier thing to do, and the people who give my story a try are the ones I actually care about.
And besides, it isn't like TOW isn't stupidly complex to the point where I remind everyone how all the mechanics work again right before each time I use them. You probably could follow along even if I didn't write it with that specific intent. But I want to stop having to do that and streamline the story anyway, making fewer of the rules matter so I can go faster by spending less time making sure people aren't blindsided by them, and this seems like an excellent excuse to do that anyway. And lastly, I just feel like it's a much more compelling way to tell the story of what happened to Starlight's friends after the ending of TOW to have new characters discovering who are learning about those friends for the first time, rather than just going "Hey, you remember this gal, here's some exposition on what did after that day eighteen years ago".
Nothing stands to lose from this, except for a few obscure rules that nobody remembers without being reminded of anyway. It's easier for me to keep track of, it's easier for you to read, everyone wins. New people being able to skip TOW and join in if they feel like it is just a bonus.
Oh, and one more thing. When I started TOW, Season 7 was mid-run. The show wasn't finished yet, Glimmy was a major character, and I was 100% certain some new show canon would come out and screw up my plans if I tried to follow it too closely. So I set a hard rule for myself that TOW would adhere to canon up through the Season 5 finale, and everything after that might as well not exist, and I stuck to it, and it served its intended purpose pretty well.
But now? Things are different. The show is finished, there won't be any new canon I'll have to pick and choose from and worry about giving people the wrong ideas with. So, The Immortal Dream will officially diverge from canon after the Season 5 finale and do its own thing, but I'll also be working in characters or concepts from the later seasons at my leisure. Not everything, and not all of it will be 1:1 with show canon, but the likes of Flurry Heart and the Storm King are very much on the table now. And given everyone's reactions in the comments to the form of a certain cutie mark, I'm pretty sure you all have your own theories as well.
With all that said, the question that begs asking is when?
No answer. I don't really feel like committing, to be honest. I want to write, I'm hyped for the things I have coming, especially these three new ponies and the character arcs for them I've spent so long crafting. However, I want to actually make use of not having a daily update schedule anymore to polish these chapters and make them shine, so the first chapter especially I might just sit around for a bit and revel in being able to spend time on. I think a good estimate - an estimate, not a promise - is sometime in April. But perhaps I'll decide to take things a bit slower and enjoy my newfound free time some other way as well. I've invested too much into this storyline to hang up my keyboard now, though, and a big part of the reason I was able to push so hard for two million at the end was because I was hyped for what comes next, so don't even think I'll be walking away.
...At least, that's the estimate I would have given before all this coronavirus lockdown business came along and dumpstered any plans I had of using those suddenly-free evenings to have a social life from time to time. So maybe it will be even earlier than that. Only time will tell.
Oh, and the other reason it's hard to estimate when The Immortal Dream will be published is because it's not the only thing I'm working on. Seriously. I spent three years having all my writing stamina constantly drained by the nature of the daily grind, but that didn't stop me from having ideas. Just from writing them. So now that I don't have any obligations to work on a single story each and every day, you can bet I'll be multitasking.
Not that anyone is seeing this blog because they're following me for some reason other than TOW, of course. They probably wouldn't have stuck around for a whole three years just because of my other Starlight story I keep occasionally promising I want to write a sequel for. They probably wouldn't have been astute enough with dates to notice this blog is here on the very conspicuous three-year anniversary of that other Starlight story, and likewise might not remember that I published blogs on the one-year and two-year anniversaries pledging and swearing myself to a sequel while also bemoaning the fact that I had this gigantic daily Glim story that was getting in the way. But if anyone somehow did, and if any of those people who remembered all that somehow weren't too jaded by fimfiction's long stream of deadfics to get their hopes up and read this far in this blog hoping that I would still remember and that would actually be the story this blog is here to promise yet again...
Nyaah. No new promises. If that long-lost sequel does ever materialize from my keyboard now that I can afford it my full and proper attention, it'll just have to be a happy surprise.
Pipe dream: get both of them published during April.
And I've got some smaller ideas floating around too. Perhaps my favorite is an ~80k heavy AU fic called The Day of Violet Rain (yes, that's my idea of small. What did you expect?) which would be an exercise in playing around with worldbuilding and an interesting society/protagonist concept, but I don't think it's fair to put that on the immediate horizon when I've got these other two big projects to juggle. I sure would like to get some shorter stuff out on the side at some point, though, and it's short enough I might be able to fit it in through the cracks here or there. But we'll see. That's a talk for another day.
Thank you again for sticking with me throughout The Olden World, everyone. Anything I do next is likely to have a fairly large and ambitious first chapter, at least by my standards, so don't except anything too immediately soon. Although, to be honest, my drive to write and thirst for comments might push me to publish something smaller in the meantime... Maybe more blogs, like about my writing process or how I do certain types of scenes, or the inspiration for and evolution of things and places in TOW. If there's anything up that alley anyone particularly would like to see a blog from me on, feel free to make it known in the comments. But with all that said... until next time. I'll be back.
Aww... I was hoping for more post finale Twi, Starlight and Dash antics tracking down the others and so on. Starlight might have gotten her resolution but when it comes to her friends... not so much.
Haven't read TOW yet because of the intimidation of it's length, but it's definitely on my bucket list and I admire the work you put in.
I applaud you m8, you must have quite a fingers for typing. Also
Can’t wait! I do admit I am disappointed it’s not a direct continuation, but I can’t really judge without reading what you have come up with. Ready to be wowed!
TOW was a crazy awesome ride! I already miss reading it. I hope we will see Cute Valey again in the sequel! She's definitely best bat and far too cuddly.
The thing with explaining some mechanism in the story just to remind us before using it was definitely something I recognized and sometimes felt a little forced. If the sequel will do that a little less I wouldn't mind at all.
The discovery of the backstory from the memory orbs in FoE was really great, mostly because it told an interesting story on its own that had to be discovered in little pieces that slowly started to make sense with each piece. I'm curious on how you will implement a similar thing. I'd love to find out about what happened to Starlight's friends this way and I hope you're not just using it to summarize TOW - even though I guess that must be done to some degree if you don't want to confuse new readers. But I'm sure you've planned something spectacular there!
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Oh, I'm not saying that isn't going to happen at all. Starlight just needs a bigger impetus to get out her door and go do stuff than she'll find in Equestria. A wake-up call from the north, as it were.
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No summaries here. To continue the FO:E analogy, Littlepip hardly got a blow-by-blow of the episodes in the show - in fact, their content wasn't mentioned at all, save for a few references and that you'd already know a little about the characters and what they were like.
Yes please!
I'm really looking forward to what's coming. TOW was an adventure and a half, and what you described sounds super exciting.
Yay sequel!
It's official everyone; The Olden World is getting itself a sequel! YES!
Ah, yes. The eternal conflict between the desire for a well-earned rest and the constant need for activity. That's certainly a conundrum, and while I'm glad to be hearing you've got another story or two in the works, please don't forget to take your time and rest when you need it.
You just got off the heels of a one thousand chapter/2+ million word-long Daily! We certainly won't mind waiting if you need a bit more rest.
Full honesty? I was certain that this was the route you were planning to take, so when you had her go back to Sire's Hollow I was completely caught off-guard and just a little suspicious that the choice was made solely because of that 1000 chapter limit.
At least, now I understand more about your actual reasons behind that particular decision. On that note:
Yes, please!
Also, looks like the possibility of Jamjars truly being Cozy's mother in this AU just sky-rocketed.
STAY DETERMINED 2 HYYYYYPE!
And now, I'm going to channel my inner WatchMojo.
Personal Top 10 Hopes for The Immortal Dream:
1. Characters go to Varsidel, the infamous llama city, and/or any other major location we never got see or learn about in TOW.
), but I'm pretty sure they didn't.
) and Gerardo-Stream moments(Assuming they're still together 
), please!
2. Garsheeva and Meltdown's fates are learned. As are Morena, Diego, and Puddles because Wallace might have died(
3. More answers regarding TETRA, Glimbot, and TETRA'S opponent.
4. Neo Ironridge is confirmed, so Shinespark, Arambai, and possibly Matryona and Dorable are all returning, but let's keep our fingers crossed for the return of Redshift, Selma, and hopefully more Grenada(Or that they're referenced at the very least).
5. For obvious reasons, we likely won't see Crystal(Or her ex-hubby), but hopefully we can learn a bit more about what happened to the changelings she enslaved(Maybe some were able to break from her control and high-tail it like Thorax did?) At the very least, I hope we see what became of Mistvale in the aftermath.
6. Since our new crew is from Yakyakistan, we're for sure going to learn more about it(Ice Reach and Infinite Glacier, here we come!), but are we going to see Fire again, learn more about Flame Face, and also hear anything about Prince Rutherford's antics involving Equestria/Pinkie Pie?
7. If/When the original crew ever crop back up into the story, could we get more Nyala/Valey interaction(Assuming one's not dead again
8. So are we going to learn anything about how the Crystal Empire connects to Indus?
9. Jamjars.
10. I ran out of ideas.
All-in-all, we've got a new trio on the way, a new story to unpack, and a new adventure awaiting. I can't wait to see what you've got cooking for us; I know it's going to be fantastic!
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It depends a little on the story, but in general, yes. A lot of authors will usually try to keep chapters between around 3-7k, but it's not that rare to see stories, particularly longer ones, that fall more in the 15-25k range like The Immortal Dream is targeted for. 30k+ is where you want to start watching yourself - don't go above that unless you have a really good reason for it (Background Pony and FO:E's Canterlot chapter are examples of good reasons). And even then, 50k is a hard ceiling. Readers can find a spare hour or two to binge a long chapter, but asking them to dedicate a whole day to your story just to end at a chapter break is a big nope.
What's usually more important than chapter length is consistency, though. If you write a story where all the chapters are 20k, it will mostly be read by people who are happy with that. If you write a story with wild chapter length variance, you might start running into cases where someone is in the middle of reading your story, picks it up on a day where they have time for one big chapter, and instead are greeted by a medium-small chapter followed by a big chapter and can't really read as much as they have time for because the lengths are unpredictable. It's a minor inconvenience, but things like this have a subtle effect on readers' overall satisfaction.
But with chapters 10k or under, that's not so much of an issue, since most people will finish that in an hour or less, so I wouldn't worry too much about this as an issue. If it does keep feeling wrong anyway for whatever reason, it's likely you're actually feeling a pacing problem rather than an issue with chapter lengths themselves. A lot of stories that regularly use longer chapters will have each chapter be almost a self-contained mini-arc - again, Background Pony and Fallout: Equestria are pretty clear examples of this. But if you're just chopping up your chapters into some arbitrary length that it feels like they should be at and those cutoff points could just as well be anywhere else, it will feel stranger and stranger the longer your chapters get.
If you do have a reason to make them longer, though, especially if it's to avoid breaking tension in the middle of an important moment or to make mini-arcs more self-contained, though, that's definitely a good thing.
Edit: I checked your stories, and for one-shots it's a little different. Stories less than ~15k often want to stay as a single chapter unless they have a reason to do things otherwise, so I wouldn't worry about it at all here.
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Thank you so much for the advice! I was afraid that if I went above a certain word count it would be a major turn-off for a lot of people, and it's very relieving to know otherwise(I plan on condensing if I can, but I'll definitely make sure to keep the word count as consistent as I can).
Again, thank you! Have fun writing The Immortal Dream!