TThe Music of The Reef
MLP: FiM
Slice of Life
Beneath the clear blue waters of the Celestial Sea lies a great city known as The Reef. Toccata is a siren who dreams of singing in its concert halls. Unfortunately for her, it is illegal for a siren to sing inside the city.
Profanity
OC
Seaponies
The 24th Pegasus · 9.3k words · 89 0 · 1.3k views

State of the Author aka It's Been a While Hasn't It? · 4:00pm Apr 2nd, 2020

Huh, I guess I haven't really blogged anything meaningful this year apart from a notification I'd be on the Barcast in February. Time to change that.

Hey there kiddos, it's been a few months of relative silence on my part on fimfic, and I blame that on the craziness that comes with finishing up a 6 month co-op rotation at a busy medical devices company owned by one of the largest pharmaceuticals company on the planet. But now that my rotation is over and I'm back home (and trapped inside, more or less, because of the kung-flu), I have a lot more time to get back into the writerly side of things on fimfic and other projects. So, now that it's April 2nd and I won't be making this blog post on that dreaded day that was yesterday and getting everyone confused, let's do a quick state of the author, shall we?

First off, back in January, I applied to be a writer for the hit overhaul mod for Hearts of Iron IV, Equestria at War. I have since joined the team and have been busy writing various events for various nations, as well as doing some additional work in preparing to create a nation from scratch for a certain species of creature that lives in the far away lands of Zebrica (hint: they love self-immolation and not talking about their feelings). Writing things for a video game has been a lot of fun so far, if very different from writing stories for a fanfiction site, and I'm happy to dedicate some of my free time to improving the mod and making it a more enjoyable experience for everyone. If you want to know what Equestria at War is all about, follow this link to join the EaW Discord Server!

Next, I quietly released a new story, The Music of the Reef, back in the beginning of March as my entry into Jake The Army Guy's Horse Word Extravaganza, where it also quietly picked up 2nd place in said contest. I got to write a setting I've wanted to write for some years now, the underwater multicultural metropolis known as The Reef, and I think it stands well as a foundation or entry point into writing more stories in such a setting. Trust me, I've got plenty of ideas, and perhaps you might hear more of them sometime soon on The Barcast, as I'll be returning to it sometime in the near future to be interviewed (again) for winning 2nd place in the contest. If you missed the chance to hear my interview live the first time around, then expect to have another chance in a couple of weeks!

And, in case you missed the last one, the full interview is up on YouTube, which you can find here:

As a last update, I'm continuing to put work into the third installment of my sci-fi tetrology, Two Thousand Miles, alongside updating my CYOA story, Unshaken, on Mondays and Fridays. I'm hoping to have the rough draft of TTM3 finished by the end of 2020, and depending on how the story in Unshaken, well, shakes down, that may also be finished by the end of 2020. And, because I'm a crazy insane person (not just a normal insane person), I've been trying to write a fourth thing between those two stories and writing for EaW, though I have so many different ideas (and barely-started projects that nonetheless have thousands of unpublished words in them) that I haven't been able to focus on any one thing in this time. So, in the spirit of some other possibly famous fimfic marsupial, I've decided to create a poll to let you guys tell me what story you'd want to see next! That's right, you get to tell me to do something, and you don't even have to pay me to do it. Who wouldn't jump at a chance to do that?

I've provided a strawpoll link down below for people to vote on their favorite of the presented choices. Each one of those poll options has a basis in a fic I've already started (or at least thought about starting) but then put aside to go start another story because I make poor life choices. As such, I can tell you a little bit about each one:

Something else in the Price of Loyalty storyverse: I may not have written anything lately in this little universe I created with my good friend LoyalLiar, but that doesn't mean I'm completely out of ideas. Expect to see a short story revisiting everyone's favorite daughter of Commander Hurricane, Commander Typhoon, and how she ended up with a skysteel prothesis for a forehoof.
A Daily fic starring Lightning Dust in a Mad Max-esque setting: This one is pretty self explanatory, though I'll explain it a little more anyway. Lightning Dust is/was an informant in a post-apocalyptic Equestria where one day the sun stopped moving and the scorching heat turned the place into a barren desert. Lightning uncovers a colossal secret that could change the fate of Equestria and everyone living in it, and now she's running for her life from others who want to know what she knows and aren't afraid to destroy everything in their path to get that information out of her. I've actually written like almost 30 chapters for this story, though in true daily fic fashion, they're very short, so that's not actually a lot of progress.
A novel about a sirenified Sunset Shimmer trying to undo her curse: This idea started because sunset siren is a tag that exists on derpibooru, and the concept (as once posited by Couch Crusader here)is amazing enough that it begs exploration. In short, the Dazzlings win the Battle of the Bands in Rainbow Rocks, allowing them to return to Equestria and drag Sunset along with them, where they turn her into a siren as thanks for being a fuck-up and allowing them to win against the Rainbooms by not intervening. The story would be about Sunset trying to find a way to turn back and undo everything that she caused, and would allow me to showcase The Reef some more. I mean, who doesn't want to see dragonfish Sunset in the underwater big city?
A Sci-Fi Thriller about escaping a crippled starship: This concept came to me after watching too much Star Wars or playing too much Halo or something: what happens to everyone trapped on a starship after it's knocked out in battle or split in half in deep space? Surely not everybody on board dies immediately; there'd be survivors trapped in the derelict hulk with only a small chance of survival, but a chance nonetheless. This story would therefore follow what happens to a main character and her friends after the ship she's on gets (spoiler alert) destroyed (duh) in battle in deep space. There's a lot of opportunities for some freaky and spooky sci-fi shit on a derelict ship, and it could certainly turn out to be a thrill of a story.
More Raridash shipping: because I haven't written any Raridash shipping in a while, so why not?

Head on over here to vote in the poll!

And with that, there's your State of the Author for the first quarter of 2020. Stay safe out there, everybody; you want to make sure you get to live long enough to tell your grandchildren about how you survived the great toilet paper wars through memes and shitposting.

Ante Legionem nihil erat, et nihil erit post Legionem
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