Someone Else's Story

This blog post is long overdue, and I apologize.

So over the course of approximately four years, I've managed to put out what amounts to four chapters to Someone Else's Sun. On average, that's a chapter a year, give or take. So I'm not the most prolific of writers; my attention gets pulled elsewhere, and, frankly, my talents are better spent working on others' stories than writing my own.

For the few who tracked Someone Else's Sun from the beginning, you may remember that it was rife with links to soundtracks. I'm far from the only author who writes with music, but coming in to Someone Else's Sun I had a pretty substantial and deliberately chosen playlist of music from various game soundtracks composed by Yoko Shimomura--in particular, Xenoblade Chronicles (and, lately, Xenoblade Chronicles 2, even though that game is not Shimomura's work) and Radiant Historia chief among them. But the eternal battle for copyright being what it is, most of the videos I linked were claimed and deleted before too long. So, rather than try and play keep-up with YouTube, I've stripped those links out.

I do, however, keep up with the soundtrack while writing. I'll eventually throw together a list and put it up on here, for those who might be interested in recommended listening.

It's probably not a surprise that the games I mentioned are RPGs. I'm a huge RPG fan. Some of the earliest games I played--in particular the SNES Final Fantasies--shaped my love for the genre, and for the idea of being metaphorically dropped into a fantasy world with no context and asked to save that world. Someone Else's Sun was born, at least partially, out of a desire to combine two things I enjoy--ponies and role playing games.

As for why I chose the Princesses, well. The series itself may have come and gone--and thank you, FiM for many years of fond memories and good friends, most of which I still have to this day--but I was always of the opinion that, at least until the last few seasons, Celestia and Luna got the short end of the stick when it came to screentime. To some extent, I still hold this opinion. They (and Cadence, to some extent, at least in the context of the show itself) are vast repositories of stories, literally living history, which the show had the chance to explore and chose to barely scratch the surface.

But this has a downside, in that it makes them very experienced protagonists--intimately familiar with the world they inhabit. So how do I make an engaging adventure story with the Princesses as protagonists? Well, to take them out of their respective comfort zones.

While the idea of the story has metamorphosed somewhat over the years, I have kept the majority of the story outline intact and ready to go. Now that I've overcome the most challenging hurdle--that is, attempting to set the stage for each of the three princesses--I intend to use most of the free time this quarantine is giving me to make headway on actually telling this narrative.

I hope, for what little it is worth, that you enjoy.