A long overdue thank you and a tale from my time writing in the void.

It has been an insane couple of months lately. The virus happened, I became an uncle, and a few people decided they liked a silly little story I wrote about a broken unicorn helping ghouls fly a nuke to the moon. And in the middle of it all stands a little mint horse, finally deciding to slack off on school for a little bit to write this little post. And my story got an M rating because of its title alone, but we don't need to talk about that bit.

First off, a big THANK YOU to everyone who has followed me and liked my story so far. I didn't expect much coming out of the gate (I actually expected this thing to crash and burn by now), but seeing you all here makes everything worth it in the end. I don't know if I'll make any more blog posts (I'm not the most socially-inclined person around), but I wanted to make sure I gave my proper thanks to all of you that are giving me a shot when there are probably better stories to spend your time reading. Seriously, you all rock.

Anyway, I remember in my last post that I mentioned about how I nearly quit writing after just barely starting. Well, I'm in the mood to share that tale too. Hopefully someone will learn from my mistakes and not go down the same path that I did starting out.

When I got home from that faithful weekend at Everfree Northwest, I opened up Google Docs and the Fallout: Equestria wiki and got to work writing up the first draft of my story. After about a month or so, I had finished it and showed it to one of the people that had gotten me started on this. He read it, gave me some advice, and I took it to heart. After three months and three chapters written, I tried to get him to read it again when I got told the most dreaded sentence ever: "I'll read it when it is done."

And with that, I found myself tossed into the void. It wasn't like he wasn't interested in what I was writing, far from it. It was just that he didn't sign up to be my pre-reader or editor (and given that I've jump ship on someone else's story because I didn't realize what I had gotten myself into until after I had said yes, I don't hold this against him). I was, of course, given places to go to to ask for said pre-readers and editors, but my crippling anxiety made that impossible. That, and I had caught glimpses of the type of people that like Fallout: Equestria and I had come to the conclusion that I wasn't going to be comfortable talking to them (my rather bad experience with the furry community had made me rather gun-shy about getting involved with any community on the internet).

So, with no one around that I felt comfortable looking over my work, I decided to get good and start reading up on how to write fan fiction. My reasoning is is that, if I learned everything I could about writing, then I could sidestep the need for an editor or pre-reader. After all, fan fiction is 90% terrible because the writers don't understand grammar or basic story flow, right? If I put in the effort, I could sidestep all of the pitfalls and write semi-competently. So I found some advice stuff on FimFiction and the internet at large and tried to take that all in. And the more I read, the less sure I became about my ability to write. And the less sure I became, the more I started looking at how popular Project Horizons was, and how many dark stories seem to want to ape that. And the more I looked at that, the more I wondered if people would actually like my silly little story for what it is. After all, the only person to have read it so far called it clique. And it is definitely not as dark as Project Horizons or even Fallout: Equestria is. Why am I even bothering with this in the first place?

"It is hard to write in the void," Somber said at that FoE panel that started all of this. And I experienced that first hand when I gave into my doubt and self-deprecation and nearly deleted everything I had written.

Then I had an idea. I had made a couple of friends since the con that I played a Fallout: Equestria style game with on weekends. And they kept mentioning this one story they liked call "Pink Eyes". So why not read that and see what that is all about? And after I was done reading through it, I had a bit of a personal revelation: I'm not a good writer and I can't write dark to save my life. But I can write about as well as the author of Pink Eyes and that story is about as dark as my own. And if I can at least make my work match the same quality as Pink Eyes, I think I can live with myself.

So I set all of the books and websites aside (I still reference them from time to time, but they stopped being a measuring stick for me to bash my head against), set my goalpost to something I could accomplish, and started writing again. I even managed to grab a couple of those friends I mentioned earlier to help me out (and ended up having to rewrite the first three chapters when one of them basically wrote me the riot act on how I had originally written chapter three). And, well, here I am, finally putting that story out after years of writing and rewriting until I made something I was proud of.

Is it perfect? No. There are things that even I agree are a bit lackluster in quality. But it is the best that I could do. And I can live with that.