Filly Friends - Wub Extended Author's Notes · 3:51pm May 13th, 2020
Before I get started, I wanted to thank everyone who has been reading since the beginning, and everyone who is just now catching back up. It really means a lot to me, and I hope you're all excited to see where this ride goes next. As of right now, I've got one little arc to finish up, and one more arc to write before I'm done. Conservative estimates are around 7 to 8 chapters, but knowing me, it's going to be more.
Spoilers ahead for the latest chapter of Filly Friends, Wub. Duh.
Here we've got the culmination of everything that has been going on in the college arc. If I can jump ahead just a little bit, I had to rewrite that last scene with the kiss about 7 times before I finally liked it enough to make it work. Honestly, I'm still not convinced, but if I just polished and polished nothing would ever get posted.
As a whole, I'm pretty happy with this section. It was mostly supposed to be about Vinyl and Octavia reconnecting in college, which I think went pretty good. I also started laying the groundwork for a couple of little plot points that are going to start coming up in the next couple of chapters. If you think you know what they are, feel free to drop me a message or comment, I'm curious what everyone is thinking!
I also really tried to pull the focus to Octavia this time around. Like I said in the previous EAN, the childhood bit really felt like it was focused on Vinyl. Quick tells me that it was interesting to see Octavia discovering what amounted to the main conflict through the eyes of another pony, but I felt that my mouthpiece didn't have much agency in what was going on, as it were, which made writing some bits really hard. (Like the scene in the courthouse. It was super, super important, but we the readers will never know what actually happened in there.)
Ultimately, I think I failed. Most of the up front plot "beats" are mostly about Vinyl, again. Which is something I took into account when planning this last bit, so hopefully it won't be a problem this time around. I think if I were to tear down and rewrite the story, I probably would do so from Vinyl's point of view. But no matter how much I want to tell the perfect story, I refuse to rewrite the last ~60k words, so that's not going to happen. I'm kicking around the idea of maybe doing a couple of bonus chapters from Vinyl's POV, but I make no promises.
After all, I still have that ISoK bonus chapter I mentioned in my last blog that I totally haven't touched in a week and a half...
I'd also like to peel back the curtain here a little bit to tell you guys how many outline iterations this story has gone through. So far, not counting removing our dumb jokes from the outline, or fleshing out rough sections with more detail, I have personally made substantial edits to the overall plan of the story about seven times. If I can recover any old versions, maybe I'll post it when the story is over just so you can see how much the story has changed from it's inception several years ago.
That's all I've got for now. As always, I appreciate any feedback, positive or not, and hope everyone is buckled in for the last bit of Vinyl and Octavia's story. Have a great week!
