Fallout: Equestria Update and Apology · 7:49pm Jun 13th, 2020
Well... to be frank I am left with a multitude of sour tastes in my mouth as I try and decide how best to frame this.
The tl;dr of this is I’m truly sorry, and I’m not abandoning the fanfic I’m writing yet after discovering some major flaws I need to fix them before I plow this baby, my fanfiction Storms of The Divide, into a rock wall. I have been for some time, and sorry for the wall of text below but please read it if you want to know why my work went full brakes.
I suppose I’ll need to start with an apology, as I feel it may be necessary to any readers out there who are genuinely interested in my work thus far -to which I thank you profusely for taking such an interest. I know it has been literally months since the last chapter, but my word on it that I have a reason, one that isn’t a recycled excuse either.
To say that the, erm... latest medical pandemic -forgive my mention of it for those tired or pained by its mention- is the reason behind my lack of continued work on ‘Storms of The Divide’ would be a half-truth. More like a lie of omission, as it has made a great deal hard as hell for us at home and I sincerely wish everyone at home the best luck against this shitestorm.
The other half-truth portion is something I should have put into a blog update thing like this, so I apologize on that regard too. I live in the sticks, and at home I have no suitable internet connection and need to go to town and camp out in a McDonalds or some net-café for WiFi.
To trim the entire package of reasons down to a digestible one, without going into a tangent of my at home situation, as of 2020’s June I have been all but connectionless for many months, so sadly I couldn’t even drop this message after I was done writing this before. Anything that dealt with this entire spiel, me biting at the bit to post more of my work and continue the story I’ve created, was technologically off limits. Regardless, by the time I’ve post this I will have discovered a way to or have been relieved of the inherent issues.
However, to get back on track.
To, uhh... tell the full truth and reason behind my seemingly utter stop is the fact that as I’ve reread my old stuff in my spare time, and once conjoined with my reading more background information I fear I have been a partial fool in my work. Evidence piece number one; I wrote out the first maybe seven or eight chapters of the book in a tizzy without a true direction in my head.
To be fair, it helped me break my... skittishness to writing. Overlong story overshort I had tried writing ages ago but ultimately failed between my utter lack of ability and my overwhelming retinue of work I had built for myself in the planned fiction. We’re talking a full scale ground up world-building and storyline basically MLP and Dark Souls the way that Kkat did Fallout: Equestria; think the world of MLP but Dark Soulsified when I was little more than... what, thirteen? Fourteen?
A task I could tackle better today, to be sure, and not to mention craft it far better than I had before. I believe I shall tackle that daunting task eventually, but when I started writing Storms of The Divide that speed writing helped me break my shell -bust my blisters to get stronger calluses if you will.
Only now as I have gone back and re-watched practically the complete show of MLP:FIM, having started to reread Fallout: Equestria, and having debated for hours and hours nearly a year ago (I think, time flies) on specific details of lore and such affects and effects of both with the fine folks over at the Fallout: Equestria group here on Fimfiction such as Alicorns, ooo such a feisty topic for logic problems, especially when considering dates (time, not candies) I find myself in an embarrassing position.
Were I to continue without fixing the major problems I’ve embedded in the story -most are minor fixes yet some are drastic, requiring me to write a bit more background to fit in all in proper like- (especially if I desire the Northern Wastelands to actually be unique and show-grounded, a problem I’ve encountered in my rereads over time) I would doom the story to oblivion for my lack of care, and all the attention and love that I put into it and others have displayed for it, would be for naught but half-baked fanfiction to be buried in peat for months until dug up and recycled to be used as fire-lighters, and to my shame.
SO, ultimately I find the embarrassing part my willingness to splurge out ten chapters, going on eleven, with a ridiculous word count of one hundred thousand plus (I have been writing, albeit at a far slower pace as I realized all this written here) without having paid the proper attention to source material. At least, that’s how I feel about the work in its whole. Suffice to say, I believe the issue is my credence to Fallout lore is... alright I’d say, maybe even ‘good’, yet I thought I understood the Equestria part of it. In a sense, I kind of did, but not in such a way that enabled be to write a story about it whilst being completely faithful or creative as I desired.
(The really embarrassing part for me is that I am seeing myself in this whole scenario as ‘Bethesda’ to Kkat’s and every other excellent writer’s ‘Interplay/Black Isle Studios/Obsidian’. Grabbing the idea and running off into a... ‘bad direction’ in comparison to the source material.)
However, this also means a previous statement of mine, one in the ‘Author’s Notes’ after chapter nine is... well, premature...
“You won’t have to necessarily go back and trudge through it all again, unless you want to that is, in order to get the full picture. This is merely me letting you guys know that I’ve polished up what I’ve done so far up a bit as I’ve learned more about how this works, getting into the jive of things. I shall also try NOT to chase my work with a brush and chisel continuing to change things around like a raving lunatic like I’ve been doing, making people want to continue going back and reread sections (small things like apostrophes sure, but not major chunks unless people look at me sideways with confusion as to what I meant).”
Major chunks are in disarray I feel across the board, and it’s an issue I’ve got to, and promise to, remedy, or go mad trying. I want this story to be something special, special in the same way as the original Fallout: Equestria made me feel when I finished reading it the first time all those months ago. Yet... in order to do that I need to rework it; understand me though as I am not going to do a clean slate protocol, ohohoho no, but I hope to retool preexisting things and fix it before I wreck this baby too hard into a wall from a lack of carefulness.
Gotta walk before you can run, and you gotta run before you can fly and all that.
Which... is why saying this -writing this- is hard. If I have any readers out there who love what I’ve got so far, my hope is to provide an even better story, and I’m sorry that I’m having to do this in the first place.
My Bad. :[
Stay classy y’all!
~Canagán.
Take whatever time you need. Just drop us an update once in a while.