Twilight's Second First Time is finally done. · 6:00am Aug 8th, 2020
So if you were waiting for that before reading, now's the time.
This one was a bit of an adventure for me. If you want to know a bit about the development of Twilight's Second First Time, or if you're curious about my future plans, I'll be covering that here in this blog.
TSFT started as a random idea - of all things, right after my wife had her last miscarriage - when the thought came to my mind: what sort of childbearing issues might ponies have to deal with? At first, I really didn't want to tackle the concept of infertility. A mare's barren womb or a stallion's impotent swimmers just feels like cheap drama. But as I turned the idea over in my head, I found myself wondering if there wasn't something in between.
And so the idea came that magic potential might affect things. The first version of the fic's outline spawned shortly afterward.
It was ... not very good. While the first four chapters were not substantially different from the final work, there were only going to be two more chapters afterward - a strange orgy that I had yet to figure out a way to justify. It sat in my 'ideas' file in that form for nearly a year.
But it never fully departed from my mind. Often while I was at work, I'd idly ponder the ideas I had created. And occasionally, I would sit down and hash out another outline when I got home. Each one was progressively better than the last, and I felt I was finally making some progress. That was when I started publishing the fic.
It was going to be nine chapters. And then, Star Tracker arrived.
Quite literally, he was never intended to be in the fic. I just needed a pony, and he's the one I wrote as the world came to life around him. After I wrote his first chapter, my momentum halted. I desperately wanted to work him more properly into the narrative, but doing so would require abandoning the outline I had created in favor of a new one. This is the cause of a significant portion of the delays, but once I had finally decided how I wanted Star Tracker's story to go, I knew I had to write it. And the rest of the story came to me over the last three weeks.
I'm rather proud of this one. It's not perfect - in particular, I think the arc with Sunburst and Starlight didn't really pan out the way I wanted it to. But overall, I think I wrote a serviceable clopfic.
Now that this adventure has ended, I hope to go do a bit of cleanup on earlier chapters - just minor stuff, nothing that changes the story. Then, I'm planning to go finish Them Bloomin' Apples, which was never intended to be more than 2-3 chapters anyway, and desperately needs some love.
And after that I'm hoping to get started again on my two long fics - one of which you may have already seen: Finding Yourself has had four new chapters sitting in the wings, almost ready for publishing, for literally years.
The other longfic is a much darker themed adventure story that follows a group of criminals hired by Celestia to deal with an international crisis. It has some cloppy goodness, and lot of badness, drama, romance, and character building to go along with it.
Your wife had a miscarriage? Damn, my condolences.
5331983
She's had eight, actually. We have two children now, and don't desire more. It was rough getting here, though.
5332030
No kidding.