The fanfic that's taken me almost 10 years to write · 10:27am Dec 29th, 2020
I don't know if it's depressing or not that I've been working on the same story since 2011 and because it's been re-written so many times I've only made it 9 chapters in.
Next June will mark 10 years since it's inception.
I'm not even joking
It first started as something that I wanted to be darker than cupcakes, sadder than My Little Dashie, and [adjective that I forgot] than Past Sins, but I wasn't a very good writer in 2011. The first draft was fucking awful, even by bad fanfic standards. The main character was a heroin junkie and was also a clone of Rainbow Dash created by the 'Twilight Sparkle experiment gone wrong' trope. Did I mention the main character was a heroin junkie? The only reason that happened because one of the industrial songs I listened to at the time had a sample from a movie with the line "Cause of death: heroin overdose" and I was like "Dope, put it in!"
So after being rejected by Equestria Daily in 2011 the story entered development hell. I took the 7 chapters I had and slowed them way the fuck down and made a story outline that spanned something like 30 chapters. I was going to submit the story on fimfiction in late 2012 but the Trainwreck Explorers were running wild, chasing people off the site and harassing inexperienced writers and this made me very apprehensive to post the story. I remember calling out one of the organizers, chastising for him for what the group was doing and the motherfucker doxxed me
He ended up passing away 2 years later but this group antics and being doxxed made me afraid to post on the site, even after emailing knighty about the group
It took Knighty 2 more months to make his blog post addressing the behavior but at that point I was hanging out in the mlp reddit communities like r/mylittlepony and r/mlplounge where I spent the next three years. I'm not going to mince words and say in those 3 years I was a bit of a drama llama (I was a dumb 20 year old) and was having back and forth arguments with community members on a near daily basis. At the same time, I was trying to get more serious about content creation so I was also trying to post my story to these communities but you can't be on both sides of the fence, so my content creation came under the same fire.
During this time though the story, or at least it's outline and concept had solidified and in these three years I spent most of my time writing and rewriting the first seven chapters, but I more or less kept the story close to my chest, so even when I was banned from the reddit communities and became a convention vendor in 2015, I never posted the story publicly outside of random reddit postings. In fact at this point the story was put on the backburner until late 2019 when I finally decided to post it publicly on fimfiction.
I had just gotten out of a very emotionally manipulative relationship with this MLP fan VA who was only getting with me to make her on-and-off ex boyfriend jealous, so when she stonewalled me and disappeared after they got back together I was left in a really fucked up headspace. I was depressed, confused, spent an entire month on my couch staring up at my ceiling trying to figure shit out and I decided I wanted to finally post Our Day in Disdain, because I needed something to pick me up.
The story had been sitting on private for 5 years, and all the chapters had post dates of 2012 - 2014, and admittedly hadn't been edited since it first went on the backburner, so it was in a very rough state. I didn't think about that at the time, I just needed some new energy coming in to get me back on my feet. However when I was mass-posting the story in all my discord servers in my usual rainb0w style, I hadn't realized I had invoked the ire of someone in the fimfic discord server because I made the mistake of mispelling a word in my short description.
I'm not going to name names but I watched this person nit-pick elements of my story and wrote this huge comment complaining about how it was a google docs trash fic which I promptly deleted and blocked the person from commenting further. After some back-and-forth arguing in discord DMs, along with messaging someone else who was accusing me of being a 16 year old because I used emotes, I got turned off from the site again. Turns out person B had a discord where person A hung out and spent months saying things like "Rainb0w Dashie is a cunt" completely unprovoked like 3 months after the fact. I found this when I paid my way into this server through patreon and snooped around and saw my name show up like 20 times from November 2019 to March 2020. And it was like, I hadn't even talked to these people since November and they're still talking shit about me?
Anyway, this sat in my head for 5 more months. I originally ducked away from the site because I was getting TWE vibes from these two, but I remember I'd just start thinking about the things they said to me and I'd get really pissed off, but I had to be careful with how I reacted because I didn't want to have a repeat of what I went through in the reddit communities. It felt unfair to me that I got the kind of response I got just because I was trying to pick myself up from a toxic relationship. And I mean, I already took my licks from Reddit; I got fucking cPTSD because the stress from those communities broke my psychologically and it followed me for 5 years until I started taking anti-depressants. It's like, I didn't do anything wrong except for posting my fic without copyediting it first.
But because I'm on these pills it's changed the way I react to things, because instead of letting this negativity sit in my head and settle into my personality and set me on the "life feels pointless and I'll never be able to reach my goals no matter how hard I work and I can never get ahead" thought-spiral I started editing my story
I'm more or less writing this blog to get some shit off my chest, because working on this story again has kicked up a lot of dust in my head and it's messed up my sleep schedule, I've been laying awake for hours thinking about my past and how this story has followed me the entire time. I realized a long time ago that this story has been an allegory to all the man vs community stuff I've experienced over the last 10 years; but even though I'm 6 out of 9 chapters into the revision I still feel the pangs of development hell because this is all I've done for 10 years, was write and rewrite the same 7 to 9 chapters to the point where making new content for the story just feels weird. I've written in my 2 latest updates that the new chapters names "feel weird" but that's because I've been running a fine-tooth comb over the same content for years.
I'm starting to ramble at this point and I really don't know how to conclude this, so I'll just say that I hope that now that I'm finally making content on fimfiction I can make progress with this story. I'm probably not going to finish it before next June, but I had a thought at some point that I don't have to be afraid to present this story anymore. The story can finally stand on it's own so I don't have to protect it so hard because I'm a fantastic writer now. TWE is gone. The mlp reddit communities are dead. I got Zoloft in my veins and it chased the voices out of my head. Once I finish these revisions I will have effectively taken away any ammo person A had against my story, so after that I can finally start writing part 2, 3, 4, and 5, and finish the story.
Holy shit. Sounds like you're doing better now though.
Keep writing, your story's on my tracking list and I'm excited for where the story's going.
Also, if you do want a copyeditor or someone to catch typos, hit me up. There's a couple in the chapters you've published, do you want me to PM them to you?
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Oh hey, I'm actually really glad to hear you're tracking the story. One thing I forgot to mention is that it's very isolating to be putting in this much work on revising the story and getting no comments, so it's very refreshing to hear that you've been enjoying the story.
And send that DM fam!
Your story has been on my to-read list for a while. Unfortunately, the time when I read lots of ponyfic for this year seemed to have ended a few months back. April through August was prime reading time, but I haven’t been able to read as much ever since September started.
I, too, have some stories that have been stuck in development hell. My future long fic had its genesis in 2012 before I shelved it because real life and other interests got in the way. Once every couple of years since then, I’d go back to revise and add details to the outline before setting it back down. However, this year the scope of the story rapidly grew and I now have the problem that I lack the technical writing skills required to pull off the kind of story I want to tell. If it were a straightforward romance or adventure, I could have started writing by now. Word to the wise: do NOT, under any circumstances, attempt to tell a story with multiple time travelers.
The big thing I remember about Hom3r is that he was the only other person in the entire pony fandom who appreciated the humor of Jerkcity (now renamed to Bonequest) as much as I.
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>Word to the wise: do NOT, under any circumstances, attempt to tell a story with multiple time travelers.
Oh my god, why would you do that to yourself?
But at the same time, I kinda wanna read it
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That’s when happens when you outline by accretion over 8 years. Especially over the summer, I had way too much time to think about this while exercising on my bike and then I happened to read House of Leaves (an infamously complex novel).
The two halves of the story are each linear from the perspective of the narrator following the respective protagonist. However,
I’ve had to write some software for myself to help visualize where and when each character is. The plot diagram looks less like a mountain range of a normal story and more like directions for two marching bands performing separate shows to their respective end zone at halftime (except some of the members toss footballs to one another).
I have some key scenes and chapters either already written or with detailed outlines planned. However, it’s connecting them into a coherent narrative (and depression-induced procrastination) that has brought progress to a halt.
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I'm kinda playing around with the same concept in this story
- MLP: FiM
- Adventure
- Horror
Twilight Sparkle is lost in the astral realms and must find a way to return to her body.Twilight gets lost in the astral realm so there's lots of 4-dimmensional fuckery going on
That's always the kicker, I'm always there. It's like, I got this super awesome idea for a story with intertwining story threads and it's like, nah, I wanna nap. It's like there's such a huge divide between planning the story and executing it and the simple act of bridging it feels so daunting at times.