And now it's time for a new direction · 1:00am Dec 31st, 2020
So now that the last of this year's progress on my LEGO Equestria Girls fanfiction series is complete, it's time for me to talk about what I'll be working on next. Although part of this blog post will be a reminder of plans I had previously shared, I will also be sharing some other new things that I think are worth mentioning.
To start off, here's a quick summary of all of my upcoming plans for the LEGO Equestria Girls series. I will start off 2021 by writing the first of a series of "Side Stories" which will remain ongoing until after all three of the upcoming main stories. Soon after that gets started off will be the tenth main story, featuring the Lego World's Changelings, the return of Starlight Glimmer to the Lego World, and the introduction of certain themes and aspects of the Lego World that I had been hoping to include since practically the earliest stories and will now finally have that opportunity. (Now that there's no more official Equestria Girls content for me to follow, I'm free to take this series in any direction I want, and I'm hoping many of you will enjoy the radically new directions I'll be taking this series over the next few years.) In 2022, not only will there be some more additions to the Side Stories, but also will be the eleventh main story, featuring the introduction of the Young Six from the pony world and the Lego World's version of Tempest Shadow and the Storm Forces under her command. (Personally, I'm especially excited for the content of the eleventh story more than anything else, so I hope I can make it worth the hype.) Then in 2023 will be the twelfth and final main story, featuring a mega crossover of all the major licensed Lego themes (things like Star Wars, DC, Lord of the Rings, Marvel, etc.). (Although I currently have a general idea of what the twelfth main story will ultimately involve, I'm still trying to work out the details and cannot yet say for sure how long it might turn out.) Once that final main story is complete and the last of the side stories are completed soon after that, all that will remain left to go in the series are a pair of one-shot stories: The Prologue (summarizing the events of Sunset Shimmer's life between when she first arrived in the Lego World and the night she stole Princess Twilight's crown immediately prior to the start of the first main story) and The Epilogue (featuring a meeting between Sunset Shimmer and Princess Twilight Sparkle many years after the events of the final story, in the same future time as the final episode of the official FiM series).
While this past year may have been rough on many people out there (for obvious reasons), it's been hard on me for a completely different set of reasons. Although I was ultimately successful in completing all three stories I had planned (and also completed the last of the available Lego video games, thus achieving my goal of completing every available Lego game within the three years I had anticipated it would take me), I had felt constantly pressured to maintain my self-imposed deadlines to complete each chapter in time to maintain the same schedule I had been promising since the very beginning (one new chapter every two weeks on Monday afternoon). Looking back on my most recent blog posts, it seems that just when I thought I had completed a story on the narrowest time crunch ever, the next one ended up even worse. Because of this among several other reasons, I've gotten so little time for sleep all year long (I honestly can't even remember the last time I got more than four or five hours of continuous sleep), and in fact, the night before I posted the last of the Holiday Short Stories was the first time I had ever in my life skipped a night of sleep entirely just so I could have enough time to actually finish writing it on time to post it. As much as I love writing my fanfiction series, I think we can all agree that I simply can't keep doing this madness.
For next year, among other changes that I'm hoping will relieve my workload, I have decided that for the very first time since the very beginning of my fanfiction series, I will not be posting the start of the next main story on the first Monday of February. If I wanted to keep that trend going, I would've needed by now to be already almost finished with the first two Side Stories that I had hoped to post in January next month (neither of which I've even started yet) so that I could spend all of next month writing the prologue and first two chapters of the tenth main story ahead of my deadline. On top of all of that, I've planned for years to include the main cast of Ninjago for a chapter or two of the tenth story, so I had hoped to eventually get around to actually watching episodes of the Ninjago TV series so that I could accurately portray them in my story. Unfortunately, I just kept putting it off for various reasons, and now that I'm getting extremely close to the point where I need to make use of being familiar with it, the only way I'll be able to make enough time for it is to simply push back the time of when I'll actually start writing about that content. With all of that in mind, my current plan is to post the first Side Story sometime in January, the second sometime in February, and the start of the tenth main story will be the start of either March or April.
Although it's really unfortunate that I need to postpone my originally promised schedule, it's probably for the best that I do that for this particular point in the series. As of now, I've already written a complete list of all the chapter titles for the tenth and eleventh stories along with the titles of what will probably be all of the side stories (so literally the only thing still not yet fully planned out is the exact content of the twelfth and final main story), and I can confirm that the tenth story will be only slightly longer than the more recent shorter main stories, while the eleventh main story will likely be about as long as the earlier stories that exceeded 100,000 words. Therefore, even with a later than planned start for the tenth story, I'll still (hopefully) have plenty of time to catch my breath before moving on to the next story the following year.
Despite this unfortunate setback, what I am happy about is how I managed to come up with a new way to write my stories when I was struggling with the last of those Holiday Short Stories. Basically, whenever I'm in the middle of writing a chapter, if I ever come up with an idea for something brief at a later point in the chapter, I'll make a quick note of it at the bottom of the page in the proper order with the other notes and come back to it later so that, once I eventually reach that later part of the chapter, all I have to do is essentially fill in the blanks. For a relatively slow writer like me, it turned out to be a remarkably efficient way for me to not lose any spontaneous ideas I suddenly come up with, so I'll be trying it out on all of my future writing efforts. I would also like to mention that now that I've got an account on Microsoft Office, my preference to do all of my writing in a Word Document will from now on no longer be confined to my 10-year-old laptop and instead can now be done on any device with internet access (though I'll be doing almost all of my writing on the new desktop that I'm currently using).
Finally, I am please to announce that I've decided to create a group exclusively for the LEGO Equestria Girls fanfiction series. I've seen in my notifications that some people would add most stories to their bookshelf, but somehow not include a few others, which I presume might be because they simply didn't notice they even existed, so I'm hoping putting them all in a single group will avoid that issue. As I was creating this group, I also decided to give everyone an opportunity to possibly write their own stories based on the Lego World of my fanfiction series, thanks to the ability to keep things in separate folders. Not to mention, I'm really hoping that my futile efforts to get some actual cover artwork for my stories might finally get somewhere thanks to the creation of this group.
Well, I think that's just about all of the important things for me to talk about for now. I hope everyone will be looking forward to the upcoming stories of my LEGO Equestria Girls series (I know I sure am), despite the unfortunate delay I've had to put on the very next entry.
Finishing the series with a mega crossover is a pro gamer move, marvel is getting more and more competition with each passing day.
Progress is progress, and you definitely have a lot planned out! It's great to see you put so much faith and effort into your work, but for 2021, try and relax. Get some rest, and I hope you have a happy new year!
I also recommend giving Monkie Kid a watch