The Past Year & In Somepony's Shadow

...yeah, probably weird to do an update, like, a year and some months since the last one.

Anyway, a lot of that is because as you can imagine the last year has been nuts. I'm still in good health, but with dissertation complete I officially graduated with my PhD last May. I then had to job hunt...that took a while (though I finally got a job offer and negotiating start date). Just in general was in a spot where I had free time I could use to write but just wasn't in a good headspace to do it between the stresses of moving, living with parents, job hunting, etc.

I sort of dealt with it by trying out a bunch of different projects (I need to get back to drawing practice) like Youtubing (which fell to the wayside), tabletop roleplaying, blogging (I have a new media analysis blog here for anyone interested: https://whammyanalyzes.wordpress.com/ ), and basically everything but fanfiction.

But I'll be honest, a part of all that procrastination was because when I thought about writing more for In Somepony's Shadow I...kind of wasn't feeling it.

It should be no surprise that I was just making stuff up as I went with each chapter. I had a very rough idea of what I kind of wanted to do at times but the details and direction would change pretty much anytime I sat down to write. The body-swap situation I left it on was an example of that, and when I looked back on it I was like "...oh, maybe that wasn't the best idea for this." Sure, I played with the idea of, say, Trixie meeting Twilight or something and having a night out with her while she was in Rarity's body which could lead to some good moments, but like I still kind of had the problem of "I made Rarity a main character now" that I didn't really want to do?

And just in general, when you have a project like this you kind of keep start-stopping for long periods of time you just kind of always get that "Oh I could probably do so much better if I had started it now with all this additional writing and thinking about story structure/plotting/etc."

So now I'm kind of stuck in a position of whether I should go back and maybe restart the whole thing and try again now that I got more experience, or keep trucking ahead with what I got but not super happy about looking back on it. All of this in conjunction with "Oh right I got a new job I should be starting in about two months that requires moving and training" to throw me right off track again.

For anyone who liked this story and still has any memories of it, I appreciate it and I'm really sorry I let it fall to the wayside again. I do want to keep doing something with it because I just love Trixie and Luna so much, but I'm still unsure what exactly I want to do with this.