My Resignation · 11:56pm Sep 8th, 2021
It is with great reluctance I must announce that I am discontinuing Technology is Magic and The Nightmare Technomancer. My tagline on my profile is “Always enjoy writing or your stories will suffer as you do.” Well, I’m just not enjoying it anymore and I know that if I force myself to continue, the story will suffer for it. I will be the first to admit that I made mistakes while writing this. I’m not perfect, no one is. But lately it feels like I am making nothing but mistakes. I know the majority of my readers are probably fine with the direction the story is going, but at this point I am not.
If I ever decide to pick this back up again, it will be as either a complete rewrite from the prologue on up, fixing the mistakes I made in the current story, or a completely different story in its entirety. A different main character with a different personality from a different setting. If I decided to make a different story entirely there might be similarities between them but the only thing that would remain truly the same would be the fact the main character would be a technomancer like Gerhardt. Though even the level of technological development would probably be different because Gerhardt is too advanced to the point it's almost impossible to make him actually fucking balanced for such a primitive world as Equestria, as was made evident by the last few chapters.
For now, however, I’m going to take a break. I’m just fucking exhausted and if a hobby is exhausting you, that’s when you know its time to either quit or take a break. I love writing too much to actually quit entirely but a break is definitely something I can do. I have no idea how long this break will last so please don’t ask. Besides, I’m going to be going to school soon so I can get an actual job so I’m going to need to focus the majority of my attention on that anyways and even if I did have motivation to continue I wouldn't want to keep everyone waiting for any extended periods of time.
If any of you are curious, I’m going to be studying to be a Sommelier. A wine expert, if you've never heard that word before. Yes, there are actual schools for that. So if I come back maybe I’ll feature wine a bit more heavily in whatever I write! I’m joking of course, I wouldn’t actually do that unless it was a natural part of the story which is highly unlikely.
Anyways, that’s all I really had to say. I wish you all well! Stay safe out there!
All I am going to say is, take all the time you need we will still be here when you get back
Enjoy your break and I hope you taste some good wines!
Not gonna lie, I sorta saw something like this coming with how rapidly the in-story situation was spiraling. It was starting to read like something the author had lost control of, and even if it didn't cause you to quit writing until further notice (which I didn't see coming, not that perceptive), I was expecting to see something to the effect of 'any further writing of this story would be from the top'.
For what it's worth I enjoyed the story. I wish you good luck on the endeavor.
From my own opinion the story was going well from the start, but I think the direction of things started going south when the introduction of the Everfree's nature spirit and Silvanus' manipulations in Equestria not being noticed by the deities of Equus - I mean it be massive suspicion when an entity not belonging to that world appears, aka, Gerhardt.
Another aspect of the story I found heavily weird is the introduction of Gerhardt's second son, I mean it would had been okay to make a carbon copy of Gerhardt's personality and way-of-thinking in his son, but also adding the memories too went a tad overboard, I mean his daughter never received said memories - only information that may had been saved within Gerhardt' memory banks but nothing too personal or things that were impreshinable only upon Gerhardt.
I felt the story was going near an end and that sequel story would pop up, honestly this is how I imagined things would go - and this is based off the arrival of the half-human/elf woman:
Gerhardt would investigate the lingering magics on her and discover she was sent here by Silvanus, with that knowledge he tries to reverse-engineer that magical trace to not only make his way back to his homeworld, but also discover the fact that spirit aspect of nature is sealed in the Everfree and is being slowly freed by Silvanus. Gerhardt would then bring this information to the princesses and let them decide what should be done with the spirit - while heavily suggesting to seal it permanently rather than freeing it based off experience he has - following after this, the Gerhardt copy back at the human kingdom will do investigations to what really happen to the original Gerhardt, and discover dimensional-energies capable of opening a wormhole to another world.
Copy Gerhardt would make a machine to make a sort of doorway to this other world, only downside, is there is a time-gap, so while a lot of years have gone by in the human homeworld, only two years had gone by in Gerhardt's time - which would put him after the events of Tirek's return.
The story would end with Copy Gerhardt with a small force entering this other world, original Gerhardt continuing his experiements into becoming a god - creating his son by accident in the process, the half human/elf woman will feel conflicted on the decsion done to the greater nature spirit - either sealing it forever or sending it into another world (Gerhardt's suggestion, not his world but a random one), while the deities of Equus begin to notice the sudden changes and prepare to act.
But that is all just my own thoughts, the story itself was well written, only issue I had was that things felt too rushed to sudden, especially with the whole greater nature spirit planning to kill all ponies and Gerhardt or Pixel replacing all organic life into synthetic... that alone would either create a sequel story that takes place a century after that story's events or the deities of Equus intervene and quote-on-quote judge both Gerhardt's and the greater nature spirit's decision on what should be done with the world, and who of the two is more guilty than the other. (I mean you have a race that can manipulate nature... like... seriously, if the deities of Equus don't consider the pony-race as a fluke then the greater nature spirit is in the wrong no matter what.)
I honestly understand where your coming from, the story was kinda spiraling. Gerhardt must have been difficult to write for as he is much more advanced than anything we've seen in the mlp-verse. I personally really loved pixel as a character and hope that you use her again if givin the opportunity. I wish you all the luck in the world with your schooling and your break you are a very talented writer and i would hate for you to give it up.
It's good you stop now and avoid burning yourself out further. Otherwise, you may incidentally turn yourself off writing all together.
On the flip side, if you're looking for a story with a similar technology theme as tour's, I recommend Dexter's Lab: Equestria. It shares many of them sake themes in regards to technology, though it is milder in terms of violence and such.
Wish you the best and hope you return when ready. Take care, okay?