I 'reworded' large parts on Conquest, but I'm really back on here to rewrite Blazing Muzzles

After finishing the half-written chapter five, I went back to read the earlier chapters and was sorely disappointed with my clarity of writing almost all throughout. I was actually twelve years old back then, but despite putting out a significantly better written work (Interdimensional Princess), still couldn't see the fic for what it was: mediocre. It's still not anything amazing, but I couldn't stand to leave the previous chapters as such if I have any intention of taking it out of hiatus. This isn't a rewrite, and the original events and meaning I wanted to convey in most scenes remains the same, but I wanted to at least touch up the reading experience to be more clear for anyone hopping on (for a no-longer-canon changeling fic that I necromanced). I have a decent idea for how the next few chapters will go, we'll see how far I get.

I very much thought I was done with this site for good, and honestly, there's no guarantee I'll still be around for that much longer either. I've gotten quite a bit back into writing throughout the summer and a bit more now (though most of my progress isn't anything I can / want to show yet).

I've been rewriting (in a very, very extensive way) Blazing Muzzles, and that's what got my foot back in the door. I've always been obsessed with the idea of writing something that I could consider my 'magnum opus' work, and never did either for lack of time, skill, or motivation in my writing slumps / long absences over the last half decade. Conquest was actually one of my attempts at this, a story that I intended to write out to the 40-60k word mark and hope I'd be satisfied with it and not want more. I somewhat gave that up when I wrote Interdimensional Princess, thinking I'd never get around to it, and I might still be right.

Blazing Muzzles is probably one of the earlier (but not the earliest) attempts I made at this, and I deleted it out of shame over the shallow characterization, nonsensical plot, logically inconsistent (albeit extensive in the military aspect) world-building. Of course, at that time, I was an edgy 10-11 year old who wanted to get his sci-fi war story inspired by Halo, and didn't know or care for much else to make it compelling for pretty much anyone. Space marine OC pony Joey Subtle go bam bam, rebels die, Equestria wins against rebels who are given no explanation for their motivations, haha. It read like a B-movie video game summary.

It didn't have a profound message, or reasonably grounded and deep world-building (that is both militarily consistent and makes some semblance of sense in terms of its socio-economic state). I can't promise to do a perfect (or necessarily even good!) job at all of these aspects, but I'm sure as hell a lot better equipped to write such a story now than I was before. I'm a bit over 13k words in (and a sizeable amount of the story, like at least a quarter, will be additional exposition for world-building through infantry manuals, newspaper clippings from in-universe, all sorts of tidbits that are somewhat optional (bit still helpful) compared to the main story but fill the role of elaborating upon some of the military and socio-economic world-building without distracting from or disrupting the main story. The story will be a lot more intimate and tightly-contained (rather than stretching the length and timeframe of a whole video-game campaign), and by the end I've hopefully written something that is both ways placating my 10-year old self's military fantasy while also not accidentally glorifying war or despotism. This is what I have set on as my 'magnum opus' for now. It may not get as much attention as Interdimensional Princess (which all things considered, is not particularly popular for a fic), but I want to be proud of it.

Linked here is some concept art I drew (and could not get to display with Fimfic's image embedding). I've always loved drawing space marine ponies but I don't think I've drawn a suit that is truly 'anatomically accurate' to the actual joint ponies in the show have until now. I've drawn arrangements with folded/overlapping chestplates to try to rationalize how a pony could stand up within the armor, but nothing's made more sense than this so far (which still needs some hand-waving, of course).