• Member Since 18th Jan, 2015
  • offline last seen 4 hours ago

TikiBat


Tiki Enthusiast, Bat fan, writer

More Blog Posts116

  • 73 weeks
    New chapter update tomorrow

    It's been almost nine months but Night Terrors should be seeing an update tomorrow morning. This is a story that I feel has been underperforming a lot throughout its run, and there's a good chance it'll be my last long story for the foreseeable future. That said, it's still one that's very special to me, and I hope people will stick around to the end of it. I've wound up altering the outline I

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    0 comments · 141 views
  • 102 weeks
    April chapter updates — an update about updates

    I’ve been running into a road block while working on some of my current projects lately and thought I’d write out a little status update for where I’m at story update wise for this month. This is going to be a mixed bag in terms of update timelines, but I always like to share where I’m at with my work anyways, even if it’s the kind of content that maybe one or two people actually enjoy reading

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    4 comments · 207 views
  • 106 weeks
    Odyssey Chapter I is out

    Because of how I'm working on this particular rewrite, the reworked chapters will not appear as "new" chapters and the story won't appear as "updated". So what that means is that I'm going to have to work harder with every update to get the story out there. This chapter shouldn't be unfamiliar to longtime readers, however, it will have some very subtle yet significant lore changes towards

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    0 comments · 163 views
  • 107 weeks
    Relaunching "Odyssey"

    You might have noticed, I rebranded and did some tweaking to "Odyssey". The first "prologue" chapter is up, though I guess it's not technically a true prologue, but rather more of a lore-filled intro. I don't want to get people's hopes up yet, so I'm not going to commit to a full structured release schedule yet, but expect infrequent updates that are made up of the original chapters but

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    2 comments · 156 views
  • 113 weeks
    Unsure what to do with "Odyssey"

    So I'm going to preface this by saying that the point of this blog post is to gauge interest on whether this story should continue or not, and how that should go if I do. If you like the story and just want to see it continue then please let me know below. If you want to read into more of my thoughts on it and get an explanation for *why* it's been on hiatus for so long, then feel free to read

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    3 comments · 160 views
Jan
25th
2022

Unsure what to do with "Odyssey" · 8:14pm Jan 25th, 2022

So I'm going to preface this by saying that the point of this blog post is to gauge interest on whether this story should continue or not, and how that should go if I do. If you like the story and just want to see it continue then please let me know below. If you want to read into more of my thoughts on it and get an explanation for *why* it's been on hiatus for so long, then feel free to read on.

"Odyssey" is at it's core a story I started years ago as a worldbuilding project, but it seemed to get some good traction as I updated it and continued to explore that world. It was my first and only first person story at the time, and something I enjoyed learning with. I had a lot of fun writing out the universe's details, and it was fun to see what people thought of it as more was teased and revealed. It was, and well, is a really rough story, but I think at its core there's something that more than a few people seemed to enjoy from it. Whether it's the characters, or the universe, or even just the narrative-- I don't really know.

What I do know is that I lost a lot of the motivation I originally had for the project after going through some very rough personal loss in August 2020. I'm not going to go into details because it's not really relevant, but I lost a family member and the resulting grief led me to shift focus on what kinds of projects I wanted to focus on going forward. I've always had a far easier time writing third person stories, and at the time "Odyssey" was always a side project. My main project "Do Ponies on Earth have Magic Dreams?" was going through it's early draft releases, and that being my first story made it more of a priority. That project is still my favorite work I've written, and there's so much of myself written into it. If you had only ever read the original rough version of that story before I completely rebooted it in it's current form, I definitely recommend reading it now because it's a lot more refined and more focused and while it's long, there's a lot of heart in it.

This isn't about that story though. Following the personal loss I went through, I decided to focus on finishing "Magic Dreams'" final draft and it's follow up projects, and what that meant was that other projects wound up getting sidelined in favor of exploring what I was most attached to at the time. Magic Dreams' final draft was finished in the summer of 2021, its sequel got broken into two "more cohesive" stories, and the first part of that was published in August. That story is now finished, but there are still two more parts left that I want to work on as well, and those might take a while to do. While those stories are all separate, they're essentially almost one big connected narrative, and so in my planning at least, I've been looking at them as one single story made up of multiple books.

I guess where I'm going with all of this is that as part of shifting focus on the projects that made me the happiest, I had to shelve something that didn't necessarily make me unhappy, but was something that I felt wasn't up to the quality that it needed to be. It's not a stretch to say that Odyssey needs a lot of work. A quick look at the comments section for it shows that there's almost a similar sentiment that the quality could be a lot better, and there's a lot of constructive criticism offered to back that up. I felt that with every new chapter that was released, things were still being pointed out and nitpicked (not necessarily in a bad way mind you,) and I never felt that I was improving enough at the time so I put it on the backburner until I could give it more focus. While I have a full outline of the story I want to tell written up, I don't know whether completing the whole project is worthwhile right now.

I love the universe I've crafted, I enjoy the characters I've written, and I *think* that people enjoyed the story as well, but I'm just feeling a little lost on where to go next with it. I could continue it either in tandem with my two passion projects: Finding Your Place with the Outcasts and Night Terrors (which you should totally check out!), but I don't know if there's enough interest in it to fully commit to reworking Odyssey from the ground up. I could just continue the story as-is, but I feel like at this point anything I write now is going to be too drastically different from what's already there, and I think the best course of action is going chapter by chapter and fully rewriting everything, keeping what's there as a base, but fleshing it out and giving it more love.

So here's where everything comes full circle and wraps up: What do you want? Presumably, if you're reading this then you've read the story, or are maybe interested in reading it. Do you want to see it wrapped all the way up? Should I just release a summary chapter giving a rundown for where the story is intended to go? Or should I just hold off on it for now? If I decide to continue it and give it it's top-down refresh like I will in this case, would you be okay re-reading the story from the beginning, and would you be interested in sticking along for the ride?

I know this kind of stuff doesn't seem important at face value, and I know it's hard to just say what's on your mind sometimes but trust me, I'm open to every kind of feedback and response, it really does help when it comes to deciding on whether I should put the time and energy into rebooting an in-limbo project. If there's genuinely not enough interest it might just be something I hold onto for the time being until there's less on my plate, but if this is a story that people really do want to see finished, then I'll gladly give it more attention.

Comments ( 3 )

I'd say just do what makes you happy 😇

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Generally I'm happy either way. If people want to see it continue though, I'll give it more attention versus just leaving it in indefinite limbo

Do what you feel is right, but I do want to read more about this story. There's not enough bat pony stories out there or ones on a more futuristic level too.

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