[AUTHOR'S NOTES] Retrospective and Future of Empire · 3:57am Jan 27th, 2022
So here we are, it's been a hair over 2 years and 3 months since I first published Chapter 1.
The Broken Eggs
As I've mentioned before in my blog posts about my writing updates, I started Empire because I was hurting. I had almost walked out into traffic only a month earlier, literally only stopped by my girlfriend, living homeless, barely hanging on to life in general. I had been working on Lost Little Wolf, which itself was a catharsis piece for the pain of loss from my divorce. I had been struggling to get anything written for Chapter 13 - Becoming because whenever I tried to put myself back in the place of my fictional isekai'd self growing up under Chrysalis in an AU of MLP:FiM (and aint that a sentence that'll confuse linguists in 100 years...), my trauma dragged me right back to the night my van's coolant system blew and gave me 2nd to 3rd degree scalding burns on my wrist and hand.
Figuring I just needed a palette cleanser, I started reading my "old standby" books. I brushed up on Past Sins and a few offshoots, read Gunsmoke again, tore through Project: Sunflower, and they're all wonderful and helped my mood, but then I got to Long Road to Friendship.
From 'Step 32: Makes Me Crazy':
“Anytime, dear. Care to tell me what this is all about now?”
“Yes, yes I would.” Sunset sat up again. “This is going to sound crazy, but with everything you’ve already seen, it shouldn’t be too crazy.” Sunset took a long sip of tea. “The night of the Fall Formal, after you girls blasted me… something happened.”
“Something as in…?”
“As in, I—” Sunset choked, her throat suddenly blocked. She coughed until she could get air down again and cleared her throat. “Ahem, I—” Her throat did it again, clogging up before she could mention anything about what had transpired when she had been hit by the Elements.
Rarity leaned forward. “What is it?”
Sunset pounded her chest a few times. “The night of the Fall Formal, I—” Her throat seized up again. It was just like when she was forced to tell the truth, only in reverse.
What’s going on? Why can’t I talk about it? “Rarity, I—” She tried to fight through the pressure, her face turning red from the exertion. She choked again and gasped for air, doubling over in her seat.
“Sunset, are you all right?” Rarity sat her up straight and handed her a cup of tea.
“N-no, I’m not.” Sunset guzzled it down in one gulp, scalding the back of her throat. “I’m not okay, because there is a—” She gagged, almost spitting her tea up. “Aaaaagh! What the hell?”
Rarity leaned back. “Sunset… you’re starting to scare me.”
Sunset ran her hands down the sides of her face. “May I have a pen and some paper, please?”
“Of course. Wait one second.” Rarity hurried out of the room, a little too quickly for Sunset’s tastes.
Seriously, what’s happening? Did something go wrong when Rarity asked me to tell the truth? It was pretty straightforward. She crossed her arms, a theory already forming in her head. Hopefully, she was wrong, or things were going to get very awkward, very fast.
Rarity returned with a pen and paper and laid them on the table. Sunset snatched the pen up and set it against the paper.
‘I have a—’ Her hand cramped up, forcing her to drop the pen. The second she did, the cramp went away, and she tried again, only for it to return when she picked up where she left off.
“No… no, no, no!” Sunset stared at the paper, a blank and hopeless void mocking her attempt to save herself. I can’t talk about the curse. The whole time, I thought it was a choice. Every time someone got close to it, I always made the choice to steer clear… and in the end, it was off-limits anyway.
A hand rested on her shoulder, and Sunset looked up to see Rarity with wide eyes. “Sunset, what’s wrong?”
“I…” Sunset hung her head. “I can’t tell you.”
“Why ever not?”
“I just can’t. I want to—I really do… but I can’t.”
“Sunset, I don’t understand.” Rarity moved her hand down to take Sunset’s. “If you want to tell me then just do it. I swear I won’t repeat anything you don’t want me to.”
Hopelessness filled Sunset’s stomach—a terrible combination with the hunger she still had. She looked into Rarity’s eyes, desperately wanting to say everything. Was it so no one could take advantage of her knowingly? Or did the Elements really just enjoy making her miserable? Regardless of the reason, Sunset hated them even more.
(emphasis added)
By way of quick reminder, this version of Sunset is homeless and would remain so or another few chapters. She's been struggling with putting her life back together after it's had been completely shattered and facing all sorts of uphill struggles, so I was already hyper-identifying with this version of her to an uncanny degree, and then The Song came on my Spotify discovery mix.
I'm not even joking about the synchronicity of it all. Depression, trauma, reading, and song all just slammed together in my head and presented the question of:
"What if this was worse?!"
And the thought terrified me. I make no bones of the fact that I'm smart. I'm not bragging, and I'm not even the smartest person I know (my sister is smarter, and I spent most of my life thinking I was nothing special because I tend to associate with very, very smart people, we're talking INT 17+ types), and it was only recently I came to realize I'm a bit of a Renaissance Woman; I've achieved mastery in several disciplines and did so with an ease that makes me wonder what else I'm an expert at that I'm not even aware of expertise in that field because of cripplingly low self esteme for most of my life? Sunset is also smart and (honestly) a better student than Twilight. She can't talk? Write. She can't write? Grab an alphabet board and spell it out. Get Pinkie to play a game with you (you know she'd be up for it), where you speak the first part of the sentence and let her run through her mental dictionary until she lands on the next word. There's LOTS of ways to communicate...but what if the elements just kept cutting every...single avenue of communication off in the off chance that Sunset could have managed to spill the beans that way?
And so the idea was born.
The original plot was to have Sunset be at her absolute lowest and then she would have to go learn from each of the Element bearers lessons related to their element. Five chapters, quick lessons, done-zo. I was just going to do what The Albinocorn did, which was to use 1st Person format to tell the story. No need to have an audience avatar if your main character is explaining to the audience what's happening.
"Not so fast," says my Trauma, "No way in hell you're just breezing through this!"
And Principal Celestia stepped in to volunteer.
I can't speak for all the other authors out there, but for me, I wind up putting a little bit of my self into every character I write. Twilight getting passionate about digging into a particular theory? That's my scientific curiosity. Sunset feeling isolated because she's "fallen" and just trying to figure out how to bridge the gap between her and everyone else? That's the part of me that had everything she thought she ever wanted, got what she deserved, and is struggling to get back out to get what she really wants. Celestia struggling with not being able to bear children of her own and dealing with the possibility that the child she's managed to get may be taken away from her if the winds of fate blow in just the wrong direction...?
...yeah...
I focus on the pain, The only thing that's real
So Chapter 1 - I Hurt Myself Today began.
Right off the bat the response was overwhelmingly positive. I literally have no words adequate to express how much the early comments were to helping me to rebuild my shattered emotions at the time. I had only just stopped being homeless a few months prior to posting that first chapter, and at the time I was still in "shell-shock" mode, so the whole thing was a relativity blur that felt like it was all happening at once.
One thing that's rather common with ALL fanfic writers is they'll get a really good idea, start slamming out the chapters, then the productivity slows to a crawl. Chapter 2 - There's Beauty in the Breakdown, Chapter 3 - When the Dawn Comes, Tonight Will be a Memory Too, and Chapter 4 - All We Do Crumbles to the Ground were like that, ideas flowing like water, so fast I almost couldn't get them out quickly enough.
Of note in Chapter 3 was the introduction to the Empire universe of a WW2 conflict that was driven by the same cultural and historical vectors that produced our last world war. This would come up later, of course, but one of my readers pointed out how brilliant it would have been to have the Germanic Dictator stand-in be The Storm King. By the time the comment was made, I was already making plans for a mention of The Storm King later (Epilogue 3, for those who don't recall the passing mention), so I was just kicking myself, 'cause that would have been brilliant.
Around the time I was putting the finishing touches on Chapter 4, I started getting Christmas music in my randomized discovery playlist from Spotify. It was November, and for the most part I was all about NOPE-ing the songs out. I don't do Christmas before Thanksgiving. The fat-man has a whole month, he doesn't need any more time on the calendar.
And then...and then...another song came on.
Carol of the Bells - Various artists - Album: "Christmas: Coming Soon"
Music Box Blues
I knew this was going to be fun, and I was super excited to just dash off a few dozen paragraphs, have Principal Celestia jaunt about the multiverse, the be back home for a Christmas Hearth's Warming Miracle, and I'd get a cute little one-shot off by Christmas as a gift for my fans, both old and new.
Yeah, yeah, yuck it up. You made it through this mess, you've earned it.
One thing I will say is MBB was just plain a joy to write. A no-holds-barred magical romp, packed with pop culture references and nods to canon and fanon alike, and just to be a cherry on top...what if I were to get the permission of the other authors who's work inspired me to play in their sandboxes for a bit?
HUGE shout-out to Wanderer D. No way in hell would MBB have been half the fun it was if he hadn't let me use the Isekai as plot lubricant. I've gotten comments that the Gunsmoke section of "The candles burning, you know I'm gonna wait, the clock keeps turning, but I know it's not too late" feels a little out of place, and that's kinda true. It was specifically a Christmas gift to Wanderer D, a cute little bon mot of a possible future (without devolving into a sequel) of Gunsmoke.
By way of SHAMELESS PROMOTION, if you haven't picked up a copy, please support Wanderer D by buying a copy of Gunsmoke for your library shelves, even if you've read the story online (a dozen times...like I have...don't judge me, it's GOOD!).
I've said it over and over, spotty8ee created a masterpiece and as a fellow author was super-communicative and accommodating for the "Vampire Lord Celestia" scene. They are still working on "Meliorism," so absolutely give it a read and a watch:
"...Hunts the Undead"
What more can I possibly say about this series that hasn't been said before by dozens (if not hundreds) of other people?
For those who have been paying attention to my blog posts on the subject, yes, I'm still going to finish "On the Subject of Bug Horses and Friendship Lessons." It is, in fact, the next story in my hopper to work on to fully clear the decks. "Bug Horses" is a prequel that's canonical to MBB and soft-canon to "...Hunts the Undead," unless RSD slipstreams the story into "A Band of Misfit Losers..."
I think you'd find me passed out from sheer happiness if that happened.
Pretty much nobody is going to know the reference to the setting where Celestia is an elf. And that's because this version of Celestia is based on a homebrew D&D 5E campaign with the current working title of "Project: Feverdream." This was the brainchild of WulfyMail, who will likely not respond if you poke her via DMs because she's shy. She had the idea to make MLP into a playable campaign but instead of just rehashing it a-la Tales of Equestria, fully adapting it using the content of D&D's core rulebooks. "A Town Called Tavern" is going to be the first book in a collaborative series based on this concept, and is going to include gender-identity themes and continue the "Sunset Gets Adopted By Momlestia" thing I've got going.
Oh, another fun fact for this section; the "harpies" in it aren't actually harpies. They are just as mythical in this world as they are in ours, but they have some descriptions of them from other worlds (like Equestria), so when Vrocks from the Abyss show up, they get mistaken for Harpies. The more you know!
One element that kinda snuck up on me was the magicless universe. I was initially going to write the whole of MBB without that particular side-jaunt, because the super-fun part was the fanon crossovers. But as soon as I had the idea for Sunset being stranded in a magicless world, I knew it was going to be the emotional lynchpin of the story, and the absolute Christmas Miracle that wouldn't be a complete asspull that's so off-putting in oh-so-many "christmas" "specials" that litter our cultural landscape. It knocked the plotline from, "that one fun holiday themed episode of your favorite TV show" up to "this is the true meaning of the holiday, damnit!" in a single, almost not written moment.
It's moments I look back on the works I wrote because I wanted to live in a world where those exist and say, "Damn, I'm good!" This was truly one of them.
If I could start again, A million miles away
Chapter 5 - Pleasures Remain...So Does the Pain marks the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic for me...and the collapse of a LOT of the trust I held in what little remained of the "old guard" on the American right. The end-result-so-far of the pandemic fallout was, amongst many other things, my chosen cutiemark symbol for my OC, a symbol that has stood for freedom and opposition to tyranny since before the founding of this country, got co-opted by racist hate groups that embraced the idea of putting a lawless dictator on a throne in a land without a king.
Yes, I'm bitter about this.
So, like Marvel had to change The Punisher's symbol had to change after being coopted by the same group of thugs, I had to change my cutiemark symbol. Maybe one day I'll be able to take the old one back.
Along with changes to...just about everything, Chapter 5 marked a change in the story. Rather than being solely focused on just the challenges that Sunset is enduring and Celestia helping with, the narrative pivoted to show how their journey fit into the larger world(s) of EQG and FiM. I had intended to do something like this from before I set the first word to screen after "Chapter 1," hell, before I'd even decided on a title. This turned off a lot of people who wanted the story to remain solidly fixed on just Sunset and Celestia, but the problem with that is the same as the problem a bunch of other stories about suicide and recovery have; they just don't pay attention to the rest of the world and how little the world cares that you're going through the single greatest challenge in your life that you'll ever face.
Had I taken my own life, my ex would have resumed raising our daughter, this time without my wishes for how she should be raised being acknowledged. My online friends would have wondered what happened but have no way of finding out, so I'd be forgotten. My employer would simply have hired another temp agent.
Life moves on, for good or ill; it just doesn't care.
And that made the next stretch of the story much stronger, IMHO, than most stories of the kind. Celestia has to fight to keep her daughter with her. Sunset has to keep doing what's hurting her most, even when the "fast exit" would be easier in the moment. The struggle of the two characters was what made the story what it was. If they didn't have to just keep going, even when it seemed like there was no point, even when it would have been easier to just give up (How much easier would Principal Celestia's life have been if she had just handed Sunset over to Princess Celestia? If she had simply passed off the responsibility of managing the diplomatic process as requested by the Equestrian princesses? How much simpler would her life have been if she just gave up and returned to her comfortable, non-magical existence?), the story would have started to fall flat very quickly.
Chapter 6 - I Couldn’t Get Away & Chapter 7 - I'll Try to Carry On pulled a switcheroo on me. I had initially planned (as Pinkie being the guest character at the start of Ch. 6 would imply) for Pinkie's "lesson" to happen before Fluttershy's. This is partially due to my ongoing struggle to write for Pinkie for longer than a paragraph, but the entirety of the rest of the reason came when I started to get to the end of the conversation explaining the problem of the magical lock from Twilight's perspective, Fluttershy was there to say, "No, this is what happens now. Pinkie's lesson is important, but this lesson is what's needed now."
So I wrote about another girl who tried to kill herself.
Fluttershy is very much my older, more experienced self from today giving my younger, teenage self permission to forgive herself. I put myself through a lot of hell growing up, because I simply didn't know better. The culture in the United States during the 1980s had done so very much to stamp out any sign that the LGBTQ+ community (as we know it today) was even a thing, and everything from the TV shows I watched to my so-very TERF step-mother had hammered home the idea that I couldn't be a girl because I was "really a boy," and to want to be any different was stupid and wrong. And because I had no idea there could be any other way, I internalized all of it. I hated myself so much and did so much to try and just conform to my assigned gender that I wound up mentally and emotionally abusing myself as much as my step-mother had done. I didn't try to kill myself when I was in my teens...but oh I thought about it a LOT. Ironically, it was my depression that probably saved me, as it had numbed my emotions so much by this point that I couldn't bring myself to care if ending my life might make things easier or not.
For those curious about what's going on in Chapter 7; Autumn Blaze has Stage 5 cancer that's exacerbating kidney failure. The complications she's experiencing mean she's, well, dying.
One old fancomic I remember was all about how (pony)Pinkie was explaining to someone (Twilight, I think?) about how she learned to laugh at things that made her sad. The whole thing is a wordless flashback to helping a friend through terminal illness and burying them, and once I got over The Feels™, that one really stuck with me. It would just make sense that Pinkie's bouncy optimism would be fueled by having a relationship with someone who could teach her that sometimes you have to laugh...even if you have to cry, first.
I'll be completely candid, Chapter 7 came out of friggin' nowhere. Even as I was writing the opening scene with Celestia, I was struggling to figure out what I was going to do next. What you got was 100% organic, home grown, plotted out as I wrote it, Pinkie Pie-channeling goodness.
I just struggle so much to write for Pinkie.
I would keep myself, I would find a way
In July of 2021, the housing program I had been living in since I stopped being homeless and I had helped run had to shut down. We saw the writing on the wall, but it wasn't until then that we just had to pull the plug because we simply couldn't keep it going.
There's a LOT to that story, and maybe one day I'll tell it, but not today.
I was also going through another round of abuse accusations from my ex, which the courts saw right through because the pandemic had made it so I couldn't see my daughter face-to-face from March 2020 on. It was, however, ungodly stressful, and the emotions and anxiety Principal Celestia is displaying in Chapter 8 - It's Strange What Desire Will Make Foolish People Do came directly from that experience. I grew up in a culture that said that the birth mother would always get the kids in a divorce and being gay meant you were automatically an unfit parent because it was a sign of mental illness. (No, I'm not kidding or exaggerating. Homosexuality was listed as a mental disorder until 1987. I was 10 in 1987.) Every time the courts get involved in my parental relationship with my daughter, I'm always on the edge of my seat and having a panic attack.
I will probably have this fear until the day my daughter is 18.
Chapter 8 is also the first time Princess Celestia's abnormal behavior catches Vice-principal Luna's attention to where she starts connecting the dots that there's something going on beneath the surface, and this is the one plot thread I'd been holding in reserve since I decided to make this a Momlestia fic. Finding the right time to introduce something so potentially distracting from the main story was a challenge, but it's inclusion in Chapter 8 felt completely natural.
Also, you can probably tell I ship (human)RariJack pretty hard, and that was even before Rollercoaster of Friendship when the animators may as well have just had little hearts popping like bubbles around Rarity and Applejack's heads whenever they looked at each other.
Zecora always felt like the natural solution to the problem of, "How do we get inside Sunset's head without creating a plot-hole with magic?" Make mind magic a little-studied discipline in Equestria due to ethical and legal concerns and then you have to fall back on whatever the hell resources you can scrounge...even if that shows up in the form of an Old Spider Woman.
The Old Spider Woman is one of my favorite archetypes in fiction. This is Raz from She-ra or Cologne from Ranma 1/2. She's probably on your side...mostly...she's probably crazy, certainly more mature than the protagonist, and will help with your adventure/quest, often whether you want it or not.
One thing I wanted to avoid was any stereotyping of her as a tribal African woman. Yes, the original character is clearly patterned after old stereotypes of tribal women from Africa, but the purpose of the character was to invert the trope just like happened in the S01 ep. of MLP:FiM. In that episode, Twilight is the "classically" trained scholar, the one who has all the book knowledge in the world...but it all fails...or does it? Turns out she has so much knowledge, but discarded the book she had (the same one that Zecora used for the cure to poison joke) because she was just as biased and prejudice as her friends, even if that prejudice came from a different angle.
My character development for Zecora was that she did come from the human world's version of Africa (I like "Zebrica," though I've seen other fan-created names for the continent that work just as well), and is old enough that she saw action in the aftermath of their version of WW2. She served as a field medic in a campaign in the orient and left for the country that CHS resides in after the war. The bag she carries is the same one she carried in the battlefield and she keeps it stocked with a lot of the same equipment she carried during her active duty period, but she has continued to study field healing, including spending time as an EMT before finally retiring to a small plot of land on the edge of the Apple farm. Like many ex-soldiers, she prefers the quiet simplicity of living "off the grid" and spends her time preparing simple suspensions and syrups for the farmers in the region.
Yes, she is a badass, but a badass that's wise from experience.
Chapter 9 - You know that I'm falling...and I don't know what to say and Chapter 10 - Hit Me Like a Ray of Sun, Burnin' Through My Darkest Night were supposed to be one chapter, but just like The candles burning, you know I'm gonna wait, the clock keeps turning, but I know it's not too late just plain got out of hand, so too did the dream-walk/vision-quest. After Celestia had been introduced as a major part of the story, the vision quest became absolutely essential for the story. I had been on the fence about whether to include the "flight from the underworld" portion of the vision quest for a little bit, but it just made too much narrative sense to leave out.
For those who watch for symbolism; yes, Celestia carrying Sunset through the second half of the vision was symbolism for pregnancy, the experience of pain and the elements lockdown just before the "wake-up" moment was symbolic of giving birth, and the disconnecting of the extension cord in Chapter 11 was symbolic of cutting the umbilical. I planned the first, realized the second was a happy accident, and the third was just so obvious that I couldn't just leave it out.
Speaking of paying attention, should you go back and re-read, you may note that the end of the story is the first time you see the narrative from Sunset's perspective. This was 100% on purpose and was very, very hard, but SO worth it!
Fun fact: I had originally scripted the scene where Luna's asked what pizza toppings she wants with Applejack, but then I wrote Applejack off to the hospital, so the timing wouldn't have worked for that. I like the version I had to change it to better anyway.
In case you're wondering; no, I do not still have the van that injured my wrist. Unlike Sunset's motorcycle, there was so much more wrong with it than the coolant system that it would have cost several times the cost of a used vehicle to fix it, so I sold it for scrap/recycling and now drive a Volkswagen Jetta. Sidenote: Volkswagen translates to "People's Car," which logically abbreviates to PC. "Jetta" is a Danish word that means "jet black." And yes, I wrote the car I now drive into the story as Vice-principal Luna's car.
Introducing SciTwi at the end of Empire was a natural choice. It just made sense with everything else going on that the human government would want their own expert to take a stab at helping the Equestrians, and who better than the counterpart to one of the princesses?
Epilogia
Epilogue I - I knew the only peace I'd find is if this child was yours was actually nearly 90% written already by the time I finished writing Chapter 3. Yes, I've had the draft of Epilogue 1 sitting in my Google Drive since 2019. For those who aren't familiar, the title is a song lyric from a fairly little-known song by a composer who does the vast majority of his work for the LDS ("mormon") church. Unlike the rest of the songs I picked for titles for this work, this one has no epic cover, no minor-key variant that came later and made it more visceral...because it's heart-rending on it's own. I knew the only song that would fit to tell Princess Celestia's story was "From God's Arms, to My Arms, to Yours." If you're not a (loving) parent, there's probably no way you can fully understand the impact this song has on a mom. The song is about a woman who wants what's best for her child, but has come to the realization that what's best isn't her, no matter how much she wishes she could be. She has to give up her daughter, and the decision shatters her.
Epilogue II - You Didn’t Know that You Fell was as as natural as introducing SciTwi. Chronologically in canon, the Sirens would have already been defeated by this point, so why didn't they show up in Empire? The answer to that question led straight to the setup for Voice of Rage and Ruin, so Epilogue 2 came together fairly easily.
The inclusion of the Student 6 was just a fun aside, and Epilogue III - We Can’t Take Back What is Done was pretty much in the story just to be able to tell the two major jokes that were a natural result of Empire's plot line.
The Past and the Future of Empire
To get to the future of the world of My Empire of Dirt, we need to go to the past. Voice of Rage and Ruin is going to be all about the Sirens and a hidden role they played in Canterlot City's own history. I'll be introducing a new enemy, but in the spirit of the the Arimaspi in S05E08, "The Lost Treasure of Griffonstone," I took some time to find an actual monster-based bad-guy for the story that will impact both the Siren's history and their time with CHS.
Voice will also be Luna centric. Just as Celestia took over parenting of Sunset, Luna will be in charge of the Sirens.
If Empire was about depression and attempted suicide and the recovery thereof, Voice will be about addiction to something that you literally cannot stop using (I've hinted at the primary McGuffin for this). Luna is probably the only person in the entire cast who would be even remotely capable at wrangling the Dazzlings without resorting to overwhelming power.
This particular angle for handling the Sirens is directly inspired by the "Sirens of the Night" series by The Crazed Werewolf, who's totally nice and fairly creative and I haven't spoken to in 3 years and that's all my fault and if they're reading this I'm sorry for dropping off the map while I worked through Empire. 
I almost put a nod to Sirens in Music Box Blues, which was intended to be a bit of a "sneak peak" at Voice, but MBB was already so very big I decided to axe the small idea I had for the scene.
I've already decided there will be a "Christmas special" for Voice, and it's titled, "Tochter aus Elysium." Like "Music Box Blues," it is a canonical entry into the Empire universe, though its impact on Voice will be much more subdued than MBB's was on Empire. It will be centered around a Christmas story, and it will feature Dean Cadence and the Shadowbolts and one other character I've only mentioned in passing. You now have enough hints to get in the ballpark of what Christmas story this is based on, and more hints may be coming in future blog posts. Mine is an evil laugh.
Even further out, we'll be returning to focus on the trials and tribulations of Principal Celestia and Sunset in You Need Never Feel Broken Again. For those interested, yes, this is where the "malfunction" of the Elements is discussed, Princess Celestia must deal with the fallout of her choices regarding Sunset, and we'll see a return of Queen Celestia from MBB. The Christmas special for YNNFBA will be called, "The Night Before Hearth's Warming," and will show a different and unexpected perspective on the conflict in YNNFBA and feature a character that has been featured in EQG.
Time to get Meta
So I kinda sorta fibbed just a little...Empire is not 100% over and done with. There is one Epilogue I've left out of the version posted as "Complete" on FiMFiction. This is going to be exclusive bonus content for the print version.
That's right, I'm planning on following in Wanderer D's footsteps and releasing My Empire of Dirt as a physical book. It will include a prologue that tells the (very, very brief) story so-far in FiM and EQG's respective stories leading up to the Fall Formal, Empire and MBB will be slipstreamed into a single volume, the additional epilogue will be added in, and I'll add "Bug Horses" as additional bonus content.
When the time comes to make the announcement of the book's availability, I'll post to my blog and tack on a copy of these author's notes to the FiMFiction entry for Empire as a "new" "chapter," as well as make the announcement on my blog.
Along those lines, I'm on the hunt for cover art. The graphic I grabbed after a 15 minute search and thanking serendipity for something that was just flat-out perfect for the time invested and getting the fic "out there", but something that more perfectly reflects the overall tone and mood of the book would be desirable.
Of course, Empire and its sequels are just one of my creative works. I've got several others that are still accruing new readers (including the "sleeping giant" of Fission on Fanfiction.net (and more recently Wattpad), that if I somehow managed to take that block of readers and get them mingled with my horsefic fans would pretty thoroughly drown out...all my fans in the Empire community, Trixie fans, the DSP constituents, and The Swarm combined. The, of course, is my other FiMFics, which I keep getting more and more ideas for.
You (yes, you) will get a chance to help me pick what I work on in the future. For those who came to follow me only after I started work on My Empire of Dirt, I used to have a voting system whenever I had completed a chapter. I'll be giving out more details on this process in the next Fanfiction Friday post (currently scheduled for Feb. 4th), so absolutely stay tuned!
The Music
So obviously this work is heavily influenced by the music I listen to, from the first seed of an inspiration to the multi-hour listening sessions on shuffle to keep the creative juices flowing. I've put together several playlists on Spotify for your listening enjoyment. Keep in mind, even if you think you know the song, I'm nearly 95% positive you haven't heard these:
- My Empire of Dirt - Volume 1: Title Tracks - Pretty much what it says on the tin, these are all the songs the chapter titles came from. They're presented in chapter order, so you should have an easy time of connecting them to the chapters. Of particular note is the version of Under Our Spell, which was a last minute swap out when I was assembling the track list on Spotify and is a thing I didn't know I needed in my life.
- My Empire of Dirt - Volume 2: The Soundtrack - This is the music that would play during the miniseries or the motion picture as the scenes are happening. Some are extremely event specific (the "Love Theme from 'Romeo and Juliet'" piece is only meant for the scene where Sunset is able to tell her mother she loves her in Chapter 11, for example), but most can be slid around and used in multiple places.
- My Empire of Dirt - Volume 3: Inspirations - These are pieces that really only mostly fit with the overall tone and feel of the fic, but were close enough for whatever reason to warrant use in inspirational listening as I was writing.
- My Empire of Dirt - Volume 4: Music Box Blues - Christmas Special? Christmas Special!
Woof, that was a long set of Author's Notes! Let me know if you had any questions of observations you'd like me to address further, but I need to go to bed now!
Ahuizotl wants to know your location. Especially since ahuizotls are known to drown their victims.
I actually started reading those fics thanks to you, so that I also have to thank you for!
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I had forgotten about Ahuizotl being based on a IRL mythical creature.
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Watch as the epilogue left out contains plot critical details that will be referenced multiple times.
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Hah! No, I'm not pulling a Bethesda move and putting critical stuff in the DLC. The added content fleshes out a storyline that is resolved in Music Box Blues but I thought could use a little bit of an extra story. Think, "official sequel for non-main characters that are interesting enough to merit the added narrative." The bits of story in the additional epilogue will NOT impact the main story whatsoever, but will add to the larger lore for those who are interested in that sort of thing.