"Shaking Off Bad Memories" Complete! + Minor Additional Content for "Late-Night Conversations" · 5:42am Mar 12th, 2022
Happy Friday! As those of you who've followed my blogs lately might have heard, I've been publishing the sequel to "Late-Night Conversations", titled "Shaking Off Bad Memories", and as of tonight it is COMPLETE! If you've been holding off on reading it so you could see the whole story at once, now's your chance! And if you didn't know I was doing this at all, well, now you know!
This was a long but rewarding writing experience. These were interesting characters to work with and I really wanted to get it the way I wanted. I had some early ideas that seemed good in my head but translated poorly to writing; I scrapped those, but in the process found some new ideas that I was happy to get the chance to really expand on during rewrites. So far, viewership has been low (I guess I overestimated the appeal of a sequel story featuring Sunset & Wallflower that didn't involve either Sunflower romance or Wallflower self-harm), but it has gotten mostly positive reactions, including the approval of the writer of several of the most popular Wallflower stories out there. So there's that.
I've included another short sample here:
"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to surprise you," Sunset responded. "I figured you could hear me climbing over the seats — I didn't realize you hadn't noticed me."
"Huh," Wallflower said, with the ghost of a smirk on her face. "Isn't that a change of pace." She noticed Sunset tense up at the comment and, horrified, the green girl lowered her face into her hands, ashamed. "I'm sorry, I really shouldn't have said that."
Sunset tried to respond No Wallflower, that's perfectly okay, but something stopped the words from escaping her mouth.
"I've just gotten into a bad habit of being, uh, self-deprecating — that's the phrase, right? Roseluck's been trying to help me break out of it. Y'know, so I can see myself more positively, or something. But it's kinda hard."
"No, I..." Sunset finally spoke. "I get it. It's fine. I didn't really mean to..." She didn't really want to finish that sentence. "How are you?"
"Me? Um..."
Also, in case you missed my earlier blog entry, both "Shaking Off Bad Memories" and the original "Late-Night Conversations" now have special cover art from SwordTune!
Speaking of the original story, I actually made a short new special addition to it! It's a very short original song I wrote based on the hymnal "Abide With Me" based on the themes of the story. I wanted to experiment with writing song lyrics in preparation for some ideas I have for a story I may write in the future, and this was an interesting way to do so. It's wholly inessential to the story, but I hope you like it anyway if you choose to read it.
Finally, "Late-Night Conversations" got a review, courtesy of Loganberry's Ponyfic Roundup blog, and it was mostly positive! (I stand by my use of colored text, dammit.) This was before I added the new song, but I trust he won't retroactively penalize me for it. I hope.
Anyway, that's all for now. I've done my promotions, I've added it to groups, and now the sequel fic is in the wind and we'll see where it goes from here (I'll post it on AO3 next week). I have no intention of adding any further to either story, though I may eventually write another that takes place around the same point in time (but wouldn't tie directly to this saga). Hope you enjoy.
Oh, interesting. I'll definitely be looking at your future work. I hope you get some more views and comments soon, I've shared it around as much I could.
Good luck!