State of the Scribe: July 2022 · 6:33pm Jul 1st, 2022
Hey pones, had ourselves an amazing last month, and this next one promises to be equally exciting!
The biggest news is of course the Friendship is Optimal Anthology: Recursive Iterations. I started an Indiegogo campaign to raise money for the book, and that campaign has already reached its goal! That means that as soon as funding is disbursed to me--approximately the middle of august--the printing will take place, with shipping immediately to follow.
If you would like to get yourself a copy of the book, or in fact any book I've ever printed before, you can do so here: https://igg.me/at/recursive-iterations
Buying multiple books imparts a substantial shipping discount, thanks to the way postage works. Media mail, for example, costs about $3.50 for a us package, plus something like .25 cents more per pound. You can see why adding another book to the box would be much cheaper than a whole separate box, doubly so for international orders.
Cover looks great, glossy looks great, and I'll have the same artist do the cover on Homebrew when I print that one after this campaign is all done and dusted. I will probably not reprint my previous books with that volume, so if you want any of my older titles, now is the best possible time to get one. The campaign runs until the 24th of July. Expect me to make one final call for orders right before then. After that I'll keep mentioning it from my blog until the shipping day, because huge piles of books are always fun to look at.
As to July, you'll see no new stories launching. Last month did come with a bonus title that many of you may not have seen yet, an Optimalverse story written specifically to be placed in that anthology above. If you'd like to read about how CelestAI eventually handles the many billions of humans who never emigrated (mostly because they were dead already), check out: https://www.fimfiction.net/story/517524/fio-ouroboros
As you can see there are no new stories launching this month, at least not beyond the usual minfic slots. You'll see one of those on the 15th, this one the story of a take on the old Sweetie Bot concept.
Other than that, just continuing on with the usual roundup of stories. Diplomatic Solution will be completing next month, and is currently in the holding pattern waiting for a cover along with Frames of War. Sisters and Myths like Us are both moving towards their endings, but probably have at least two months after this before they end.
For those few of you who cared about those fairy stories I was posting before, I've written another one of those too! And thanks to a new ebook program, I'll be able to adapt them to digital release much more quickly going forward. I wrote a second one some time ago that I never released in complete form, that will be coming out soon. I just didn't want to bombard the world with blog posts, so I'm holding off for a little bit.
The third one will need to be edited, so that will probably take another month. Maybe more if it gets a cover.
I'd like to wrap up with my usual appreciation for your support. I still get to write fanfiction, when I thought I'd have packed up and moved on long ago. I will still have to stop eventually, but... not for a little while. I won't leave anything unfinished.
I have an active Discord community with tons of other writers. If you want a place to be motivated, or ask questions and chat about stories, or just watch bad movies with us at random times, this is the place: https://discord.gg/DMDrCrG. We also do live-read edits of whole blocks of chapters before they go up, for those who want to binge stuff and hear that last pass before publication.
I now conclude with the usual list of the ongoing Patreon stories. Feel free to read the first chapter for free on my Patreon. If you prefer not to support, just hang on a few months, and they will make their way over to Fimfiction for everyone to read.
Dreamlands: The story of a batpony who ventures into the dreamlands to try and rescue Nightmare Moon from banishment and save her outcast tribe. Read at: https://www.patreon.com/posts/new-story-45878879 . Also has an awesome cover now, but I'm not sharing yet >.>
Diplomatic Solution: Equestria is uplifted into a spacefaring society, not to be received into a perfect utopia, but as the last best hope against a conquering force of magical aliens, who are sweeping across the galaxy. Ponykind doesn't know much about war, but it does know how to make friends. Maybe there's a way to solve things that doesn't need weapons. https://www.patreon.com/posts/new-story-30394496
Just wondering, do you have native ePub files for your stories somewhere? I know you can download ePub here from FiMFiction but a lot of times the images you add to your stories do not come across, only the text, so with stories like Last Pony on Earth, you lose the cute drawings.
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I haven't ever made them, but going forward I probably will for anything I print from this point forward. Otherwise it's a time-consuming process I don't usually go through, unfortunately.
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I hear ya. Appreciate what you do, love your writing.