Looking back, looking forward. (Don't worry I'm not leaving) · 3:57am Jul 3rd, 2022
It's been a little while since I've done much self-reflection about my time here, hasn't it?
First of all, man. That's an old blog lol. Second off, this is also partly going to be an update blog of sorts where I ramble about stuff I'm gonna be doing.
I'll start things from the top since it's been so long now. Hold onto your butts. And don't worry I'm not leaving Fimfic anytime soon.
Back in seventh grade, I was bored during what I think was my biology class. I knew that the theater class I was taking was going to do a school play in the next few months. Somewhere, in that little edgeball's mind, it clicked that I wanted to write a story.
And also take over the school play but that didn't happen and holy crap is current me glad that that didn't happen or else I'd probably be long-gone for cringe related reasons.
Anyway.
I was really into sci-fi and fantasy stories at the time, and I remember that there was also a presentation the library was doing of a middle schooler from a different school who already had an entire published series completed. She was there to talk about her latest book, and then gave everyone signed copies.
And... well, that really got the ball rolling for me, at least. Knowing that someone my age could already have so much accomplished, I decided to give writing a more serious shot myself beyond the initial spark of "hey let's try and write my self insert into a story I was trying to pitch as the next school play for the sole purpose of getting the role myself". Clearly, I was a very humble child.
So, armed with the absolutely tiny amount of experience in writing that I had from making weird one-off "comics" in elementary school and then writing an edge-ified "three little pigs" rewrite for an English assignment, I set out to write a little story that I'd come to call "Wielder of the Orb".
(Also my brain is scrambled egg and I don't remember if the presentation or me being bored in biology happened first either way it was during that biology class after a test when I tore out a sheet of lined paper and actually wrote anything)
And hoo boy, did I write lol.
Wielder of the Orb in its absolute original form was a collection of what turned out to be around 27 or so double-sided pages of script-formatted dumpster fire, featuring Sammy (my self insert at the time and still my Minecraft skin to this day for reasons I call "being too lazy to bother changing it when I have a different Minecraft account that I made a whole new skin for already anyway"), Caleb (friend/assistant character), Brodie (also an assistant character but slightly different) and Zoey (girl character who existed just for being a girl character). The idea was that there was this big bad dude, "MindGlitch", that was after some all-powerful "Orb" artifact that had disguised itself as a conveniently-placed book in a thrift store that Sammy and co. came across. Eventually, after the school play came and went without me ever enacting my plan to take over, I was left only with the incomplete script-formatted mess.
I still have that incomplete script-formatted mess.
I decided then to start working on turning it into a more traditionally-formatted story. Made Sammy even more of a self-insert by having the opening scene be in a house identical to my own.
AAaaaaaaaand after two ~100 word chapters I have up. 
I knew I didn't have much experience at that point, not only because my paltry 200-something word story didn't hold up at all to what I hoped I'd be able to write (which at the time, I was mentally comparing to things like the Michael Vey series that I was hooked on), but also because it just overall sucked. My ideas sucked, my characters sucked, and everything sucked lol.
And that is where Fimfiction comes in. By then I was already aware of the site, having been a lurker without an account for a year or so and keeping track of stories using my favorites list. I figured that I'd might as well make an account and try writing stuff there for "practice", and then leave silently once I felt that my writing was "good enough".
Of course, this meant more Wielder of the Orb. I wrote a "crossover" between MLP and Wielder of the Orb, where the main cast of WotO somehow just kinda escapes into Equestria and gets turned into ponies, supposedly after being chased across countless universes by MindGlitch. I think by then I'd renamed the big bad to Anicetus because it sounded cooler.
Thing is, I wrote that story in script format 'cause I was a little heck that didn't bother reading the rules when I joined the site. Got the story rejected for that reason, but after a day or two of rewriting, I... got rejected again because the story was just that terrible and unreadable.
I do still have that second version by the way. First one's gone to time like that pokemon Ash x Misty shipfic I wrote in like 5th grade and immediately deleted after finishing.
Anyway, after a second round of rewriting, Wielder of the Orb: MLP Version (later "Of Magic and Ponies") was live! I thought it was the next best thing to grace the site in all its forgot-that-quotation-marks-exist glory. I wrote a sidestory, thinking that people would be interested enough to legitimately want more than just the main thing.
Both, naturally, flopped flat on their faces.
And so, for a time, I gave up on WotO, vowing to return to it someday when I had more writing experience.
The next few stories following that were Spacebound Equestria, What If, and Remnants of Glory. Of the three, I'm sure a good number of y'all know what What If is. And for those in the back, don't worry, you won't need those brain cells soon. Spacebound and Remnants were a duo of stories set in the same universe, where King Sombra has successfully taken over Equestria and for some reason just... sorta lingers and chases ponies around. Celly and Lulu take the entire Equestrian population aboard a big freakin' spaceship and blast off, not knowing that Sombra is still onboard. Meanwhile, over in Remnants of Glory, it turns out that a good number of ponies, especially those from the Crystal Empire, have been left behind. They do rebuilding stuff I guess.
Continuing on, I decided to try my hand at a bunch of wildly different stories, a good number o them being comedy one-shots. I'm skipping over them since there really wasn't anything all too notable about 'em, but I'll take a moment to further detail What If and its intended counterpart, "Techie's Story Box". What If, originally, was meant to be a story where I'd write various what-if scenarios based around canon events. A sort of alternate history sort of thing, really. It was kicked off by Twilight being written as the supposed mastermind of all that followed. But, folks decided to take to the comments and start suggesting increasingly wild ideas, and I'm not 100% sure, but at some point or another I completely gave up on taking What If seriously and let it go absolutely unhinged.
Techie's Story Box, funnily enough, would've been far better suited for what What If ended up being. It was, as the name implies, a pile of short stories and things that I wrote just because, and it just sorta fizzled out and died by the time What If took its job.
Now then. It is May 2016, less than a year still after I'd joined the site. I was getting big into the idea of multi-author collabs, and somehow managed to pull together three other folks aside from myself to... what else? Reboot Wielder of the Orb. All the human characters were stripped out, replaced by a duo of ponies. That story came into existence and proceeded to die again so quickly that I still do not remember what happened. I think Soup Can Stan might've originated from this version of the story though.
Anyway.
I started up work on what I now consider one of my first minor successes here on Fimfic, "I Think I Summoned a Ponk" in July of that year, and kept it running with near-weekly updates for a time.
...
...
Everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked Equestria Forever was written.
Somehow, I had it in my head that the perfect way to do a 9/11 tribute was a ten-author collab that'd unofficially also serve as a supposed unifying story to tie together several of my fics at the time into a bit of an author universe sort of thing. It had a bit of momentum early on, but things rapidly fell apart as other authors pulled out of the project, leaving me with multiple dead stories, axed by Equestria Forever.
But, I was able to rebound somewhat and farted out Twilight Finds Herself in Generation 1, followed by Lab Horse. Both came and went pretty smoothly, with Lab Horse spawning a small series that ended with Equestrian Human, which got canceled in 2018 in favor of my then-new project that'd taken over by that point, Pony-Me. I've already blabbered about the history behind that story in specific, so I'll just move on. You can read my original thoughts on it in 2017 Pony-Me's final chapter.
So. This places us around 2019. The OG Pony-Me is now over, and I was trying to write a successor. Pony-Me at that time had become my most popular story to date, and I really felt that I was ready to dive back into original fiction. In fact, it was around that time that I had started preparations to post a final story before leaving the site. Buuuuuut, that didn't quite work as planned. Why? Because I hit writer's block while writing that final one-shot and decided to just not bother.
So, I stuck around. I had a new goal now: one-up Pony-Me. I tried with a sequel, which quickly fell apart twice in a row because Pony-Me left everything wrapped up. I tried writing a thing about a volcanic wasteland. Also didn't work out, leading to another cancellation.
Tried rebooting Lab Horse. It worked out alright, though I've since lost all momentum on it and don't plan on returning to it anytime soon.
And of course, Wielder of the Orb. Again. Third time's the charm, they say, but the only good that came out of it was a shadowy underworld place that I like so much that it's become a recurring location much like how I reused Zoey as a character across some 5 or 6 stories at this point if you count all the Wielder of the Orbs separately.
So.
With those stories at the time attempting to put fresh coats of paint on old stories, I tried yet again to write a successor to Pony-Me, and came up with Worlds Reset. That story actually seemed a little promising for a time. It had an interesting (to me at least) premise, and some strange mechanics to boot, and was for a while actually quite fun to write. The problem? With every chapter, the writing progress I made slowed. I had an ending in mind, but didn't have any idea how to reach it. Eventually, in May of 2020, the story ground to a halt and was put on hiatus.
Next up, an attempt at a serious counterpart to What If, "Let's write a story". It was, like What If, comment-driven. Unlike What If, however, it was attempting to keep a consistent story throughout. There was a Discord server associated with it as well, though that ended up becoming the Write On writer's workshop server after a while.
And then, I wrote and posted The Old Collector. Judging from the comments, it seemed that people were interested in the story, and the lore behind it. I thought that it could be something I could make into a story that could finally fulfill my goal of one-upping Pony-Me, to prove that I didn't peak in 2017.
Haha, no. $100 cover art, plans for an entire story universe with multiple spinoffs and sequels, and an actually published prequel, Sunbeam, later, and I had a rather expensive flop on my hands. The story seemed almost cursed in a sense, with much better-known stories often updating immediately after I posted a new chapter of Splintershard. Though progress has greatly slowed now, I am still slowly trying to work the story through to an ending. Those old plans for an expansive web of stories is now long-gone.
So, what now? All of the attempts I'd made by that point to write something to put my own inner doubts to rest had flopped.
Well, if it was Pony-Me that I was trying to beat, why not just write another one? Literally? It certainly did better than Splintershard once published, and had a tweaked storyline that upped the stakes a little. Though, being published in December of 2020, right around the time when Facebook decided to start pulling their Metaverse stunt, the entire concept of a fully-immersive virtual reality world started to feel a bit... icky. It now stank of corporatism regardless of how much I tried to look past it, and now, I had a story on my hands that was actively trying to defend the idea. And with college starting at the same time, momentum slowed more and more, and many of the chapters that were published came from a "stockpile" that I'd built up ahead of time from a writing frenzy I'd gone through before the story was published.
More than a little insecure about how others saw my writing now, I decided to set up a little experiment: an alt account, where, using some ideas I had laying around, I'd moonlight as a completely different person. I posted a few one-shots, which received pretty alright reception as far as a supposed new author to the site goes.
And then, I wrote Inkwells across Equestria. It was initially a one-shot, consisting of a seven short chapters that explained why there were versions of Raven Inkwell in the show that were Earth Ponies and versions that were Unicorns. And for the first time in a couple of years, it exceeded my expectations. And in fact, in its first month alone, it had blown both Splintershard and the Pony-Me rewrite out of the water, and for a time was only gaining momentum.
I called off the experiment as a success, and turned the Keyslam account into a sort of scavenger hunt ARG. Though it's been almost a year since it has updated, I finally have a new Inkwells chapter now in the works.
So. What next?
I was finally happy with the state of my writing ability again, knowing now that I could still write something that could catch people's attention. I wrote a couple more comedy stuff across my main account and my Technonerd account. Generation 5 was announced, and then arrived with a movie.
This, now, is where at least to me, things became absolutely wild.
Mid-2021, I noticed after browsing some new stories that Fimfiction was about to hit its 500,000th story ID. While there aren't 500,000 published stories on the site due to folks writing but never publishing, or people deleting their stories, 500,000 still meant that that "new story" button was hit 500,000 times. It was a milestone for the site, and I decided to try pulling a wild stunt.
Short to say, I farmed a good 10 or so story IDs in a row before hitting 500,000, and then invited as many people as I could to a public GDoc for an open invitation to a sitewide crackfic.
Two months later, in September, a new school year had started, and the G5 movie had been released. Deciding to play off the concept of dragons living for hundreds, if not thousands of years, I wrote a little oneshot called "The Dragon of the Ruins" one afternoon during my lunch break.
And holy crap did it blow up.
I hadn't expected it to do nearly as well as it did. It was a oneshot that explored an idea, and apparently, I guess, people loved it. It absolutely decimated everything that I'd written before in first-week viewership.
So, riding that tidal wave of momentum amid calls for the story to be expanded upon, I posted Ruins a month later, bringing us to today.
I will say, right off the bat, that I have been pretty egotistical during my time on the site. Heck, the whole "write something to one-up Pony-Me" quest that I had up until the success of Inkwells Across Equestria was purely me trying to prove to myself that I still had some writing talent in me. The Dragon of the Ruins and its own successor, Ruins, proved that more than I could ever imagine, entirely unintentionally.
Sometimes, I think, it's better to just see where your writing takes you, and not worry about things like likes or viewership. Yes, both of these can be wildly addicting--I know that from experience--but to try for multiple years to one-up a single work that you had practically defined yourself by? It really isn't healthy.
I know that now.
Since then, both Pony-Me and Splintershard have drastically slowed in their update frequencies. In short, they just weren't all that enjoyable to write anymore. Pony-Me for its aforementioned reasons, and Splintershard, because its entire existence was pegged on the goal of surpassing the story that always overshadowed it.
I had moved on from those stories, but out of respect for both the stories themselves, as well as my past efforts, however much they were in vain, I will still try and work both out to an ending.
This, now, brings us to the final thing I have on mind.
Fractures.
It's, funnily enough, my first real attempt to write fully original fiction in ages. Though I'm not leaving the site, I finally have the confidence to fulfill what 7th grade me wanted to do all those years ago: try and write an actual, legitimate, book.
Or in this case, a book and a companion crackhead energy-infested doppelganger.
Originally, at its conception in September of 2021 when I had first started collecting ideas for it alongside posting The Dragon of the Ruins, I had it written that it would be my next attempt at a "tonkusverse" author universe-type story, somewhat along the lines of Crew-T but with less deranged screaming and explosions.
Over time, however, I realized that as an original fiction that I wanted to actually publish one day, I wouldn't be able to cross reference other things nearly as much as I planned to. Moreso, after sharing the story and its plans around with friends, things became even further restricted. I wanted to lessen the amount of hand-waviness that I'd used across my fics, and after a bit of encouragement and back-and-forth idea pitching, I made a decision.
Fractures would be... well, fractured.
Into two stories, to be more specific.
The main story, Fractures "Proper", would be the one I would pitch to publishers. A tidy story with as few of plot holes as there can possibly be, and very little in the way of referencing other stories.
The second, Fractures "Tonkus Edition" or "TE", I plan to post on Offprint. This story, unlike Proper, is set to follow the planned storyline I made starting at the end of May of this year, when I dusted off the pile of ideas I had from last September and started connecting things together. I cannot post it here on Fimfiction since the entire cast is human, but I certainly can reference things.
Currently, with Crew-T now being marked as complete, Fractures TE is set to take its place. It won't exactly be as crazy or episodic in its chapters since at the end of the day, it's still just a variant of this big overarching Fractures project, but it'll be the "for fun" story that I'll update along the way while Proper is kept under wraps.
Of course, with all this talk about original fiction, what about the stories I have here, right now?
As mentioned before, Splintershard, Pony-Me, and Inkwells Across Equestria are all creeping their way towards completion. Ruins and What If have no planned ending in sight, and will continue to update at their current rates until I say otherwise. Those two stories are what I've for now enjoyed by far the most in writing for a loooooong time here on the site. And for Ruins especially, I've been able to explore some slightly more mature concepts, inadvertently pushing how far I can stretch that darn Rated E tag.
When What If hits that 1000 chapter mark, you can absolutely bet that I'm writing a sequel.
And Ruins? Until or unless I am able to get more invested in G5 (which for now points to "no"), Ruins will continue to update and pull in bits and pieces of G5 along the way. I'm certainly interested in the potential Alicorn villain from the end of the TV special, but keeping things 100% canon will be tough, if not impossible to do with how much headcanon I've already inserted.
Either way, Ruins and What If are my two main focuses right now here on Fimfiction, and in the (hopefully) near future, y'all will be able to start reading what I've been quietly working on behind the scenes with Fractures TE. 
But also, on a more serious note
Holy fuck that's some deep Techie lore
5669515
yus :V
5669516
It's awesome you're looking to publish your own legit book tho, I'm still sitting here twiddling my thumbs and making stories in the shadows that don't get published haha. Though, I guess it's technically the case that I've got non-pony related stories on other sites, they don't exactly get engagement tho.
I've, somehow, started just blindly blowing through words writing an actual pony story here, when at no other point in time I was able to do that. So who knows, hopefully I can turn that into something I can publish one of these days.
5669518
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Interesting tale of writer's progression :-)
G5 is "return to your roots" event for fandom, an ongoing story once again, new lore... And we (or those who will be active in fandom) will laught someday at today's attempts to predict a story :-)
Amogus
5669574
Lmao