All right. This is the thread to discuss things that didn't quite make it to the final versions of the fics and things that we only discovered later that my have changed things if we wrote the fics after discovering it.

I have a few of them already, so I'm going to ration them a bit.

First of all, the first draft of Star Swirl was not actually the 147th, but the ninth. I then saw Hearth's Warming Eve and realised that I had been seriously underestimating the amount of time that had passed since Star Swirl the Bearded. So, I decided that 147 sounded humouous and like a plausible amount of time. I also like numbrs which have no zeroes or repeated digits and my favourite digit is 7. I didn't know why that specific number seemed so right to me. Months later I realised that my Masters dissertation had 147 pages, so it made sense that that number had been on my subconcious.

I should also confess that the first draft of Star Swirl's ponyality was a MASSIVE self-insert. I basically put my brain in her body. Then again, I often work from a base when creating a new character. I then threw in pleny of other stuff and made alterations according to what I thought would be better for the fic. Twilight was obviously the canon pony to have the biggest influence on her, but Applejack, Rainbow Dash, Trixie and Fluttershy all had significant influences as well. Then, of course, I added some other quirks and made extra adjustments to fit everything together nicely.