So I'm in the mix, the final Bad Thing before the climax, and this part is...hard. There's a little bit of the lead-in to the traumatic part that I don't have quite clear in my head that needs a little finessing, but I'm finding the emotional block to be bigger than the "get the words on paper" part. I legit just don't want to cause any sort of pain or suffering for the characters that I've grown to love so much.

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So, author's notes on I'll Try to Carry On...

Writing Pinkie Pie in snippets is easy.

Writing long-form with Pinkie Pie is an exercise in Extreme Fiction Writing and just getting through a full chapter while sane is a challenge.

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So about halfway through my vacation my health suddenly turned south. Extreme lethargy triggering my depression which domino'd into the executive dysfunction that rears it's ugly head in my life when I've had particularly challenging depression episodes, culminating in getting exactly diddly done other than binge-watching a couple shows (and I didn't even get through that completely).

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So I didn't get the promotion.

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So the last chapter of Empire I've been very quiet on the writing front. This might be a concern, for those of you who have been following my blog for a while, because the last few times this happened, bad things were happing in my IRL.

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I'll do a more expansive blog post on this tomorrow, but as you can see I've posted a new chapter for My Empire of Dirt. This one was FUCKING HARD to write, and I needed at least two vacation days off work to get it from the bare outline form into the fully fleshed out product I finally was able to publish. Let nobody tell you that writing about suicide attempts is easy, if they say that then they're lying.

So (and it's not as if anyone who reads...anything on this website couldn't see this as a thing, so don't complain about spoilers) in Empire of Dirt Sunset needs to learn about the Elements of Harmony. She technically already experienced the "Generosity" epiphany (and those who guessed it can pat themselves on the back), but the lack of Rarity being a part of that particular moment, as important as that moment was for it to happen exactly as it did, always felt like a bit

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One of my favorite anecdotes from one of the people I will consider a mentor in storytelling until my dying day, J. Michael Straczynski, is from the time he was actively working on Babylon 5 during the development of Season 4. (If you haven't seen the series and intend to, stop reading, 'cause I'm about to drop a spoiler or two)

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I came up with an idea a couple of days ago regarding a possible "b" plot for Empire that would involve (human)Flash Sentry, accompanied by (human)Rarity would take flagrant advantage of Rarity's ambassador status to make a trip to Equestria through the portal to investigate how to "court" Princess Twilight from the Equestrian princesses, Rarity's counterpart, a seemingly "random" encounter with (pony)Shining Armor and Princess Cadence, ultimately culminating in Flash meeting with Princess

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One of the things I enjoy most about writing horsefics is when I have to do research into names to find the origin of something that is just kinda...a word we use but has an etymological source in native words in a dead language that actually refers to something that the people of the time actually knew and understood that it meant a thing.

My current favorite:

'Buckingham' (as in Buckingham Palace) comes from "Buckinghamshire," or "Village of Bucca's People."

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When I say "hayburger," I MEAN hayburger, not hamburger! Don't go autocorrecting something that's correct!

Yes, I'm working on the next chapter of My Empire of Dirt.

So I had reason to download iTunes on my work computer.

It had to do with MLP:FiM:The Movie. Long story, won't bore you with it.

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So as I whittle away at the second half of Empire of Dirt and having (finally) completed Music Box Blues, I have been giving thought to the future of my little story that began life as a cathartic exercise to "shake out the cobwebs" and clear my mental pallet for Lost Little Wolf (which was itself a way for me to get over the pain of my divorce).

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So I had a nagging feeling that my plans for what is now Chapter 8 were a bit...meh. Not that I couldn't spice them up enough to make something spectacular, but it didn't introduce enough "oomph" to keep the emotional stakes to the story high enough that it would make Chapter 9 make sense. That, plus I need a decent way to introduce Zecora before Chapter 9 and nothing in the way anything has been set up allows for her presence in the story.

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So I realized part of what was keeping me from being able to do the next chapter of Empire was I was attempting to intersperse two different types of narrative. There were two scenes in the chapter which just didn't fit right, and one is just too good to cut entirely, so it'll be moved to the following chapter and be the foundation of that chapter's narrative (and shaping most of the plot for that chapter, too). This one, though, would only have fit in Chapter 5, so it's getting cut

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A couple of weeks ago I got inspired to write some content for Empire, but due to its nature and the way I wanted to tell this part of the story, it wouldn't fit within the chapter/story-arc I've already established. I'm absolutely going to finish this one before continuing with the rest of Empire, as I do consider it to be a canon entry in the story, unfortunately, a cold knocked me on my backside for several days out of the last week or so. This resulted in me not having as much time as I

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So the current WIP chapter of Empire is going to be a little more Pinkie centric than previous entries. This means that there's going to be an element of humor laced throughout. Being in that mental space means that some humorous scenes or lines will come out during the writing process that may not exactly fit with the rest of the chapter, but that are nonetheless fun and worth sharing. The following is one of those, and yes, spoilers be ahead.

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So I've already acknowledged the upcoming next chapter of Empire is going to be quite a bit longer than my usual. There's a scene that I was sincerely worried about writing it right. I needed to write a character that suddenly got massively and unexpectedly, even to them, OP. Problem is when you know everything that happens, you tend to not realize when you're not telling everything that needs to be told to properly show what's going on to the reader.

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FYI, this chapter of My Empire of Dirt is going to take longer to post than the previous entries, just because it's going to be looooong. I had considered breaking it up into multiple chapters, but there's no good splitting point to do that. I haven't got nearly 1/4 of the story I need to tell in this chapter done, but I'm already at 1/3 the length of my previous chapters.