That is all.

Goddamn it, the timing is off in Elements of Opposition. I either have to refactor my times, or figure out why it took the Opposition team two and a half hours to get to Ponyville from Canterlot when it's only like a 40 minute trip normally.

See, I was recording the times when things took place so I wouldn't end up with shit like this and I still miscalculated. Now I have to go through the whole thing and record the times so I can refactor.

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I made this. It's far from high art -- I just snipped Discord out of a screencap and then used cut and paste to break him apart and reassemble him, badly. But imagine being Discord and confronting a thing that "looks" like this.

(This is relevant to fic, I promise...)

Now to see if I can get through that blockage on Not the Hero.

Made quota, but I'm too tired to keep going and I'm still not quite done. I'm in the middle of the chapter climax and I need a fresh brain. Hoping for tomorrow.

Today or tomorrow. I have, I estimate, between 2000 and 4000 more words on the chapter.

Sigh. So far I have 3 line items completed out of an outline containing 11 of them, and yet I am at 2/3rds of the word count I estimated for the chapter. I should just, like, triple all my estimates forever. Well, some of the line items might end up much shorter than I'd originally planned.

As I generally do, I have posted the incomplete piece to my Patreon for patrons who pledge $2 or more a month. I'm hoping to have the whole chapter done and posted sometime Thanksgiving weekend.

The hammer was originally a throwaway reference -- there's a similar hammer in "Variables" by TheDescendant, which is where I ripped off the idea of Spike killing a stone Discord with a hammer that kills gods. "Discord in Hell (Not Literally)" was full of these kinds of throwaways because I hadn't really intended to expand it when I first wrote it. Now, though, I have to deal with the fact that TheDescendant's Celestia is kind of a warrior goddess, or used to be a long time ago, and mine is

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There are a few paragraphs that got left out of the last chapter of Elements of Opposition. They're during Harmony Twilight's conversation with Opposition Celestia, and are basically the point where Celestia gets the letter Opposition Spike sent in the previous section where he was with Big Mac. I've re-inserted them. They're not critical so you don't need to go back and re-read them, but if you want to, there they are.

The good news is that by my estimate I'm probably within a few days of finishing the next chapter of Elements of Opposition.

The bad news is that this is because I've had to break the planned chapter into two planned chapters, because everything is taking more words than I estimated. This chapter is likely to be up to 25% longer than I planned it to be and contain 25% fewer scenes than I'd planned, pushing those scenes into a chapter of their own.

Somehow I end up working on Elements of Opposition every six months. I really gotta speed it up, at this rate it will take me years to finish.

But yeah, I'm writing the next chapter now. If my estimates are correct, and they're not, but they've all I've got to work with, it should take me about 4 days of writing to finish it.

...because it's 5 am, and I gotta sleep sometime.

I did promise everybody I'd do two chapters of EOO in rapid succession to compensate for the six months between each of the last three chapters. Finished it today, will post tomorrow.

I promised that I'd begin Chapter 7 with a catch-up synopsis for the sake of the people coming in late, and the people who skipped chapters 4 and/or 6 because they contain rape and torture. So here it is. Because this synopsizes content that contains rape and torture, it does discuss those things, so those with severe triggers may just want to skip this entire story, as I can't avoid talking about those things entirely.

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The chapter's running longer than I expected, surprise surprise. I should just double all my estimates. This is the word count where I expected to be done, but I'm only about halfway.

Opposition meets Harmony.

I meant to have EOO updated three months ago. And I was supposed to be half done with Not the Hero by now. Le sigh...

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I finally have an outline I'm happy with, after more than a year of working on this story.

Of course, in the process, I seem to have increased the total expected chapter count from 14 to 19, and increased the length by about 50%, but there will be a lot more action, more feels, and more setting Fluttercruel's house on fire. (No, she's not in it at the time. Neither are the animals.)

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Still kinda sick. My lungs haven't recovered and I'm coughing a lot.

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After working my ass off and producing a 22K chapter for Elements of Opposition... it's acquired three upvotes and three downvotes. And downvotes have an enormous impact on scoring, far more than is proportionate. I'm... actually kind of pissed, especially because, as usual, no one can be bothered to explain why they're downvoting.

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He began to laugh to himself, quietly so it wouldn’t wake his captor. Oh, Fluttercruel, Fluttercruel, you should have read the fine print. You’ve gotten what you wanted all along. You’ve broken me. Good job, my dear.

But you should have paid attention to where the fracture lines already were before you set out to break me. Because you’re never going to get what you wanted to get.

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The latest chapter of Elements of Opposition is now longer than any of the other chapters, I'm not done with the scene I'm writing, and I have not yet written the Harmony team side! Whoops.

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