The Little Wooden God

by Apophis797

17. I Am Confronted By My Pursuer [Incomplete, read editor's note]

Author's Note:

The following note has been archived here to explain the situation until this chapter is finished. The second option has been chosen and writing has resumed.

Hello everyone. It probably seems like I either died or abandoned this and, while I do have less than ideal news, it's thankfully not that bad. I do have future writing plans that involve this story. There are, however, major problems that prevent me from continuing this story as it was originally written:

1) Lack of planning - I was essentially writing this story by the seat of my pants. I had a beginning, a rough idea of where it would end, and nothing else. This meant that while I could keep pumping out chapters at first I could only work on the current chapter in progress. This wouldn't be too big an issue as long as I kept momentum up and could write from where the story was but that brings us to the next couple problems.

2) Emotional/Mental State - I am currently in a better, or at least not worse, position than when I started this story and that's sort of the problem. I started writing this story while in a very specific mental and emotional place and the fact I am, in many ways, a different person than when I started means I cannot get into the headspace where writing this story, as I originally wrote it, comes quickly and naturally. This was a problem before the last update before this one but what eventually put the nail in the coffin was...

3) Lack of Free Time - I went from a college student with a ton of free time to someone with constant crisis, of various forms, and a full time job that, while I enjoyed it, left me completely exhausted. I have since returned to being a college student with a ton of free time but my momentum was broken and I was unable to get back into it. I tried and failed many times but all that amounted to was the draft below.

That leaves us with one major question, namely what will happen to the story going forward. I currently have a planned, written, diagrammed story that I should be able to stick to through a lot more happening. I've also kept writing for various other projects and will hopefully be able to do a bit better job. It is, however, very different from this story in tone, scope, and subject matter and I have 3 options for fitting them together. A task I would like your feedback on.

The first option is what I like to call reconstructive surgery. I keep writing this story, albeit with an abrupt transition, and will slowly work on rewriting and readjusting what I've already written to hopefully have a smooth continuous story at some point down the line.

The second is to put this story on the backburner and get straight into the bulk of what I've been planning. It would get extended but much more care would be taken to maintain something approaching the original style and you'd get to see a lot more of what I have planned at the cost of this specific story updating much slower.

The third, and most extreme, is declaring this story an unfinished draft and placing it on longterm hiatus while I focus fulltime on other stories.

On Monday night, by which there will hopefully be at least a few new comments, I'll make my decision and edit this note to say what I've chosen. Thank you for understanding, regardless of what I end up choosing.

Twilight frowned at the map hovering in front of her. She was used to working with relatively incomplete information, not everyone could be as attentive to minor details, but Lyra had practically circled the entire lower markets.That alone would be annoying enough but with the crowds for the upcoming equinox cutting visibility it had made for a long and tiring day. She was just about to call the on-hoof search off for the day and try a more statistical method, it was always comforting to get back to basics anyway, when she noticed a head poking out of a nearby pony’s bag. A suspiciously alien head.

_/|\_/|\_/|\_/|\_/|\_/|\_/|\_/|\_/|\_/|\_/|\_/|\_/|\_

“I can’t believe he called me creepy. Me! Creepy! I mean sure I might have been a little forceful with my questions... And I haven’t really taken care of my mane lately... But it’s not like I’m creepy. Not properly creepy anyway.” She muttered to herself as she walked down the street. “You don’t think I’m creepy, do you?” She asked the pony next to her who had been slowly moving away but he tried to appear as if he hadn’t noticed before slipping into the crowd.

Letting out a tired sigh, the mare turned back to her task. Apparently the alien had been hanging around the markets for a few months by that point but always ran off towards the lower city in the afternoon. It made enough sense, she supposed. Even that thing needed a place to sleep, not to mention a base of operations for whatever schemes it had been getting up to since committing a robbery and fleeing into the woods.

Comments

[duckmagee]

if you do plan to hiatus this story just give us a summary of what would have happened for closure, i really enjoyed this story

[IllusoryQueen]

As I do enjoy this story I would prefer the first option , however if you feel as though you can't go on, I would instead suggest that you should do what you feel is best for you I suppose.

[Apophis797]

10972433
The first or second option is likeliest, I included the last one mostly because I wasn't sure what the level of active support would be since to be honest it feels like I stopped years ago, but let me know if you'd like a rough summary of the originally planned ending. It's substantially different from what will happen.

[Rawislon03]

I’d say the second. Reconstructive surgery seems a bit unnecessarily arduous and I feel like you’d find more enjoyment out of continuing a story clean cut, rather than going back and retroactively altering what’s been posted of this work.

[Xinamar]

Second option for the story seems good to me.

[Barney]

I hope you choose the second option. I really like this story so far and I'm interested to see where it goes!

[duckmagee]

10972520
yeah go for it always love to see how a story could have gone

[Apophis797]

10972574

10972549

10972542

10972433

Looks like the second option has the most support by a pretty wide margin. I'll update the editor's note soon.

Expect this story to update slowly but consistently with what was already written and a new, faster updating but tonally very different story to be posted within a week or so.

[Apophis797]

Gamer Update: I've got a few thousand words written but am waiting to post the story until I feel it has a proper introduction. The chapter length will be noticeable longer so even at a decent pace of writing there'll be longer gaps between chapters.

[Pete100]

Nice to come back to this.

[Lunar Flame]

Man, whatever happened here? This is a great read but a shame to see it dropped.