The Price of Loyalty Journal #4 [Preview Draft] · 8:56pm Aug 14th, 2013

Okay, so I've been sitting on Journal #4 long enough, it's time I actually do something with it, shall we?

As I said in a couple blogs, the Journal's first draft has been done a while now, since just before I published Journal #3, but I've been a bit too caught up in other things to get around to it, as my blogs also might've shown. Morale drops kinda ran rampant but I recently received a comment from the very kind brickguy213 on my story today, giving me hope yet again for this story.

Things are slowly being put in motion to plan the full arc of PoL and its' non-canon sequels, and a potential canon sequel to the end of PoL. Things are still in debate whether or not I want to use the intended plan, or if I should make the non-canon sequels canon, since they're highly ambitious. Once again though, it'll be determined by how well the story's received near the end of its' completion. I'll just have to wait and see I suppose.

But how 'bout we get to the juicy bits. Journal #4. Some of you guys have been waiting on the next chapter for a while, and I should've given it to you guys ages ago and not let it gather dust like it has. More importantly though, I need to finish the last remake of the chapters from the old iteration of this story, A Tale of Two Nations. Once we hit Journal #5, I'm going into completely new territory with nothing to reference with from my old works. What this will also mean is while I have the general idea of how the story's gonna go (up until the 3rd quarter of the story which I'm still unsure what to do with), I don't have the specifics in mind, such as how character walks from A to B, what all is said, and what all we'll see up until the big bullet points I have in mind already. But I'll figure that out as I go I suppose.

Anywho, what's in store in this journal? Well, we're gonna see some friction between Ashen and Peace Walker, namely because of some of his choices he made with the bandits at the end of Journal #3. More friction's going to come about as they have disagreements on how to tackle the situation once they enter finally enter Equestria and meet the denizens for the very first time in a thousand years. This chapter is going to focus heavily on building upon the relationship between Ashen and Peace Walker, albiet through some disagreements. Hopefully this might lead to some stronger character development (and in theory, attachment to the two characters). Guess we'll find out, won't we? =P

So, for all your guys' patience, I offer you something rather zany, and that's a full-blown preview of the first draft. Now, this has been refined to some degree from the ancient Tale of Two Nations version, and refined even more through some dumped writing. All this really needs though is some trimming down, possibly rewriting some descriptions and dialogue to be a bit more concise, and shorten a particular scene at the start of the chapter. There's dialogue between just Ashen and Walker at the start that needs to be reworked a little, and a scene with Swift a bit later on definitely needs trimmed down. If you guys think it's fine as is though, or have suggestions to particular parts of it, feel free to leave feedback in the Google Doc comments. If you wanna wait for the final draft to be published, that's fine too, this is only for those who tune into my blogs and want to read up early on an unrefined version.

That said, I give you the near-complete draft of Journal #4: