tl;dr and spoliers everywhere · 4:10pm Jul 27th, 2017
Wow. A thing happened.
An important thing.
Holy shit.
Holy shit.
Look how fucking introspective I sound.
Okay.
Okay.
Okay.
Just need to breathe here.
Favorable Alignment? My precious baby of a novel? It's done?
It's quite a surprise... If you look at the statistics, I pumped out 360k in a year, on this story alone, so it took a year to write this, eh? Not really.
It took four, minimum, and what a journey it has been. I don't normally type long stuff like this, but hopefully if you're one of the thirty or so readers that has stuck around for FA and my main arc, you'll be able to stick around for this... and maybe even after?
Favorable Alignment and that stories that came before it have been one of the strangest experiences of my life, and probably the strangest if I thought about it long enough. I don't think I've ever been more afraid of commas than I am now.
Writing has actually given me nightmares about commas.
The entire arc of stories has been four years in the making. Originally, it was only going to be four, too, with some side stories. TCWK snuck up on me and was originally meant to be a side story.
I always wanted to write ponyfic. I really, really did, but up until a few years ago, me writing anything halfway decent was like Donald Trump getting canonized as a saint. I could draw... and that was nice. I've frequently doodled a lot of characters (namely Sombra) behind the scenes of my stories. If anyone wanted to see them, I might consider uploading some onto my very barren DA or a blog here, or somewhere else, like the Iceverse Discord server, if anyone asked. Almost everything, from landscapes, props, to OCs that have appeared in my stories have been drawn out by me at one point or another, which means that I have four years and many sketchbooks (and many more loose papers) of doodles, from stories both past, present, scrapped, and future.
Would you find it surprising to hear that there's still more to come? I'll get to that in a bit.
But, yes. Maybe you'd find it hard to believe I couldn't write for shit. I was always coming up with headcanons for MLP, though. Those headcanons evolved into the Iceverse.
I knew from the start, I wanted to write about the princesses. Namely, Celestia, Cady, and Luna. Twilight would be there too, I guess.
Especially Luna. She's amazing to write and is most certainly going to be appearing in other stories.
But I also wanted to write Sombra so badly, and was working on developing him.
I wanted to tie my weirdo backstories, strange ships, and adventures together so I could actually have a layout from which I could base a story on. I had a world forming in my head and nothing to begin it with except a few barely complete doodles. It was all just sitting there with everything else still in my head, and while it wasn't a focus and more of a hobby than anything, this frustrated me almost endessly.
I had no talent or means to do youtube videos or even a how and art just wasn't doing it for me, so I wasn't even sure exactly what medium I was shooting for.
So, one day, I grabbed a notebook and wrote fourteen pages in two days. It was the first story of my universe, and one I never intended to publish. I just wanted to see if I could write.
I surprised myself by making something halfway decent.
I called it The Dark Side of the Sun and let the notebook sit under things for an entire year. I could write, and that was okay I guess. It didn't really change anything.
I still wasn't sure to what I was going to do. I wanted some bigger adventures. There was Lunbra that needed to happen - and was going to if I could just figure things out.
Then, before season five aired, in that hiatus that was really fucking long but I actually liked because reasons and you'll see, something very strange happened.
I had a dream.
I had a dream that wasn't the normal, surreal, weird-ass shit that I (so the past tense of dream again?) about or the inevitable existential dread and darkness that formed the stuff of nightmares and all my what-ifs about the universe that probably had a part in explaining why I was such a depressing insomniac that felt vaguely ticked off at basically anything that wasn't a book or a cat or something.
Oh, and that I didn't really talk much four years ago. Hooray.
Anyway, I had a dream.
And it wasn't like anything else before because it was arguably weirder.
And I remembered it when I woke up, somewhere between grumpy and surprised on a summer afternoon, with my heart racing and wondering why I wasn't in the Arctic. I didn't bother to question why that thought had occurred to me in the first place.
At that, I shook my head and let everything sink in. I didn't live anywhere near the Arctic. Or any place cold, and that sucked.
I felt like I had been on some really cool adventure and it had nothing to do with the fact that I had mostly been binge reading the Inheritance cycle and a bunch of historical fiction about the Tudors either that summer or the year before or something. Don't remember.
Why did it have nothing to do with this?
Because the dream had ponies.
What was the dream?
That's what I asked myself, sitting there really confused and wondering what the fuck my life had become. I never remembered my dreams, unless they were something morbid or something that I'd find myself doing like a month from now. Fuck those.
I just sat and the feeling that my dream was actually some cool ass stuff sink in, as it unfolded again.
There was Sombra and Cadance, and I had seen things through the latter's eyes.
Cadance longed for home.
Damn, there were a lot of wicked snow drifts.
Sombra was sassy and mysterious, or at least had seemed so. He was also grumpy af, and I dug that because those were traits I wanted him to have, I just didn't have the spark to really organize every little specific detail his character was going to have. This didn't seem like any Sombra depiction that I had seen before in all the EqD and fanfic I had bookmarked on my computer. After all, this was back before I joined fimfic.
The dream was what became chapters 10-14 for Crystalline. Most of it went into 13 - the highlight of the dream, I guess? That scene never left my mind and remains one of my favorites to this day.
Things clicked right after that. I no longer cared that this dream was weird. I wanted to know about it. What were they doing there? How did the snow feel? I kept finding answers almost instantly as I sat there in a daze.
So, I grabbed a notebook that had been lying nearby - funnily enough, if I hadn't flipped to a bunch of blank pages in the middle, I'd have glimpsed my short story from a year earlier.
I wrote down the closest thing I did to outlines for stuff then: the plot of a story.
I called it Crystaline because it was like ten on a summer morning, I couldn't spell to save my life, and give me a break, would you? I was also very tired.
Seconds after that, I wrote down something on the next page as idea after really rough idea just came to me.
Sombra wasn't going to be what he seemed. He was going to be living magic. (The concept of demons would be finalized later).
Starswirl would be evil.
Celestia and Luna would travel up from the wilds, from a world grown from ashes to be his apprentices.
I'd base the Tribes off things I knew from history - the Unicorn Court would be like the Tudors, and there'd be more than just not understanding Friendship.
There'd be this kid named Onyx. More would happen with him later.
The Crystal Empire wouldn't just be a goddamn DLC for Equestria.
Some of the world building would come from the vein of 'I really liked high fantasy, played too much Skyrim sometimes, and watched LOTHR and The Hobbit movies any chance I could get because dammit landscapes need personality too and has anyone ever just looked at how awesome New Zealand looks in those????'.
And that's how the summary for Tomb of Magic was born.
And then the one for Divine Move happened seconds later, but with a different name.
And then Favorable Alignment, but also with a different working name.
I already knew how I wanted to write the characters for the most part and what was going to happen.
I had caught a glimpse of that short story I wrote again, and the plan I would set out to accomplish became clear.
I had woken up one day and decided to become a fanfiction writer.
It was likely going to end horribly, but I would do it anyway.
I was going to commit so many crimes against commas in the handwritten first drafts of my stories.
But I wasn't going to stop.
...I think everyone else can figure out what happened next.
Flash forward to now, you're reading a blog that is way longer than it needs to be and questioning my life choices.
Probably.
I got okay at writing by writing. So that was a thing. But now we're talking about a different thing, and that different thing is: what now?
Well, there's an arc two. There's an arc three somewhere in the far, far future and probably a galaxy far, far away too, but let's talk about arc two, okay? Don't put your story outlines before the writer, like, holy cow that's my job, okay? Imitation isn't always the sincerest form of flattery.
Okay.
So.
Arc two? It's going to be different. Two novel-ish stories, and by that I mean they're all going to be above 30k min. or so. I know that much. There'll be a couple side one shots that are fairly large. Like 6k. I can't really being doing a bunch of random one shots all the time, but you guys shouldn't mind. Maybe I'll be writing some fluff, related or not related to the 'verse between things. With where the plot is heading, I'll certainly be needing. Maybe some more historical stuff will pop up, and maybe not. You shouldn't really be counting on any of this stuff. At most, there might be some scraps and omake that I'll have in my anthology. I don't want to focus on this stuff, I want to focus on arc two and have been wanting to for years, so getting myself roped into a dozen projects is a no.
There's good stuff on the horizon, and four stories right there. It won't take a year to finish an entire one either, so that's a relief for me. Favorable Alignment was tough!
However, I'd ask that you try to spread the word about some of these stories. Arc one is done and two is in the making, so any kind of promotion is appreciated. Add a story to a group or something, I dunno. Tell your friends. Word of mouth helps. My stories don't circulate very well in this vast sea of a site.
The question is, what is arc two going to be about?
Okay. You guys - the ones who have stuck around for the adventures of Sombra, Luna, Cadance, Tia, Onyx, Shiny and Purple Eyesore - are going to get a couple hints for sticking around.
Consider it a thank you for watching me progressively go insane, but with far more literature.
If you've taken a peek at the timeline in my Iceverse group, you can see that there's an 'After FiM' section. That's your first hint.
You'll notice a couple one shots are there and that means that it's gonna be future fics.
Now, maybe you're worried. Who will be in these stories? Will Sombra and Luna still be there? Cadance?
Yes, they all will. I promise that. They'll always be something like secondary characters in my work. You guys know how Sombra started off as what appeared as a secondary character. Haha, well I sure fooled you, didn't I? Sombra and Luna will still get to be main characters and see a lot, but there's the others too, and the same applies to them.
There's also a Sombra/Luna shipfic and fluff story coming out too.
And the last hint? Well, I'll just leave this picture as a suggestion.
This isn't my art, it's just cute and relevant.
No, you're the faget.
Anyways, congrats on finishing up that big 'ol book and thanks for sharing your story and stories.
...I'll get around to reading the rest of Iceverse. Just you wait and see.
...I'll take that as a compliment lmao
Okay well, joking aside, it was fun to read your stories, and I plan to keep reading as long as you keep writing.
And maybe, one day, make you something in return, though I don't know how I might surpass your skill.
Haha, being an insomniac seems to help people do shit, eh? While I may be bad at writing, I've had many story plots come from my sleep deprived brain. Some even half decent. Things like CR and the new story I'll write after I finish some other stuff.
And that pic? You've revealed too much. YOU'RE IN TOO DEEP.
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We'll thank you! :)
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This is gay yo
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bby you know it
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Oh you betcha
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yah
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So gay
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yap
I be very excited.
Do I sense a hint of kiddos coming along?
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*adjusts hipster glasses*
Demonspawn is the technical term.