The Year in Review: 2021

Is it starting to become a tradition that this gets delayed? I honestly can't tell. I did have a good reason for it, though. I drove back to Pennsylvania to celebrate the holidays with family, and since getting there on the 22nd, this is my first genuinely free day where I'm not doing anything. But that's for another unpleasant reason. I survived the winter madness that destroyed I-95 yesterday (and last night, and today...), and on hour 9 of my 3.5 hour drive, got home extremely late, and then told my boss I wasn't coming in for work today and slept until noon. But that's all behind me now. Pray for the lost souls who have yet to make it through.

How it felt trying to get home last night. Art by otakuap.

But now I'm back in Virginia, and I can finally whip up my annual Year in Review/Year in Preview blog posts! I mean, traditions once started can't be ended, right? At least I can very confidently say that 2021 was a far better year for me (and most of us, I would hope) than 2020 was. At this time last year, I was working a part time job in a liquor store over the holidays. This year, I took a week of PTO from my job as a scientist to spend 12 days back home with my family. I'm living independently with a steady (and good) source of income at a job I enjoy working at, my family and I have managed to avoid catching the plague as we approach 2 years of pandemic (thank you vaccinations and modern medical science, very cool!), and though my writing pace has slowed down dramatically, it's for good reason, and I'm excited about the projects I have in the works (one of which I revealed on Christmas). So it's at least something to be proud about when I confront the fact that my always-ambitious New Year's resolutions fell flat once again!

Art by the wonderful Twotail813!

The Break of Day was a fic long awaited by the residents of my discord server (where I've been sporting a Daybreaker profile pic for over a year now; head on over if you want to check it out!). It is also my first wholly Equestria at War story, which you would think would have happened sooner considering a nearly single-handedly wrote the localization for the Pax Chrysalia Redux in the mod, the most story-heavy path in the game (and a monstrous fanfic in its own right at over 100k words). Over the course of 15k words, we explore something that I wish was really touched on more in the transition of Equestria to the Solar Empire in the game: how the brutal sacrifice and toils of a modern war can grind down at Equestria's timeless and benevolent paragon of a ruler to the point where she becomes a maddened despot willing to burn all those who dare stand against her. I was very satisfied with how the story turned out, and I feel I was able to present that transition in a believable manner. If you want to read about peak performance Celestia, then this is the story for you.

And maybe one day the team will rework the Solar Empire, since it's old content. Maybe I can find a spot at the writing table to put my mark on it.

Image I randomly found on the internet

What is it with me and writing emotional Equestria Girls stories? Even when I know that they're not what people following are following me for? I'll tell you why: it's because it is easier for me to project the mood of the music I listen to onto a bunch of teenage girls than it is horses stabbing each other to death on a glorious battlefield. Night Moves is the latest of my works to come from my mind after listening to a song on repeat. Just as the song the story takes the title from is centered around a teenage relationship, so to is the plot, but just like the song, it takes a closer look at the dwindling summer years of youth with autumn closing in. For many teenagers, the end of high school and the beginning of college is a time of upheaval and insecurity. For the first time in your life, you're being sent out on your own, and though college typically isn't a "truly" independent environment, it puts enough distance between the friends and family you've known your whole life to feel like you're being sent out on a raft into the ocean to make your own headway. How do your relationships change when you reach this stage of your life? How do things change with the people you were close to in high school, when you all lived in the town and reliably saw each other several times throughout a week, when there's hundreds if not thousands of miles between you now? What happens to high school sweethearts when they each get accepted to their dream colleges on opposite ends of the country? There's just something so bittersweet in that moment of knowing good things in your life are coming, but to get to them you have to kill the good thing you're enjoying right now, that I couldn't help but write about it. My exact feelings on this story are difficult to put into a paragraph in a blog post here; go give it a read if you want to see what I was trying to get at with a few thousand more to explore the idea.

Art by Tsuyu_tatsu

Did you see the new horse movie? If you haven't, what the hell are you doing here? Go watch it! Now!

Alright, now that you're back, we can get into this story. I'll start off by saying that I loved the movie (I think I'm on rewatch #5 or something now?). It's exactly what I expected: a simple, rushed plot with a lot of holes and a lot of questions to be answered. The movie itself, mechanically, is nothing special. But I loved the characters (especially you, you magical little horsie), and there's an amazing amount of potential with the lore to be explored in future specials/movies and the upcoming G5 series. Many creators in the fandom have already begun exploring some of those questions with their works, like the art above. The art asks (and posits an answer to) a simple question: how did Pipp, the princess who craves attention and stardom, differ so greatly from Zipp, the heir to the throne who wants exactly the opposite? Though Pegasisters originally started out because of the question asked by the art, that question only became a small part of it. I wanted to write something about the relationship between the two sisters and how what should have been a key point of friction between them in the plot of the movie was so quickly glossed over for the sake of packing the rest of the story into its 90 minute window. I envisioned a sort of aftermath of this plot point, and the story was born from there. Short, simple, and sisterly sweet, it's a nice little thing that shows a moment of sisterly intimacy steeped in anger and misunderstanding but healed with love.

Art by Ruirik

Ah, my old, still ongoing friend. I honestly don't have too much to say about Unshaken except for the fact that it's still ongoing and it's approaching the end. My twice weekly schedule of updating it fell off a cliff once I found employment in February and my writing time evaporated, so I kept it at once a week for a while, but that started becoming more irregular as the year rolled on. Unfortunately for the story I expect that to continue, but thankfully enough, we're at the last few dozen chapters of the story, at the rate which it's progressing. I hope that I can finish this by the end of the year. I know that I can, but the matter of finding consistent writing time has always been the most difficult matter to solve since I found full time employment. Trying to juggle that with the other projects has become far more complicated when I lost probably between 50 and 60 hours of writing time per week when you factor in the time I have to spend doing stuff to survive living on my own on a weekly basis that isn't explicitly work related. Too bad there's no way to make money just appear in my bank account without doing anything so I can dedicate more time to writing, right?

And as for my other miscellaneous story endeavors, I'm still active writing in Equestria at War, where all of my energy and time that I devote to that project has been dedicated to bringing the major kirin nation into being with a fantastic storyline and many, many branching paths and directions for it to take. If Pax Redux was my first major contribution to the mod where I cut my teeth hammering out hundreds of events, then Kiria is where I take everything I learned and refine it into delivering the same story experience in an average playthrough but with far, far less reading (I love reading and all you do to, otherwise you wouldn't be here, but things get chaotic when the hundredth event pops up in your face after only a month of in game time). Here's hoping that it (and the rest of Zebrica itself) is released sometime before the heat death of the universe.

And quickly, as for TTM3... yeah I still haven't made like any progress in that one. I mentioned last year that I scrapped and restarted what I'd written for TTM3 up until that point in the hopes of getting things moving along again, but sadly that hasn't really happened. TTM3's file has been sitting largely untouched on my computer since the summer as my writing attentions were devoted to other projects while my writing time dwindled. I can't say for certain when it will cycle back up my priorities list again, but I can reaffirm that I won't let it die. TTM3 (and the inevitable TTM4) will be out... someday. I just don't know when.

But that's it for my writing pursuits for this year! All in all, I'm pleased with the progress that I've made, and I do have a lot of things lying around in my fanfiction folder that have had a lot of work put into them but haven't seen the light of day yet. The words will keep coming, even if they don't come as fast as they used to, I can assure you that. I don't plan on going dark anytime soon. If I don't log into fimfic for like a month, it's probably a safe bet to assume that I'm in a coma or dead. Let's just hope neither of those actually happen in 2022. It'd kill the vibe I got going for me.

At any rate, I hope you all enjoyed your holiday celebrations and the New Year, however you chose to celebrate them. I spent a lot of time with a lot of family and friends, and my brother and I were able to revive our traditional New Year's Eve party after missing it last year. So that's goodbye to 2021, and onwards to 2022! We can only hope that 2021 was that whole "things will get worse before they get better" and 2022 is the year they start to get better. Maybe if we just believe hard enough it will, right?

Stay tuned for my traditional Year in Preview blog post... whenever I get that one out!
Ante Legionem nihil erat, et nihil erit post Legionem
24

END OF THE YEAR STATS:
-Views: 118,516 (2021 = 99,382)
-Total Followers: 1059 (995)
-Followers Gained: 64 (83)
-Followers per Day: 0.31 (0.33)
-Follower Rank: 272nd (295th)
-Blog Posts: 8 (9)
-Stories Posted: 3 (2)
-Chapters Posted: 23 (65)
-Words Posted: 55, 883(400,690)

24's 2021 Goals:
[ ] Pass 1100 followers
[3/6] Publish 6 stories
[ ] Finish Unshaken
[ ] Finish the rough draft of TTM3
[ ] Participate in at least 2 writing contests

(Let's not look at those goals, how was I supposed to know that I would find a job and lose all my writing time?)

Comments

[RoboRed]

We can only hope that 2021 was that whole "things will get worse before they get better" and 2022 is the year they start to get better. Maybe if we just believe hard enough it will, right?

lolnope