Character Art · 2:59pm April 22nd
Placed below the break for anyone who has not read past Chapter 2. If you haven’t, no clicky!
A simple sketch of Night Cloud in her hospital scrubs, done by Helmie. Helmie’s Patreon here.
Placed below the break for anyone who has not read past Chapter 2. If you haven’t, no clicky!
A simple sketch of Night Cloud in her hospital scrubs, done by Helmie. Helmie’s Patreon here.
I probably should have said this a few weeks ago, but I took an unintended break from rewriting things.
Translation: I burned myself out writing close to 50,000 words of mostly-original narrative over the span of two and a half months.
What it says on the tin. If you were waiting for Chapter 5, go read it! Please.
I’m a little over halfway done with rewriting 6. Unlike with chapters 2-4, I’ve been able to salvage most of 5 and 6. A lot of the work is reframing the same events from the original version, recontextualizing it, and some of it is shortening things, trimming the fat.
The last chapter that should need significant rewriting is 7.
I finished and published a completely rewritten Chapter 3 of To Bellenast. If you recently read the original version, you have my condolences. It was awful.
I promise the new version is an order of magnitude better. It’s 1/3 the length, has no pointless fight scenes, no plot contrivances, and no unnecessary exposition (there is a teeny tiny bit; I wanted to keep it to the absolute minimum, but these bits are vital).
Contains significant quantities of Adorableness, Cuteness, Fluffiness, Happy Pony-ness, and also significant (though also directly foreshadowed) spoilers for To Bellenast.
I am now ~3 years younger than one of my fic’s characters.
Chapter 2 of To Bellenast was a pile of garbage.
So I completely rewrote it from scratch.
It’s much shorter now, it has better pacing, better characterization for everyone involved, less pointless exposition, less clumsy narration, and a couple pieces of foreshadowing for things later in the fic, which were present in the original draft, but which I failed to execute properly.
Say it three times, and they shall appear!
*ahem*
Chapter 5 was ~21.5K words. It is now ~15K words.
26 January 2024: AND NOW IT’S EVEN SHORTER, MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
I’ve been looking more seriously at the first half of the story a lot lately, with a fresh perspective thanks to some much-needed criticism from friends and fellow writers.
I wanted to wait until I’d posted Chapter 15, since it contains a minor spoiler, buuuuuuut oh well.
I commissioned EarthnAshes (Earthsong9405) for this art of Crystal Dew sometime in 2018, then forgot to share it anywhere. Whoops.
Time to fix that!
Minor spoilers for To Bellenast (and the image) below the break. Don’t look if you haven’t read Chapter 9.
Wheee, new chapter up. I’m tired. Go read my fic
I hunger! Give me comments!
Behold as I write cute, happy ponies doing cute, happy pony things... and then visit horrible violence upon them two paragraphs later.
Minor spoilers for To Bellenast in this one, but I urge you to read, anyway, even if you want to avoid spoilers. This is less a breakdown of the blog title subject and more an anecdote and cautionary tale of my experience with it.
This contains significant spoilers for To Bellenast. Please don't read this if you haven't read through Chapter 13.
Caution!
This blog post is kind of dumb and contains Pictures of Pretty Honses!
Little blue apocalypse horse's adventure now comes with 100% more map! Courtesy of... that's right, me!
Here it is, in all its blinding, eraser-smudgy glory!
Solid lines are rivers, dotted lines are roads and highways (not the paved kind, mind you) All the big dots are towns, villages, hamlets, and in the eponymous case, the Dunn Kingdom's Capital, Bellenast.
While it won't have the specific character contact I mentioned in a prior blog post, Chapter 13 is finished, and I'm doing final pre-reading and editing now. I should be able to make any last-minute touch-ups and publish it by sometime in the next couple days. The big reveal will have to occur in the next chapter (It's the Goddess poking her nose in. I mean, really, who else could it be?)
Firstly, I'd like to apologize to everyone who had expected Chapter 13 to come soon after the blog post in December. I had hoped to finish the chapter some time in January. That didn't happen. This is partially because three characters I had intended to serve a simple, short purpose became three characters with much more complexity and dialogue time than I originally planned... and partially because I was sick.