Life of a Project - FOAL 9000 · 1:56pm Nov 28th, 2019
Ah, my little epic about a mothering nursery and its three little fillies. This story is both my longest and took the longest to reach it's final form.
You see, I love the automated nursery concept. While discovering Pattycakes in 2014 was what awakened my "interest" in this fetish and niche, I'd argue that it was discovering Dashie and the blanket by Sky Hooves in 2015 that really cemented my love for the concepts. Before then, I'd written a single fic that was meant to be a one-and-done dumping of my fetish, while putting a darker spin on the spa stories that were popular at the time. (Geeze, I should really do a Life of a Project on After Hours Relaxation at some point. Definitely a story there). But Dashie and the blanket (and others, too) kept me around and kept me writing.
As earlier as back then, I knew I wanted to make an automated nursery story. Over the years, fics like All Dolled Up by Zubric or the bottleneckbaby artwork kept my interest in the idea strong. And yes, I made many attempts to actually put pen to paper on this desire too. The earliest attempt was of an innocent Derpy stumbling upon a secret nursery Twilight built (sound familiar?) and getting trapped. I'd actually completed this in the form of a one-shot. But oh boy did it ever stink. Rushed and horny, it was by far one of the worst projects I'd pumped more than a thousand words into. I never published it. In fact, I don't think it even got the dignity of The Pigeon Hole. I think it's just gone now, and good riddance.
I tried again, this time completely mixing up the formula. Inspired by the previously mentioned All Dolled Up, I was going to subject some ponies to the horrors of a factory assembly line in order to diaper them. I honed in on Pinkie Pie (then unpadded in any of my fics) and Rarity. On their way home following The Last Roundup, they'd stop off at an abandoned factory and accidentally turn the old doll making machines on. For one reason or another, it's been hell to actually write this one. I started back in July of 2017 and have added to it as recently as June of this year. Yet in all that time I haven't managed more than 1.6k words on the thing. Pretty sad, if I do say so myself.
At this point, you're probably wondering when I'm actually going to get to the title fic. And oh yeah! This is supposed to be about FOAL 9000, isn't it? Well, now that our long and complicated backstory is out of the way, how about we dig into that one, eh?
February 2018. The idea comes to me finally: Twilight, trapped in a nursery of her own design and anypony who tries to help her meets the same fate. I blasted through a 1k word outline that day, mostly because picking her partners was super easy. I'd been trying to get Twilight, Starlight, and Trixie in a fic together for months leading up to this one, and now everything was falling into place.
But I didn't exactly jump on the idea then and there. At the time, Something to Rave About was still going strong and I really was looking forward to finishing that one. So I buckled down, battled burnout and knocked out more chapters of that for a few months (see the relevant blogpost for more details there). But even when that one finished I didn't start up FOAL 9000. I didn't want to go from one long fic to another so soon, especially with so many ideas for shorter works bouncing around in my head for a while. So I knocked out some stuff that would eventually become On Brand and Pranks for That, but hesitated before posting.
You see, during Something to Rave About many a project died before even getting a chance. I refused to focus on other stories while a big, looming, long fic stared me down every day. So I posted a blog asking my audience what they'd prefer: Finished stuff now, or as buffers during my long fic's development. Got my answer pretty quickly and went ahead posting all that, taking at least some time to start FOAL 9000's first chapter.
And then it was time. I published The Learning Nursery back in October '18 and hit the ground running on chapter 2. Most of the time I found it pretty easy to write this story, probably because I really did love the automated nursery aspect and bringing in new characters every few chapters kept it nice and fresh. I stalled out a few times, admittedly. Especially when I discovered the outline that I'd written and the actual fic were starting to diverge. This mostly came down to Trixie, and where I ultimately ended up needing her character to do in story. She was originally going to be much more of an obstacle, spending an entire chapter or two demanding this and that from Twilight to keep her placated, which really hindered the actual story and wasn't all that convincing when I actually tried to write it.
After cutting those bits and shoring everything up with a bit more focus on character (a lot of the chapter of A Friend's Intuition was initially unplanned, but I felt overall necessary for the story when I got to that point) I was finally able to get the ball rolling on some genuinely cloppy stuff. Bit of an interesting note, but even during the outline phase and all the way up to writing it, I wasn't quite sure how far I was going to go for this one. I didn't want to turn off any readers with to extreme a shift, but I also wasn't going to let all the build up be for naught. So I compromised.
The chapter Into the Dungeon was originally not going to have any cloppy stuff in it at all, ending with the trio stepping into the new room and on a cliffhanger. But I went a little further then that, getting everypony trapped and shoving Twilight down a diaper pail. It was meant to test the waters and get a little feedback before I jumped into the cloppy stuff. If too many people were repulsed by the idea, I would've scaled back my ambitions and kept things more tame (though still sexy) throughout the closing chapters. But instead the response was pretty positive. Very positive.
In fact, I decided to go even further than what I'd considered before, with things like Trixie wearing somepony else's diaper, and kissing Starlight through a diaper gag. And the response was still very positive from the majority. So I guess we're all degenerate freaks, hooray!
I should also touch on the two endings. When writing, I could never decide which satisfied me more. Turning off the nursery and just leaving was always a little anti-climatic to me, no matter how many "climaxes" I considered including. But leaving them trapped there indefinitely didn't really feel like a conclusion to the story. Just another "Oops, that plan failed, what's next?" type of deal. Even making it so Twilight gave up and began to justify her failure--though it did add some finality--still didn't make the story feel complete. A proper ending needed to have her finally overcome her libido and do the right thing in order to feel complete, but again, just that lacked the satisfaction I craved. So I compromised again.
Two endings! Why not? Daring Doesn't Do Curses had a similar thing and was incredibly successful as a result. Just based on the stats of that fic, I knew "bad ends" were easily the more sought after ending by my audience, this allowed me to include the deliciously dark path and the actual ending that, you know, ends. As for which one of them is official... well, both and neither. It's whatever you chose when you made Twilight's decision. Since I don't intend to do a follow up, I'll never have a definitive ending for you anyways, so sorry. (Bonus material still may or may not happen. Been kicking around ideas for months)
And that's FOAL 9000. Fitting my longest fic would get my longest Life of a Project, but there was just so much to say about this one. Thanks for reading, and let me know what fics you want to hear about next!
Whether or not you make some spin off or sequel, it is in my opinion your best work.
I do of course still want a sequel, because it was just so good5161578
But I also really don't think I have it in me for a sequel. 
Good to know this whole adventure was well worth the effort at least.
Would love to read Foal 9000 bonus material! <3
5161611
I really hope I can get around to it someday. There were a lot of ideas that didn't make the cut for the story.