The Mane Event: A postmortem

Hey, I'm no longer sick! Yay! So, that makes this a good time to talk about how I feel The Mane Event after two weeks of it being out.

The Mane Event started existence as something I simply felt like writing, namely some fun way to transform someone into a pony. On the 11th of September, I asked if anyone wanted to have a commission where I turned them into a pony. To my surprise, there were far more interested people than I thought there would be. Whilst wondering who to pick, a lightbulb went off in my head: I'll just do all of them!

The mane 6 ponies felt like an obvious choice as transformation candidates, but that meant I would have to figure out which commissioner got what pony, and there would no doubt be plenty of conflicts with people wanting the same ponies. So, I set up an alternative vote based system, sent out messages, and waited for people to send back a ranked list of which pony they wanted to be turned into. Believe it or not, there was no overlap in the commissioners' top choices! Everyone wanted a different pony, and they all got what they want. I could only interest 5 people in total, so in the end, I got Twilight.

With the starting point and my destination both solidified, the next week was spent planning out one chapter of The Mane Event per day. It took a while, but I eventually had a plan, and by the next week I was ready to begin. Once again, I wrote a whole chapter of the book, once per day, until all 6 were complete. The way I write is a three-step process, though, so I needed one more week, which I spent proofreading each chapter, and also making sure the commissioners were happy with them. Over the course of that week I eventually accumulated the €150 I earned, and with that, the story was practically complete! All that was left was the technical aspects of getting it all into a book-like format (big ol' LaTeX pipeline), and I could release it. The only problem is, I instantly realised that it felt entirely unfinished without an epilogue to it, and that I had to write one. So, it was delayed by a few more days.

After everything, The Mane Event was released on the 5th of October, to wild acclaim! Just kidding, it received barely any attention from anyone who wasn't a commissioner in it, which lead me directly into a downwards spiral of depression. A mix of coming off of finishing the biggest project I've ever attempted and not even slightly getting the reception I was hoping for made me feel pretty damn bad about the whole thing. But! And that's important, so I'm starting a sentence with a but, but!! But that ended up changing! After a week or so of relatively languishing, something happened that I couldn't have expected. An extremely popular artist in the transformation circles liked The Mane Event enough to draw fanart of it and send people my way! Now, having an artist draw fanart of my stuff has been a lifelong dream of mine, so that alone is incredible. They singlehandedly doubled the amount of attention the story received, and gave me a whole ton of new watchers in the process!

So that's where I am today. The longest thing I've written is doing as well as I hoped it would, and I'll soon be on my way to writing bigger and grander things. The whole experience has been an adventure of learning, and figuring out my abilities as a writer, both of which are vital for what I want to be doing in the future. Was the experience worth it? It's true that I could've made a lot more money by doing simple commissions in that time, but in the end I'm glad I tried something different.