I'll keep this short.
Most of you know what happened. The rest are about to find out.
I'm a wreck. I cry at almost random times. I get phone calls which stretch out into an hour as I have to tell it all again. Just about every time I go outside, when I move through the apartment, something happens to make me think about it.
But I have to survive. I have to f...
2021-01-18 01:43:45 +0000 UTC View Post
There's an argument to be made that this was the only way to finish 2020 on an appropriate note. Namely, with a crackfic, because this entire year has been a crackfic of history writ large and honestly? At this point, I think most of us just want it to stop. I can't promise that next year will be any better: I just want to see the backside of this one. Because once I've got a view of its backside, I can start kicking.
It's kicked all of us enough t...
2021-01-01 03:24:42 +0000 UTC View Post
Most of you know what's been going on. And if you're a little behind on the blogs, with that statement just leading you to wonder what the latest disaster is... my mother has covid-19.
I think that's enough disaster to be getting on with.
This month of nightmares, care center escapes onto ice, X-rays showing a broken femur, dementia flares which never end and now t...
2020-12-30 03:07:46 +0000 UTC View Post
I'm going to keep this brief.
It's holiday-themed, but it's belated because Real Life has been kicking me in the face all month.
It's a little over 10000 words, and I had to manage that when Real Life also kicked me out the door and put a delay on the starting time.
I have been working on this story for hours. And hours. And hours. Also hours.
I skipped dinner.
I am not going to be coherent for much longer.
I have used the word 'I...
2020-12-28 05:23:15 +0000 UTC View Post
I'd like to say the full assortment of disasters stayed out of the way for long enough to let me finish this chapter, but the truth is that I finished the last portion of it during a two-hour period of waiting for the nurse to call me back. I was told that the hospitals are just that flooded with the covid surge, it might take a while for anyone to reach out, and -- two hours passed.
So it's more that the disasters were out of contact.
(I just called back and got through. &n...
2020-12-24 03:27:28 +0000 UTC View Post
(This may be the record for shortest pledge post.)
This @$#%ing month.
If you've been following the FIMFic blogs, you know why.
If you haven't, this is a good time to get caught up. Because I can't repeat the whole of it here, and...
...once you read about what's been happening, you'll know that 'this @$#%ing month' suffices.
9400 words. Tomorrow, I go back to sc...
2020-12-22 03:40:39 +0000 UTC View Post
First: I'm desperately hoping that next month lets me find the centering required for comedy, because November wasn't it. Just know that Anchor Foal has not been, and will not be, abandoned. This just hasn't been an autumn filled with laughs.
Second: about 8400 words in this chapter, and it was initially a victim of the natural chapter break because I didn't want to stop until I hit that point. (I had reached 6k and realized that the chapte...
2020-11-30 02:31:11 +0000 UTC View Post
Dark moods may be good for creating dark stories, but dark times mean it's hard to find quiet hours in which to work on them.
There should be a full medical blog soon, because I just got a vital piece of information about my mother's physical rehabilitation stay this afternoon. Namely, it ends on December 4th, and so I can pretend to enforce some degree of chapter structure on life while recounting recent events. But for now, let's just say that she's been blaming me for all...
2020-11-24 22:39:01 +0000 UTC View Post
The original plan was to hold off on this particular 7500-word chapter until December, because other stories need updating. But, put bluntly: Harwick happened.
Who's Harwick? Well, if you missed the blog in question, all you have to do is take a moment and look closely at the image which leads off this post.
...right.
We have new cover art.
This was not commissioned. He made this of his own free will, because he wanted to contribute something to...
2020-11-19 22:52:42 +0000 UTC View Post
Word count: 12,700.
So there's the other reason why the previous chapter was split off.
*slumps over*
G'night.
And we once again meet one of the writer's greatest enemies:
The natural chapter break.
We're coming up on Cerea's meeting with Cheerilee's class, and this chapter turned out to be the final section preceding that scene. And I thought about going almost directly into it within the same chapter, without anything more than a bit of {HR} code to create transition -- but I had a natural break point. The kind of line which says 'Stop here, let the readers think abo...
2020-11-11 18:34:01 +0000 UTC View Post
I went for a long walk yesterday.
I shouldn't have done that.
*sigh*
At 4100 words, this mood (or in-a-mood) piece falls under the 5k line which I use to determine whether to check the Charge For This Post box. But I wasn't going to artificially pad it out in order to reach the minimum, and it was a story I wanted to tell. As such, there's no pledge charge attached to this posting. Anyone who feels it's worth their pledge amount anyway may ...
2020-11-05 18:14:18 +0000 UTC View Post
I want to start by apologizing. I know I'd said I would try to get an Anchor Foal chapter up in October, but... bluntly: right now, it wouldn't have been anything worth pledging for. I'm not in a good mental place for comedy. I'll try to pick it back up in November -- but today, a dark mood called for a dark story. Or I might not have been able to write at all.
As far as medical updates go: I'm going to try and get a blog up for...
2020-10-31 01:17:20 +0000 UTC View Post
Things are bad.
I don't even have the strength for a supposedly-dramatic ellipses in that sentence, let alone the desire. Things are bad. I spent just about all of yesterday in the emergency room with her and for a couple of hours of that, she was trying to kick me. Today had her in the hospital not remembering any of it, or that she had asked me to help her two minutes before she asked me to help her again. Her dementia is spiked to a level I haven't seen since ...
2020-10-29 00:19:40 +0000 UTC View Post
That image was originally viewed as a placeholder.
I have trouble commissioning art. Part of this is fiscal, but a significant percentage comes from my twinned troubles in finding anyone who will take money from me and deliver the results in less than two months.
(This is a large part of why any and all hopes of creating print editions have stalled out. As the joke goes, there turned out to be something which artists won't try to create for money, and i...
2020-10-24 23:38:57 +0000 UTC View Post
So it turns out I can't really write at the bedside in a hospital room.
You know that little half-swinging table which the nurses put supplies and meals onto? I thought I could use that, because most of this chapter was written before I went in for visiting hours. (It's another UTI, or it's the same one back again and it brought two new blood clots: one in each calf. I haven't blogged about it because I feel like everyone's sick of rerun season.) She was sl...
2020-10-22 23:55:18 +0000 UTC View Post
This is how tired I am: it took about twenty minutes after publishing an 8k chapter before I remembered that I should probably head to Patreon on that.
...yeah. It's been a rough few days. Without going full blog, let's just say that I had some not-so-brief doubts about whether I could post anything this month. Tomorrow starts a Week Of Doctor's Appointments (including her critical echocardiogram on Wednesday) and there was a while when I thought we'd be...
2020-10-19 01:16:29 +0000 UTC View Post
This has been a day (and night) of terror.
I said that checking in on Tish was the last part of the bridge. I stalled enough on that, and it was due to fear. But that story went up, and after that... everything else would have been pure stalling. I could still write one-shots and do smaller stories as inspiration took me: I just would have been doing so while effectively standing in place.
I'm fully aware of how tumultuous my life is. (There's a...
2020-09-30 23:23:18 +0000 UTC View Post
Almost all I want to say right now is that there's a fairly major medical-related blog coming -- with 'fairly major' meant in the sense that there's just a lot to cover. This has been one of those cases where I couldn't stop and sum up because once again, life doesn't operate with chapters. Every time I felt there was a moment available for pausing and updating, something else would happen...
But I also don't want people to panic. So I will say that none of it is high-...
2020-09-29 00:33:58 +0000 UTC View Post
This one scared me.
It's not the length. (I swear I didn't mean to hit 14k again.) It's because this is the last link in the bridge. I announced that I was thinking about this story on Twitter some time ago, I got the first 800 words done, and then -- a lot of things happened. Some of them made the blog and are legitimate reasons for not having written the rest. But the remainder came from fear.
There are chapters which have scared me. ...
2020-09-27 01:17:37 +0000 UTC View Post
This was not originally meant to be 14,000 words.
@$#% it, me.
*sigh* Well, try to think of it as Value For Pledge. In any case...
In the most recent blog, I said this was inspired by my mother's recent experiences with Cardiology. I'm going to explain what that means here first, as a bonus for my sponsors. But in this case, I'm encouraging everyone to read the actual story before they go any further in the pledge post. It'll give you a...
2020-09-25 02:14:15 +0000 UTC View Post
I'm not going to try and recap the chaos which made the first posting of the month take place on the 21st. (I'll try to reach five, as the last two scheduled appointments for September both take place tomorrow. I just don't have much confidence in reaching the goal.) I think the majority of you have seen the blog entries and for those who haven't, you know where to look. ...
2020-09-22 02:27:08 +0000 UTC View Post
Closing out the month with 9700 words of what may or may not qualify for 'bang'.
I wanted to give Cerea the last word because it felt as if I'd left her in a somewhat awkward place. At least this way, the cliffhanger isn't hers, and it serves as a reminder that things are still happening away from the palace. And I also wanted to post one more update for her story in August because just about every time I place a new chapter, the story picks up at least one d...
2020-08-31 00:57:20 +0000 UTC View Post
I know: this post doesn't line up with half of the publication timing, because there's two chapters in this update. The problem was that it was originally meant to be one. And there may be another chapter yet to come this month, as our centaur might insist on being the one who gallops towards the border into September. (Patreon exclusive sneak preview: whenever it appears, the title of that next chapter will be Conspiratorial.)
I originall...
2020-08-28 17:16:39 +0000 UTC View Post
It's partially downhill from here.
...oh, come on. We had a moment of emotional connection and recovery, also known as 'most of the previous chapter'. Y'all have some idea of how I tend to occasionally work, this story isn't exactly over, and Nightwatch promised to tell Cerea what had happened on the next day. It's tomorrow. Commence new trauma!
Or, more realistically: this story is taking place in phases. One phase just wrapped: ...
2020-08-25 01:46:43 +0000 UTC View Post
Scootaloo's withering stare didn't expect this to have 9200 on the word count either.
(Seriously: I thought this chapter was going to top out around 6k. The lesson, as always: I know nothing. Also that I'm too tired right now to edit that part out, because now y'all get to make the obvious jokes. All of them.)
Things got stalled out again during the week. I'm hoping to post a full blog update tomorrow, but the bottom line is this: &...
2020-08-22 03:26:17 +0000 UTC View Post
So I owe everyone an explanation, because I'd said I was shooting for the first weekend of August on this chapter, and... this isn't exactly it. We are a good temporal distance from 'it'. So, without going full blog...
The random-grab image of Scootaloo is glaring at me.
...she has fresh hairline vertebrae fractures at L4 and L5. Fell asleep sitting up, then fell out of bed. Refused the ER and X-rays, it took me days to get her in, then there...
2020-08-18 00:21:24 +0000 UTC View Post
Ultimately, the choice of which story to update was about emotional tone. There are readers who feel this story edges along the cliff for one of the worst tropes: Darkness-Induced Audience Apathy. They believe that things are so bad for the main character as to make reading difficult, and it can reach the point where you don't care about what happens any more because it feels as if nothing can get any better.
I understand that, to some degree. But protagonists ca...
2020-07-29 17:54:04 +0000 UTC View Post
I'm torn. I know I said I wanted to close July with a chapter of Anchor Foal, but I know where this particular story is going next. The scene is in my head, it wants to come out, but I can't neglect Anchor Foal too long and... when it comes to Patreon post charges, I don't go to six in one month. Not paid charges. I already put up a freebie for July, but that was because the story's length was too minimal to jus...
2020-07-27 01:21:20 +0000 UTC View Post
And so Cerea meets her greatest foe:
The natural chapter break.
I swear: I hit the 6300 word mark, and every instinct looked at the natural cliffhanger and shouted Stop here! You reach the point where going on means ruining the emotions of that one moment, you don't want to take anything out because you needed all the buildup... you just have to stop. And so I called a halt to the proceedings, and did so at the same moment I internally committed to...
2020-07-25 00:40:23 +0000 UTC View Post