The Finite Lonely Day

Alex in Socks by the fantastic PaintSplotch

So those who found this blog through the last chapter of The Eternal Lonely Day will already know what this blog is meant to announce. As of the most recent chapter, I have ended the story. This may be a great surprise to those who have been following. Those who have been following the story from the beginning will (correctly) realize that I originally planned to describe the full 10,000 year era it would take all humans to return in this story. I didn’t even break 300 AE, so it ought to be very clear I’ve got a long way to go there. For various reasons I’ve elected not to continue this story that long, reasons I will illustrate here.

I wouldn’t want to go further without another thank-you to my readers who made it this far. We’ve gone from several thousand to several hundred, but that doesn’t mean I appreciate your support any less. Thank you so much for sticking it out with me. I really did write this much because of you. Your comments and feedback effected the story more than you know. I feel like a wiser, better author than I was when I first started this project, back when summer started. It’s because of your support. Likewise I’d like to thank my artist Zutcha for all his fantastic work, and for pushing through and staying motivated even when he didn’t want to. It wouldn’t have been the same without him.

First though, I’d like to present what I will be doing instead. I won’t be neglecting all the future. Those of you worried that this is the end of LPoE, you need not worry yourselves quite so soon. I do still want to tell the story of some of these future years. However, I intend to tell the story a little differently. As fun as it’s been to use Alex’s perspective exclusively again after taking a break from it in Founders, I’ve found it greatly restricts what I can do from a narrative perspective. People have pointed out in the comments, and they’re not wrong, that it can be frustrating to have so much of Alex’s story missing after the few hundred years I skipped. With a potentially immortal life to look at, there are obviously quite a few more years than just those 300 to consider.

I’ve elected to change the format for the future. Rather than restricting myself to a totally linear narrative where each chapter directly follows the previous, and rather than holding to a single character, I’ve decided to abandon both. Future updates to the universe will not be told as Chapters to Alex’s story, but as self-contained “Episodes” Focusing on a single character who may or may not be one we’ve seen before. Each Episode will be a self-contained narrative, perhaps longer than my usual for chapters, perhaps shorter. Given the large periods in-between these sections, it’s likely perspective characters will not recur. The only exception to this are our immortals, who I expect to make an occasional appearance every now and then.

I have not yet decided if I intend to have these chapters appear as part of ELD or not. If so, I’ll likely rename the story, change the cover, and restructure things a little to keep things easy to understand. I might, on the other hand, start another sequel, which would certainly be the last in the series.

This project was ambitious, far more ambitious than I intended, and it’s had the inadvertent side-effect of restricting my writing. This brings me to my second point: As I move to this new format, I will be moving away from regular updates. I know this is a change for me, given I’ve been publishing at least weekly since March of 2014. I do have good reasons, though. The first is that the chapters will be full stories in themselves, so might be longer and take more time to write. Secondly, I have other MLP-related projects I’d like to write, a few of which are already in the very late stages of production and will probably be published soon. I need to have a break from regular publication deadlines in order to get these stories finished and out there. As much as I’ve loved writing for LPoE this last year, I’d like to write other pony things for awhile.

Most importantly though I’m taking the next three months off from regular pony publishing in order to focus on getting my real-world novel ready for publication. I’ll talk more about this later for anyone who cares about such things, but for now I’ll only say I’ve got a unique and extremely limited opportunity at university right now and I’d like to take advantage of it while it lasts. I expect I’ll return to more regular posting in three months, hopefully.

In the meantime, expect occasional updates from me. Some of those will be Episodes of ELD, some will be probably be to get a few shorter stories I’ve written posted.

Oh, and I’ve also got a project going with the artist of LPoE, which there will hopefully be another blog post about, so stay tuned. What could that project be? Well…