The Future of My Little Apprentice

The Decomposition and Future for My Little Apprentice

Hey everybody, so more than a few of you are probably a little surprised to be hearing from me, a blog entry on a story that’s already been complete for some time. Oh, and there are spoilers in here, so don’t read if you haven’t finished the story.

Some people don’t like reading, so for those people, here’s what this blog is about: I’m breaking up My Little Apprentice into three separate stories, one of which isn’t written yet.

Wait, what?

No, you heard right. I’m splitting up the story. Here’s where it started: I’m not a perfect storyteller. As a matter of fact, I’m a fairly poor storyteller. After having finished writing Harmony Defended, I came to the painful realization that in many ways I fell short of my goals for the story. How?

The name of the story is “My Little Apprentice,” and yet we see very little actual apprenticeship going on. It seems almost as though an apprenticeship was about to start when the whole discord thing started, but next thing we knew there was a kidnapping subplot and we didn’t actually get to see that relationship develop.

There are many reasons why this happened, but I for one don’t really believe in excuses so I won’t give any. Instead, I’ll present my plan to fix things.

1. The story of My Little Apprentice will be split into a trilogy, dividing along the lines on the three main acts.

2. This means that the first novel, the one that will stay posted under this name, has more or less been written. It includes chapters 1-16, with grammatical revisions (curse my English class for never teaching me about the proper use of said tags!) ane a few new scenes (such as an entirely original prologue). Again, this story will be posted as what is presently called “my little apprentice.” This revision will begin in January, and proceed quite rapidly, probably over the course of that month (if not faster)

3. Here’s where things get exciting. The second story is not written yet. The idea here is that Chance’s kidnapping didn’t actually take place on the day of the Summer Solstice, but some time later. There are months of time left open to explore. This story will primarily be about Chance, the CMC, and Twilight Sparkle. We’ll see the actual apprenticeship, more adapting to pony life, and some tie-ins with episodes from the forth season. Those who know about my plans to write about a “Science Fair” will know a little of what to expect.

Also important for this section, I intend to handle rising action better. I did an absolutely dreadful job with that the first time, and everybody was completely blindsided. That would have been great if this was a thriller novel, but it isn’t, so I intend to do a much better job about that. We’ll probably see more about Chrysalis and her plans, at least in some small amount.

4. The third of the stories would be particularly composed of the later sections presently included in MLA, with some fairly heavy revisions. Not just the grammar mistakes (which I would fix), but there are some problems with the plot I would end up needing to fix, plus making Chrysalis and Chance’s changeling clone into more important characters.

So, that’s my plan. I expect to release new material for the second story with one update a week (the pressure of releasing twice a week was part of the reason we ended up with a barely-edited first draft. I wrote 90k of MLA in march alone). When it comes to re-submitting existing material, we can expect material more quickly. I will add (R) to chapter titles that were already posted but have been revised.

For those brave souls who made it this far, thank you! Hopefully you feel wiser now without feeling older.