A Sparkle-ling Perfection: Chapter 12 (Patreon)

Summary

Chapter 11: 6,640 Words

Chapter 12: 3,101 Words

February Total: 9,741 Words

Jeeze, this month was terrible.  I started out all gung-ho, on pace for a 20k-word month… then I got sick and most of that momentum was wasted and I started to ask myself if I really wanted to go this direction with Twilight.  Somewhere around there, I lost some patrons who were only here for Sharing the Night, so I decided that I really needed to get my head on straight about what I'm going to do for that… which mostly ended up as me reading a million or two words of fanfiction as 'inspiration'.  I was only able to dig myself out of that hole when the end of the shorted month of the year started looming on the horizon, and now here we are.

Oh, and I spent the latter half of the month constantly snowblowing the property here, so there was that, too.

 Author's Notes 

This chapter is a bit of a repeat of the situation with Cadance's foalsitting; it's an important, amusing event, but I feel like I might have cheapened it with the brevity of it.  As should be clear from the word count this month, I've been finding that I just have more to say from Sunset Shimmer's perspective, and this will probably continue with the next two or even three chapters being from her.  This makes sense, actually, since Sunset can clash with Twilight and the rest of the changelings, but it'll take somepony with more authority over Twilight to really force her to grow (Ie. Celestia).

You can probably see, then, why this chapter was difficult to pin down.  I wanted to get Twilight out of her comfort zone a bit and make things happen, but I also didn't want to spend several chapters bogged down in it.  Unfortunately, the large gap in time between this and the previous chapter will probably exacerbate the brevity issue; I can only hope that it comes off as a short "Meanwhile…" when taken with the story as a whole.