Sharing the Nation: Chapter 9 & A Sparkle-ling Perfection: Chapter 19 (Patreon)

Oh god, this month was a trainwreck.  After two months into writing 1k per day, I thought I'd been setting a comfortable pace.  Then I missed a day.  The problem with trying to maintain a streak of daily achievements is that once you actually do miss a day, you lose all that built up momentum and it becomes easier to miss a second day… and a third.  I missed a little over a week of writing… and then the problems started.

Writing chapter twelve of Sharing the Nation… didn't go well.  Both Twilight and Spike kind of ended up with anticlimaxes at the same time and I rewrote the first half of the chapter over several times trying to come up with an approach that wouldn't bore everyone to death.  Frustrated, I decided to give the whole thing a read over from the beginning to try and get a feel for the momentum of the story, and… didn't really like what I read.  I've really let my semicolons and em-dashes get away from me, and Twilight's side of the story seems to be struggling to get off the ground fifty thousand words in.

That… depressed me, and while I managed to put together a chapter around the middle of the month, I couldn't work up the confidence to actually post it for preview, and for that, I apologize.  I continued to fail to write anything for the next two weeks until I finally had to get something out Or Else.

Chapter nineteen of A Sparkle-ling Perfection was actually fun to write and I'm decently happy with it.  Expect the next couple of chapters to be more of that.  I'm not abandoning Sharing the Nation, nor even putting it on hiatus, but I need to get some wins back under my belt and some time to take a good look at it in the meantime.  As much as I hate to do revisions, I might have to make some significant changes to get things back on track… and maybe get rid of some em-dashes, too.

But hey.  Sunset Shimmer is a dragon now, so I've got that going for me.