Hello my ever-patient readers!

I wanted to give you all a bit of an update on the hiatus, just to make sure you know I haven't forgotten any of you. I haven't abandoned the project, I've been hard at work on it.

Now, things have been going slow due to working within certain confines. First of all, my computer has been giving me trouble lately. I've been getting a myriad of problems that keep me from working at any decent pace, but I've been doing my best to work around it. Aside from that, we're running into a new set of challenges: when writing a new chapter, we have carte blanche to add whatever we want as long as it doesn't mess with the overall plan. Things can be tweaked and adjusted, pushed back, altered, etc. I mean, Praline, Lamington, the entire FAMILY from Stable 60 were never in the original plan. Rose traveling with the main party was never a part of the original plan. When writing new chapters, we can tweak these sorts of things to try and make the story better in the future.

We CANNOT do this in older chapters. We have to keep within the established canon, while making things better than the original. So far we're 99% done with chapter one, and have started on chapter two. Chapter one required a ton of edits, both in terms of presenting ideas better, and filling in silly plot holes. (How did Lost get the Stable open, for example?) But there's a lot of things that are already established and expanded on later on that I can't get rid of. I mean, something we're working on now... WHY would Hidden expect the nameless stallion she'd killed to be a good guy? Why does she suddenly go "OH HEY LET'S CHANGE OUR WHOLE WAY OF LIFE ON A WHIM!"? Well, she wouldn't. But I wasn't a great writer back then, and we need to make sure that she still does, but that it fits with the worldview the characters have.

So anyway, it's been a challenge, but I'm a lot happier with the new versions so far. Here's a short list of things we've changed:

1: No exposition dumps - There's quite a few places where Hidden has a huge paragraph of narration that's nothing but exposition. Just her flat out explaining something. Writing is better when you 'show' instead of 'tell', but I cannot make the assumption that every reader has played any Fallout games or has read Fallout Equestria. So we've done our best to rewrite those parts to fit them into her narration and show them rather than telling them. The same info is told, but... Better.

2: No addressing the reader - As I said in the last blog post, there's quite a few places where Hidden flat out talks to the reader. She addresses them in her narration, but it wouldn't really make sense for her to narrate that way. I've tried to keep the same details, but without that.

3: Expanding and filling in plot holes - How did Lost know how to open the Stable? That's explained now! When they leave the room to find the 'kitchen' it says "We left to find the kitchens. We found the kitchens." almost verbatim like that. Well I've fixed that sort of thing to expand on things and build the surroundings and to fill in silly plot holes.

4: Worldbuilding - The Stable isn't a 'faceless' place anymore. It has noises, the halls wind confusingly for a pony who's never been there, there's no lights and strange shadows are cast by Lost's magic. Before it was just them walking down non-descript halls with no /description/ of anything. I expected readers to already know what a Stable looked like from playing the games or reading FOE. I fixed this, now the world has some life breathed into it.

SO YEAH! This has been an update to let you know I'm still here. I'm still working hard. My editors are cranking out comments and suggestions to fix the content at their best. We're chugging along and will have the content out ASAP so we can push forward onto 22!

~Hnetu