At last, after 1(0,000) years, I'm free! Righteousness and superior horseword output have prevailed again: Rider on the Storm is finally finished!

And like the titular character, I had a fantastic time doing it.

This story has been in development for the better part of two-ish years now. Or, to be more precise, it's been failing to launch since around August of 2020, if the timestamps of my files are to be believed. It's been started, stopped, rewritten, started again, restopped, and generally fiddlefucked with for much longer than I'd like to admit. And in the interest of preventing you young'uns from making the same mistakes I did, here's an itemized list of all the fuckups that led to this being published in May of 2022:
- Start out wanting to try something different from my usual greentexts.
- Obsess over tiny details instead of the big picture.
- Being a sweaty tryhard and deciding that I needed to change to third person prose, because "I'm better than that".
- Being a sweaty tryhard and deciding that I needed a "proper outline" instead of writing seat-of-the-pants.
- Being a sweaty tryhard and deciding that I needed to expand on the above and create an entire Zim wiki - used to great effect in my longer in-progress stories - for this /short comedy story/.
- Lose interest after all of the above, because /of course I did/.
- Come back after a while on a whim and realize all of the tryharding amounted to never going past chapter 1.
- Overcorrect for being a sweaty tryhard and flip back to doing greentext.
- Forget that I wanted to try something different in the first place, am surprised when I also lose interest.
- Drop it and come back after a while.
- Finally say 'fuck it' and write like I normally do: off-the-cuff with no notes or planning.
- Read my old entries and re-interpret them as second-person prose, disregarding the above a bit but to actual good effect at the cost of time.
If you ever want a story idea of yours to fail to launch, then this list is a fine way to go about doing it!
Fortunately, the strong positive reception to the first chapter was not only /super/ kino and heartwarming, but really helped push me further into powering through the rest while shedding all of that ridiculous second-guessing of my writing instincts, since I'd honest to God been stuck cycling on that first chapter for /way/ too long. In fact, you can see for yourself just how badly I'd been cycling if you read a little further beyond!

Whenever I write something, I always set out to write something that's at least one of a few things:
- Something that's new and interesting.
- Something that's a fresh spin on an old idea or concept.
- Something that's weird and experimental.
- Something that's just plain old fun.
For this story, it was definitely the second one, and in more ways than just it being AiE: this story is basically an entirely different take on an older greentext I've done called "A Stormy Ride". Which, if you haven't read it, is a two-part piece of smut I originally wrote back in 2018 for the old /mlpol/ porn threads, back when I was both still experimenting with - and really enjoying - writing smut, and was really starting to crystallize my particular style of writing.
But the concept of a story with a villainous Anon really stuck with me. And when you combine that with me being something of a Plumfag, it's no real surprise that I'd get an itching to write something like this. Bigger, longer, uncut, and rated T, baybee!

Writing villains in particular has always been a perennial favourite thing of mine to do, even way back before I got into MLP: this dates back to when I used to /RP :3/ over instant messages! My expressions of villainy really started to take off, however, back when I was writing Thaumaturgy With Anon. I won't spoil it if you haven't read it, but if you /have/ read ThaumAnon, then you know exactly the kind of villainy I'm talking about.
For Rider on the Storm, I combined it's original concept from A Stormy Ride with both the lessons I'd learned writing villains in ThaumAnon and the interactions I've had over the years with some crazy fuckers IRL that have always been a total blast to be around. That, and an earnest attempt to /not/ turn it into straight porn. And judging from both the reception that Rider on the Storm has received, and how I often couldn't stop laughing at what I'd written during my multiple editing passes, I'd definitely call the combination a total success!
When I said that I enjoyed writing this as much as you guys had enjoyed reading it, I wasn't kidding!

But all good things eventually come to an end, and while the cliffhanger I left thing on is an obvious indicator that I have a /lot/ more to write about in the upcoming Fury of the Storm, I also strongly felt that trying to cram it into this story would have both dragged /super/ hard, and would just water down the overall super tight experience I'd unintentionally hit but strived to maintain. So it wasn't /just/ to blueball you fuckers: it was also to keep myself in check!

However, in the year since I'd finally knuckled down and stopped being such a filthy, disgusting, sweaty perfectionist tryhard, I /have/ actually made some major progress in how I internally set up my stories. Previously, planning things out just vacuumed up time I could have spent writing, and since I'm a seat-of-the-pants writer at the end of the day, I'd usually just go with my gut and use a different set of plans anyways, which made the previous planning a complete waste of time.
These days, however, I have a much better system for planning, an example of which you can see a little later. Long story short, I learned how a /spreadsheet/, of all things, can be used to help you plan your writing with surprising effectiveness, and I also started treating all of my notes, plans, and other things as living documents instead of ironclad monoliths with enshrined rules in it. It's far from perfect, of course, even moreso when you realize it's just me screwing around with stuff and suffering from terminal "not invented here" syndrome all the while. But it's also exceptionally fun and rewarding to see my processes get better and more refined as I go!

And pretty soon, you'll be able to bear witness to those processes for yourself.

I've always been an open-source, free culture kind of guy, and taking inspiration from the imitable "htpot", I've decided to start a trend of releasing the complete source documents of my finished stories from here on out, relesed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license 4.0 (and 3-clause BSD license for the code), starting with this story.
<file go brrr>
You can consider it the bonus DVD in the box-set that is Rider of the Storm!
Of course, if you don't feel like downloading random 7-zip archives under the auspices of "dude trust me lmao", I understand completely. Won't stop me from /laughing/ at you, especially since you're missing out on neat cut content, cut characters that reappear in Fury of the Storm, and even a cheeky sneak peek of an upcoming story I've been plugging away at since 2019 ;)
But for those paranoid few, the painfully lazy, or the disgusting mobilefag degenerates, I'll give you a short and sweet breakdown of what was involved in writing this specific story:
- Everything was written using FocusWriter.
- Two documents were always open: the first was the actual story, and the second was cut content.
- Before Rider on the Storm, I never kept my off-cuts, and would instead just delete them during revision.
- However, that fucked with FocusWriter's progress tracking, usually causing my words-per-day count to go into negative percentages when the editing reaper came to play!
- Cutting and pasting them into an off-cuts file preserved my progress, and as I did it more, I found looking over my off-cuts was exceptionally useful to my writing process, to the point where I'm shocked I made do without it before!
- Beyond just cut and rewritten snippets of chapters, I've gone so far as to move entire chapters I've needed to rewrite into the off-cuts file.
- Twice.

