User blog:Paperluigi ttyd/A Special Anniversary

First of all, this is awkward. Since October 14, 2013, I have made a total of three blog posts, and the two of them were for Winter Fanon Con 2014, meaning I have not made any blog posts in almost a year and a half. For reference, I used to make blogs all the time, so it's kind of weird that I stopped making them, though I was gone for 4-5 months. Anyway, enough nostalgia.

Except for the fact that this entire blog post is about nostalgia!

No seriously, it is.

Today is May 10, 2016. As the title states, today is the anniversary. Well, on May 10, 2012, my life changed forever. While walking around my basement, I was thinking about Young Justice. I loved Young Justice; the show was amazing, and I was extremely sad when it didn't get renewed for a third season (there's still a chance it could come back someday, but that's not the point of this post). No, what happened that day was I thought to myself: what if I took the basic idea of Young Justice, an somehow adopted it to the site where I had spent most of my time of the last few months: BTFF. And from that simple question, Young Plumbers was born.

Over the course of the next three plus years, Young Plumbers was my life and soul. The original series especially so. I completed my first episode of the series on May 20, 2012, 10 days after originally coming up with the idea. The final episode of the series was released on April 19, 2013, about 11 months, or about 334 days later. That means, with 55 episodes in the original series, I was finishing more than 1 episode per week (or about one every 6 days if you do the math). It was a passionate fury and (in my unbiased opinion) it still to this day holds up to some of the newer series.

The sequel, unfortunately, never got that treatment. Including the 5 episode special connecting the original to the sequel, I wrote 31 real episodes of the sequel, not counting the 3 episodes I released of Season 2, which I later abandoned. From September 6, 2013, when Generations started, until December 31, 2014, when the first season ended, for a total of 481 days, I was releasing episodes on average only once every 15 days, or about 2.5 times slower than for the original series. My heart just wasn't in it anymore, and unfortunately it took me almost two years to realize that. Earth-19 as a franchise was something that I could not continue anymore. It was a bittersweet conclusion that left me very angry. I wanted to draw all of the stories to a conclusion, but I couldn't.

So what's the point of all of this? Why am I telling you about how I failed to live up to my expectations for one of my series? Well firstly, as I stated, it's because today is the anniversary of the creation of that series, and since I haven't really made announcements on it since I returned a month ago, I felt like I needed to say something. So, finally, after much speculation and months of waiting to see if the series could continue, today, I can finally announce that Earth-19 as a franchise has reached its end; the project is being retired.

But I'm not here today to make everyone cry about a sad story of how I failed to finish my series. My second reason for making this post is to talk about the future. I know Fanon Con is not until next month, but since I missed the last two Fanon Cons (and didn't participate in several before that if I remember correctly), I feel like doing something a little bit early. Just to be clear, I will still be submitting to Fanon Con next month, this is just a little sneak preview of what I've been planning.

So now that Earth-19 is finished, what am I doing now, you ask? Well, before I officially stopped working on Earth-19, you may remember that I was working on another series: Attack on To'kustar. Like the premise for Young Plumbers, this was one of taking another show and applying it to the world of Ben 10, though I've learned from my past mistakes. This isn't a user series; the characters are all created by me, instead of being based off of real people, which means I can include what plots I want involving those characters, as long as I don't violate this wiki's polices or Wikia's Terms of Use ;). I'm also taking the time to plan out far in advance for future episodes and seasons, instead of just writing episode by episode and coming up with some pretty big contrived coincidences in order to tie up loose ends.

Another question you may have is what I was doing on my break from the wiki? Was I thinking about Attack on To'kustar of about the wiki? Well, the answer is mostly no, actually. I was thinking about school mainly, and finding some other hobbies to keep myself busy. I did check the wiki a couple times to see what was going on, but I never posted. My goal was to give myself time to mentally recover from the writers' block and such that I had suffered before leaving. My whole point in leaving was to refresh my mind and specifically not think about the wiki. That meant I wouldn't write anything for another couple months, but it was necessary.

Since I've gotten back, however, I have continued Attack on To'kustar, and I have released a few new episodes in the last month. As my school year draws to a close, I hope to write many episodes, and release at least one per week if possible, though keep in mind that my goal is to not get burnt out. My plan is to spread out episodes a little bit, and not try to continue writing when I feel exhausted from doing so. I want to think a lot about what I put in my episodes, and make sure it is genuinely good.

But enough about my process, I want to talk about my content, just for a little bit. I am currently in the middle of writing the next episode, titled "Flame". Since Fanon Con is coming up next month, I won't talk too much about my plans for anything to far into the future, but since I did promise, I will talk a little bit about this episode and the few episodes after that.

Obviously, skip this part if you have not actually been reading my series :)

In conclusion, I am back, and hopefully better than ever. I am working on my series again, and taking my time, instead of rushing to get it done. I still may not be super active on chat or anything, but that's probably cause I'm going to be working on my a series a lot of the time.

TL;DR:


 * Today is the 4 year anniversary of the creation of my first really big series, Young Plumbers.
 * I am officially announcing that the Earth-19 franchise has ended.
 * My main focus for now, and for the foreseeable future, is Attack on To'kustar.
 * I will be making a Fanon Con presentation next month about Attack on To'kustar.
 * I still won't be super active on chat unfortunately, mainly because I'm working on my series.

Thanks for reading. This was a long post, but as I said at the beginning, I don't write them that often, so I figured a long post would be fair.