Dusty Trails is officially on Indefinite Hiatus

Posted by Vraddock 5 years ago

 

(This is originally written for the Dusty's Trails public Discord server, hence some of the minor formatting weirdness.)

Hey there @everyone, Vraddock here. You should all know me as one of the two co-writers of Dusty’s Trails, alongside Cainiam. I’ll be announcing this solo, though this is a decision and announcement from both of our metaphorical desks.

Some of you may have suspected this already, but DT is now officially on indefinite hiatus. This means no new chapters or bad ends for the foreseeable future, although characters from DT will remain as available as they ever were in RPs, fan works, et cetera. All released chapters will remain available in the same state as before, and absolutely nothing is going anywhere. In essence, everything is frozen; just as frozen as it’s been since the latest chapter released on July 15, 2018.

(Yes it’s been that long, and _yes, it hurts us both to realize that.)_

The both of us want to sincerely thank everyone here on the server, now and going forward, for sticking with us for all of this time. You guys are wonderful fans, and we hope you’ll still enjoy everything we do, even if Dusty’s not the centerpiece any more.

I’ll ping the server again at the end, once I’ve posted all of this little prepared explanation I have. It’s a long one, so anyone who doesn’t want to follow along as I post, that ping is for you, and you can take it as an indication that all has been posted and you can read it all as a whole.

Some of you might be asking why. Why has it been so long? Why did we take so long to declare this officially? Why have we stopped writing DT?

There’s no grand, dramatic reasons for any of them, I assure you. Me and Cainiam are still on exceptionally good terms, even if he’s a little harder to get a hold of nowadays. I’ll get around to that in a second.

The best place to start is with why we stopped writing DT. This was not a conscious decision, and neither of us ever said “It’s done, let’s call it quits.” I hope that the status of “indefinite hiatus” reflects that; DT is not, and will never be outright canceled, but the story is being fully put on hold.

What happened was simply that me and Cainiam never could quite work out what we’re doing with DT. Some of you might remember how we tried to shake up our voting system a couple years ago, to no avail. This is because as a format, DT is exceptionally strange. Dusty’s Trails is a second-person, user-driven CYOA… sort of. What this translated into was that Cainiam or I would write a chapter, leave it on a cliffhanger, and discuss various options for the other to write that would get Dusty out of said cliffhanger, paring it down to 4 choices (or more often, 3 choices and one silly suicide option.)

The result of this was that readers who wanted porn either didn’t vote at all, always voted for the obvious bad end, or maybe didn’t feel confident voting for an option that MIGHT lead to a scene more befitting their personal tastes. But by comparison, readers who were fully invested in the setting and characters of Dusty Shelf and company would choose tactically sound decisions, trying to keep everypony alive, because we had been known to permanently kill off characters for the sake of kink. In fact, these readers felt specifically dissuaded from voting for the silly bad end options, even with the knowledge that it would lead to a bad end, albeit a non-canon one, out of the fear that this bad end would be a surprise progression chapter instead, with their decisions having fatal implications.

This led to not terribly many votes as a whole, and we rarely, if ever, broke double digits on any single chapter in terms of votes.

We tried a few things, and discussed a lot more, in an attempt to fix this system and better incentivize voting. But that never really panned out. That led to more radical ideas, and I think this is where Cainiam and I had a literary difference of opinion.

I wanted to step back from the current story slightly, and work with Cainiam to hammer out some major plot beats. Various factions, more locations, and some specific quests to undertake, then string them together into a cohesive narrative. Then we would follow that, and either ditch the concept of voting entirely, or severely limiting it to very minor cliffhangers to break up chapters. Chapters would have been planned out in advance, and potentially become longer, with more of a focus on the setting and characterization, but also likely would have taken longer to write.

Cainiam, however, liked the story as it was, and felt the chapters I wrote were getting longer than he was comfortable with already. DT actually started at his work, where he could hammer out a quick kink scene while at lunch. He prefers to write by the seat of his pants, and plan ahead as little as possible, with the intention being that people in the comments would provide impetus to Dusty. If there was to be voting, it would be in the form of commenters responding to other comments and supporting the ideas they provided, which would allow him to go with the most popular or most fun option.

I’m sad to say, we were just never able to come to a proper decision on any of this. We were never even able to sit down and properly talk it out; Cainiam suddenly became very busy, and moved from one department of his company to another, from factory floor to IT. Suddenly, his work was much more complex, management began keeping a much closer eye on his computer and phone activity, and his free time dried up. What little time he did have left, he wanted to spend with his absolute favorite RP partners, and mostly receded from the public eye as a whole.

What was worse, every time the subject came up, more and more time had passed. Neither of us really wanted to think about how long we had let DT languish, or even properly acknowledge it by discussing it. Our talking about DT went from brainstorming and discussion, to jokes about how the chapter was a little late, to us realizing that it had actually been a while since either of us had actually written any DT, and then we simply stopped talking about it entirely.

This was the point where we should have made this announcement, but again, neither of us wanted to acknowledge how long it had been. Most of all, neither of us wanted to _officially_ cancel it, because we genuinely felt as though we could still sit down, hammer out a chapter, and we’d be right back into the swing of things. But that never happened.

We still feel like this today. We both really like Dusty and company, and we’ve both used various characters from the story in other projects, RPs, and personal tabletop games (when we could find time.) Neither of us wants to fully cancel DT, and that isn’t going to happen. Dusty will live on. But we’re definitely no longer writing it.

(We even briefly discussed transferring DT over to FiMFiction as a full story, including re-edited chapters, and picking up where left off over there. Or converting all of the previously-written chapters into a Quest game, albeit a very limited one.)

In the future, maybe that will change. It is always possible that Cainiam will move up in his company once again, and in a nice, cushy, private office, he’ll find inspiration to write about our little corner of the wasteland again. But I can’t in good conscience say that will happen soon, or even really at all, and I don’t want anyone to think a new chapter is coming next week, next month, or even next year, because in all likelihood, it will not, in any form.

I personally don’t feel as though I could write DT without his input, at least. It has always been Cainiam’s creation, and I’ve always been merely a guest in his writing room. The only reason he really brought me on to begin with, was that I was particularly active in the comments of the earliest chapters; you can still go back and read these public comments today, if one is so inclined. Between that, working as a pre-reader, and a desire to write, Cainiam felt I could help him out.

I hope that I have; not just in his eyes, but in all of yours. Thank you all for enjoying my writing, and especially for leaving comments and favorites on every single chapter and Bad End of DT, especially the ones that I wrote, pre-read, or indirectly assisted with.

Now, onto this server. What’s going to happen with it? (and, by extension, the story chapters here on Eka's portal.)

Well, to put it bluntly, nothing. We have no plans to shut down or restrict this server in any way. I personally feel it should remain as a hangout spot for anyone who wants to use it, who still wants to discuss DT or the concepts within. It’s also a nice repository for fan art and previous discussions. Plus, I hate losing access to information, or the thought of something being lost and irrecoverable.

Should that ever change, then we will of course notify everyone as far ahead of time as we possibly can. There are methods of backing up Discord logs, and presumably of archiving entire servers, should that become necessary. We will do everything in our power to preserve the server, in any way that we can. Out of nostalgia and love, if absolutely nothing else.

Finally, the obvious question: what are we up to nowadays, if not writing Dusty’s Trails?

Cainiam, as previously stated, has been extraordinarily busy with his new IT job. He’s written short things when he can get time, either cleaning up RPs, writing birthday gifts, or various other small things. He was playing with Quest programming a while back, and his demo for that, _Daring Do and the Tutorial of Terror,_ is a fully-functional game that my OC even guest-starred in! It can be found here: https://aryion.com/g4/view/328140

He’s also written another, more in-depth Quest game actually set in the DT universe, though outside of any established canon. Called _Enclave Escape,_ it features Dusty having been captured by Skyheart, and her adventure as she tries to sneak or fight her way out of an Enclave prison base. It can be found here: https://aryion.com/g4/view/515960

Unfortunately, if you want to ask Cainiam about RPing, then you may be out of luck. His metaphorical dance card is already incredibly full, to the point where I genuinely can’t get a hold of him most days, and when I do, it’s because he’s specifically gotten time off, or has chosen to put time aside just for that purpose. I won’t dissuade you from asking, but just be aware that it’s extremely unlikely that he’ll take you up on the offer.

He’s also somewhat fallen out of Pony, and now that the show has come to a close, I can’t as such say I blame him. He’s more focused on general furry work now, and has posted a few things to his FurAffinity account here, to reflect that: https://www.furaffinity.net/user/cainiam/

As for myself, I’ve almost entirely stepped away from writing vore, and porn as a whole. I enjoy it, of course, but I wanted to focus on other, more fulfilling projects. I want to get into writing in general, though I’m focusing on fanfiction for now, and I already have a _ton_ of projects in the works over on FiMfiction here: https://www.fimfiction.net/user/75339/Type_Writer

Currently, my most major project is The Hollow Pony, a Dark Souls/MLP crossover in very much the same vein as Fallout Equestria. This means that instead of taking characters from one and dropping them into the other, I’m blending both settings to create something somewhat original. While this story is hopefully entertaining, first and foremost, my hope is to build a setting that others will also feel like they can step into and create their own stories within. If that sounds like something you’d enjoy, you can check that out here! https://www.fimfiction.net/story/463271/the-hollow-pony

In fact, a new chapter has just been posted today! I also plan to continue updating every Sunday until the story is done, and so far, I haven’t missed a week. Hollow Pony represents the same writing skill you enjoyed in my chapters of Dusty’s Trails, so if you enjoyed my characterization, scene-setting, lore-writing and faction conflicts, all of that is very much on display here!

TL:DR, Dusty’s Trails is now officially on indefinite hiatus, as much as both Cainiam and I hate to say so. Nothing is happening to the published chapters or this Discord server, and we’re both working on new projects in the meantime if you’d like to continue following us elsewhere. From the bottom of our hearts, we’d like to thank @everyone for sticking with us through the last few years, and we hope our new projects help lessen the sting of Dusty’s hiatus.