The Buttery Snake Show: Onward · 12:55am Aug 23rd, 2018
Buttery Snake slowly revolved in his chair, looking over his pitted, slightly burned stage-desk at the overstuffed, floral-upholstered abomination that had largely swallowed a rather sallow, peculiar-smelling fellow named Unwhole Hole.
“So,” he said, glaring. “You’re leaving.”
“No.”
Buttery Snake groaned and threw his hooves (recall that he is, in fact, a pony). “So why am I even here?!”
“Because I pay you to be.”
“You don’t pay me!”
“Because I have no money.”
“Because you keep spending it on exotic houseplants!”
“Because I like purple things!”
“Twilight is a purple thing.”
“Your mom is a purple thing.”
“I’m a fictional character. You created me. You’re my mommy. A purple mommy.”
“Now you’re just making this weird. Is there any reason I’m here?”
“How should I know? You’re the one writing the blog post.”
Unwhole Hole paused, realizing that he had written the better part of half a page without yet getting to the point. “Ah. I see.”
Buttery Snake shifted his notes, which were largely blank except for many drawings of pony Josephine on them. “So. You’re triple-wielding stories.”
“You mean that I have three actively updating stories.”
“Yes.”
“That is not uncommon.”
“How would you know? You’ve only read, what, three fanfictions?”
“Reading is very difficult for me, and I am very, very slow at it. As such, I’ve only read three pony fanfiction stories total on this site. ‘Past Sins’ was one of them.”
“Oh. That make sense. I mean, if you can’t read, you can’t read. But what stories do you have going now?”
“Well, I have ‘The Hole’, which should have its last chapter added today.”
“Is that a play on my name?”
“No. It was an idea that occurred to me. I wondered if it was possible to make something as simple as a hole in the ground scary.”
“Is it?”
“No. The story is overblown and overdramatic, so it comes across more as absurd than as actually frightening.”
“Oh. Then why bother?”
“Mainly? I was on vacation, and since I don’t know how to operate a television, I got bored sometimes. So I sat down and wrote that story in three days when I was not otherwise busy. I consider it to be an exercise in brevity.”
“It certainly is short. Maybe you’re shortest ever. But other authors are even shorter.”
“I know. I’m trying.”
“Clearly not hard enough.” Buttery Snake flipped through his notes, chuckling at a picture of Josephine as a doctor. Consider for a moment that this picture actually does exist somewhere on the internet. “And ten house points to the one who finds it, I guess.”
“Slytherine will always find it,” said Unwhole Hole. “They’re the best one, after all.”
“Because they have a centaur?”
“Because they have a centaur.”
“You know nobody will get that joke. That story was not very popular. Except to the Kaiser for some reason…” He paused. “Speaking of comedies! ‘Derpy Deeds (Done Dirt Cheap!)’ is still going.”
“It has twenty five chapters, so yes. It will continue to update well into September. It’s weirdly successful. It was actually featured at one point.”
Buttery Snake’s jaw dropped and a large number of mint jolly-ranchers fell out. “No way. YOU were featured?”
Unwhole Hole nodded. “For about half an hour, and not on every system, but yes. There was a glitch in the algorithm after I posted the first two chapters. I have pictures. The highlight of my Fimfiction career right there.”
“You’re being sarcastic.”
“I’m not going into that. You never look a gift-horse in the mouth. It upsets Rarity.”
“And that story is…?”
“Apparently considered somewhat humorous. I enjoyed writing it.”
“Well, that’s what counts. And the other one?”
“You mean ‘Daring Do and the Hand of Doom’? Not nearly as successful.”
“And that one is nearing completion?”
“Chapter 55 will be going up today.”
“Oh! So it’s almost done!”
“There are 85 chapters.”
Buttery Snake’s heart sank. “Oh. So just thirty more.”
“Yes. That story almost killed me. Literally, I almost died several times writing it. I kept staying up too late, falling asleep, and driving off the road the next day. Every time I would think I was close to done, another ten chapters would come out. It was a pain.”
“But it is finished.”
“I never start uploading until it is.”
Buttery Snake looked down, and then sighed. “So. This is your swan song.”
“In a sense, yes.”
“You’re leaving Fimfiction.”
Unwhole Hole paused for a long moment (it actually took several day of thought prior to writing this). “Not entirely.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means my next planned project is a non-fanfiction story. I don’t know if it’s of particular interest, but I’ve been writing since I was in the 8th grade. I won’t say how old I am, but that’s longer than some of my readers have been alive.”
“You’ve been in college longer than most of them have been alive.”
“No, only nine years. I don’t think kids that young read my stuff. Supposedly they want me to graduate no more than three years from now.”
“Yeah, you should really work on that.”
“Regardless. I’ve always had the goal of writing a story good enough to be submitted for publication.”
Buttery Snake snorted. “You think you’re actually good enough?”
Unwhole Hole’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t recall inventing you to be the voice of my personal doubt. Nevertheless, the answer is ‘maybe’. That’s why I came here. To experiment with stories and to gain experience to eventually write a novel for publication submission.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“What have you learned?”
“Well…for one thing, editing. I’m going to need to work on that one. Second, people don’t like it when I take things seriously. People DO like comedy. I think that’s an aspect of the era. Nobody wants to read a big, long, heavy science fiction epic. They want to read something that makes them laugh.”
“I think the difference in audience may be biasing you…”
“I don’t care. Mainly, people want something funny. But I like writing things that are very dark. I did not know that until I came here. BUT, as it turns out, the darkest stuff is also the most funny. If you take your serious to bigly, you end up sounding like an edgy teen.”
“You are a teen.”
“I haven’t been a teen in many, many years.”
“Not the point. Any hints on what you’re planning?”
“It’s not really the purview of this blog, but I’ll give a preliminary summary. It’s a fantasy epic about a man made largely out of living spam teaming up with an interdimensional bounty hunter to do nothing of great importance.”
“Ah. So very different from you’re fanfiction, then- -”
“And the bounty hunter is an eight-inch-tall unicorn.”
Buttery Snake slammed down his papers and said several choice words I’m not allowed to put in blog posts. “So you’re STILL writing fanfiction, then! You’re not doing anything different AT ALL!”
“Unicorns are a historical mythical creature. If anything with a unicorn in it is pony fanfiction, then Sapkowski’s ‘Witcher’ novels are too. By the way, did you ever wonder if there was weird tension between Ihuarraquax and Kelpi?”
“THAT IS NOT A THOUGHT I EVER WANTED TO HAVE!”
“In addition,” said Unwhole Hole, ignoring Buttery’s wheezes of agony, “I was considering Marcelizing ‘The Murder of Elrod Jameson’.”
“Your second least-popular story?”
Unwhole Hole nodded. “If I change the names and rewrite a few key scenes, it suddenly has nothing to do with MLP at all. No wonder it never caught on.” Unwhole Hole shrugged. “That, and I wanted to do a hard rewrite of ‘192’, which is Bob’s original story.”
“Wait, you mean the hairy woman from ‘Mass Core’?”
Bob stood up from the life studio audience. “YEAH! Write my story skinny mortal! WRITE IT NOW!”
“You keep quiet or I’ll rewrite the ridiculous sequel too!” threatened Unwhole Hole. All present shivered, recalling that abomination.
“But that means you’re leaving,” said Buttery Snake when he had finished. “You can’t write more than one story at once because you’re not very bright. So this is the end.”
Unwhole Hole sighed. “No. Because of a feature I’ve learned from this site.”
“A feature?”
Unwhole Hole nodded. “I really enjoy writing long, fantastical epics. The problem is, they’re not very popular here. I mean, ‘Hand of Doom’ took three months to get the views that ‘Derpy Deeds’ did in an hour. Nobody wants long scifi stories like ‘Elrod Jameson’ or, worse, ‘Child of Order’. They want comedies or short horrors.”
“Well, I guess so…”
“Publishable novels are limited to about 120K words. Do you know how long it takes me to write that?”
“A day.”
“No. About three to five months, depending. But then the cycle clicks forward. I can’t write two like that in a row because I get stressed by long stories. So I stop and write comedies and horrors. Likewise, I can’t write a comedy or horror without a good premise, and that takes a long, long time to come up with.”
“So…”
“So, the time I’d take writing less-popular stories like ‘Hand of Doom’ would be spent writing non-pony stories. Then I’d pause for short little stories like ‘Derpy Deeds’.”
“You say that, but…”
‘ “AND, I highly doubt I’ll actually get published. My goal is to try, not to succeed. It’s very competitive. So when I fail, I’ll just come back here.”
“That’s kind of a rude thing to say…”
“But true. I do not write well. I know that. My stories are full of grammatical mistakes and sometimes overblown or confusing. The only advantage that I have is the great much of quickness.” Unwhole Hole paused. “And…”
“And what?”
“Well, as much as I’m ashamed to admit it, I haven’t seen any of season 8 yet.”
“Wh- -what?!”
“I don’t have TV, and it’s not on Netflix yet. There have been substantial changes in the show, and I can’t keep up without having watched it. New characters, new settings, new attributes- -I mean, why did you think ‘Derpy Deeds’ is set five years BEFORE Twilight shows up? Because I have no idea what’s going on!”
“Oh…”
“So I’ll go write my own story for a while, and hopefully catch up pretty quickly.”
“I guess that doesn’t sound so bad…”
“This community’s cool. Everyone’s nice, and I’m glad people like reading my stories. I’m hesitant to leave it, but I want to at least try.”
Buttery Snake shrugged. “Fine. Do what you want. Just don’t mess up.”
“I never don’t.”
Best of luck with your plans. I really do need to take a better look at your back catalog...
4924345
Right? So many I suspect hidden gems.
I've read a lot of your stories and I've enjoyed them tremendously. It's sad seeing a great author go. I wish you the best in your passion. Your a very talented writer.
I dooooo!
But good luck with getting published. I do hope you don't disappear from here entirely, even if you are successful elsewhere—I'd be interested in reading your non-fanfiction work too!
Don't suppose you hang out on Discord or anything?
I wish you the best of luck on your original fiction and hope that you'll share them when the time comes. That said, I do hope you keep writing on the site. The two of your sci-fi stories that I've read are easily among my favorites for the genre for this site and it'd be a bummer if we didn't get to see more of them.