TAW wrote a great blog post (except for his barbs at device heretic) about how to choose what to write. I just learned a similar lesson, with my new story "The Detective and the Magician." All the stars lined up for me on this one: It was featured on EqD, and at the very same time, it was the last of a batch of stories to be approved on fimfiction, so it sat at the very top

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I've said before that the story length between short-short, and 10,000 words, is very hard. Short shorts, under 1500 words, have just one or two scenes and jump directly into the action. Stories over 12,000 words are long enough that I can rearrange the order of presentation to put something catchy at the front. But 2,000-8,000 words is hell – there aren’t enough scenes to rearrange them, yet there’s too much setup necessary to start at the beginning.

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I don't know what the overlap between MLP and Peter Beagle fans is, except that they both like unicorns. It does not matter. You must like Peter Beagle stories. Bad Horse has spoken.

A quick review of his 2006 book of short stories, The Line Between:

Introduction

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I don't usually read clop-fiction... but when I do, it's by biologic orthodoxy.

Some bronies read clop-fiction. Some bronies even read clop-fiction about the CMC. Personally, I find this more disturbing than a Lyra plushie. BUT.

The Hunger Games has taken in over $400 million. And it is a movie that, from start to finish, is about children brutally murdering other children.

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In my previous post about different ways of measuring authors' popularity and quality, I introduced the "thumbscore per view" measure (TPV), which is

TPV = (thumbs_up - 9.027 * (thumbs_down+1)) / views

This is a rating of a story or of an author, which has an average value of zero over all the stories on FimFiction.net.

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From an interview in the June 2012 Wired:

"My Little Pony from the '80s was boring. It was my favorite toy, but the cartoon wasn't the stories I told when I was playing with the toys. I viewed my show very much as a do-over."

I tried the most-obvious thing first, taking each reader, then each story s, then each of that reader's favorites f, and adding up how many times story s was favorited by other people who favorited f. Here are the recommendations for everyone who's tracking me.

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This weekend, I wrote a spider to suck down and parse all the pages on fimfiction describing the stories. Mostly I looked at story title, author, number of views, thumbs up and down, genre tags, and character tags.

There were 10,590 stories with 39,846 chapters by 5,512 authors, having 9,618,891 first-chapter views, 368313 thumbs-up, and 35130 thumbs-down.

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It's official: Valve is run by a brony.

Some pony stories collided in my mind and produced a thought. My own Pony Tales: No Regrets, plus my earlier, unpublished and abandoned "Moving On" (about what Twilight does when Celestia gets a new pupil), are both about Twilight realizing that being the best student isn't enough to build a life on, and searching for meaning to her life. In the other,

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