It Is Recommendsday, My Dudes #145 · 1:57am Dec 28th, 2023
I'm late. I'm absolutely wiped after a complication at the border added more than five hours to the travel time back from my in-laws, my phone battery is at about 2% (curse you, Peglin, for draining my battery while waiting), and I still haven't unpacked, but I haven't missed one yet and I'm not about to start now. Though I might be a little briefer than normal because my brain is fried.
In honor of that hellish trip: let's have some stories about tragedies and the moon.
...okay look it's been a long damn day roll with me on this one
We'll lead off with the newer of the two: Fate Has Ordained by iluvponies35
Silver Sparks is one of the Equestrian astronauts in the new Lunar HAB - the first permanent (or at least semi-permanent) base on the moon. He - along with Shock Diamond - have been assigned a horrible but needed task: to clean up the site of the Excelsior 7, Equestria's first landing on the moon. One that didn't come home.
Now, y'all probably know I have a soft spot for The Contingency Speech as well as for the trope of the heroic sacrifice. So really it shouldn't be any surprise that this story hit square on to my favorites and I loved every bit of it. It's a beautiful tragedy and wonderfully written on top of that, too.
Really, it's one of those that I think the basic pitch is enough to sell it: just conceptually it's a beaut and iluvponies executes it just right.
On the other side, I'm gonna cheat a little by using Shrink Laureate and the short but sweet Free Moon.
At only a thousand words, it consists entirely of the one-sided exchange of the ship Defiance calling ground control in Ponyville as it takes the final approach to the moon. And that's all the summary I can give. Any more would be spoiling, and the growing understanding of what's going on is pretty critical to appreciating this story.
As some of the commenters note, the individual elements here aren't new. But how they're combined - along with the very unique presentation that helps the story be so incredibly compact - elevates it and gives it a lot of force. Which I entirely agree on. Wouldn't expect less from Shrink, though, who pretty much never disappoints.
Really, I kinda got to leave this one there. I don't have the brain power to do a careful dance around spoilers and I definitely don't want to ruin it.
New or catching up? Try Recommendsday: The Index for your story needs!
Ha, earlier this year a 3+ hour plane delay coming back from UK Ponycon meant I too published past midnight for GMT, though I "justified" it on the out of not being the next day in the Americas, where most people read for. Most justifiable for yourself, actually being there, of course.
Also:
This was too relatable: on more than one occasion, I've been delayed away from a charging port so long I've burned through the charge on my (admittedly old and cheap) power bank and then really gotten don to low juice on my not 4.5-year-old phone.
Yes, Mom: I'm getting a new one real soon.
If there's any week where you deserve to plug a story that scratches your personal idiosyncratic itch just so, this is it. Not that I don't see the appeal myself, having adored your fic on the contingency letter and all.
Hm. I'm wondering now. Do you pre-prepare your blogs and only write the intro before the stories when posting? Or do you write the whole blog from scratch on the spot just using the pre-selected connecting theme, fic, and (presumably) notes on what to possible use when they get their time in the spotlight?
Can you tell I'm always really curious about the processes of my fellow fic reviews/recommenders?
Myself, the blurb I usually write the night before, though sometimes much of it is done even earlier and I just retool it later, while the individual reviews – rare is there a linking theme between them as is the norm here – can be anywhere from a few weeks to several months old.
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Bit of both. Generally I've got it complete at least a day in advance, but this time it was a lot of stuff being compacted together time-wise. The holiday proper, going up Christmas Day to spend three days with my in-laws, making sure to get my monthly story update for First Hoof Account and my Jinglemas story done - all of that was a time crunch where I had to put something off. It would have probably been fine, but the delays turned a two hour drive home into a seven and a half hour one.
But usually everything's set and ready to go (aside from last minute edits) at least 24 hours in advance.
Well damn, something I wrote got recommended by a big name writer, thanks for the pleasant surprise! Glad you liked it enough to give it a signal boost!
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More than happy to have! It was a great story, and I very much enjoyed it.