A Great and Powerful Update · 6:44am Jun 15th, 2013
To what I'm sure will be widespread amazement, Chapter 2 of Trixie's Friendship is Clearly Superior has been grinding out more slowly than I had hoped. In large part it's been because I know exactly the beats that need to occur in this chapter -- those beats are in the story's description already, for heaven's sake! -- and I've had to pound the characters' dialogue and actions into shape around that, along with making Luna's dialogue sound vaguely old-fashioned instead of rigorously Shakespearean, and keeping Trixie... Trixish despite the chapter putting her in a position of unaccustomed vulnerability.
Of course, it doesn't help that due to wacky comedy in my life, I ended up having to vacate my apartment at the beginning rather than the end of June, therefore spending a large chunk of my recent time scrambling to save my earthly possessions, ending up in the rather strongly undesired position of depending on certain relatives for help, and currently being holed up in an extended-stay hotel with an internet connection speed of, like, three, while I wait for transportation to leave behind all my friends and the city I love for the foreseeable future, to go live in a place I loathe, under the roof of the one human being alive on whom I actively wish physical harm and who is more than halfway responsible for the mental health issues that I'm going out there to get help with.
But life troubles are no excuse for a writer (on the contrary, they are fuel), so all that is neither here nor there. The important thing is that 'Friendship' Chapter Two is coming, probably to be up by Monday; and that with the setup parts of the story out, future chapters ought to be more fluid in their emergence.
The plan, at this time, basically amounts to bonking Trixie into other characters for awhile, with an awareness of things developing in the background that will eventually ferment into the real plot, but in the meantime simply to let the characters talk and shape their own interactions. I have some ideas for how the most important other characters will respond to Trixie at first, but aside from that she's on her own to make friends or enemies before the Secret Background Plot rises up to put pressure on those relationships.
In the meantime, here's a blatant plug for an amusing thing -- Trixieverse Builds a City, an ongoing series of Minecraft videos starring ponies, by FiMFic's own Applejinx.
Now, a warning, because I figure the majority of those who read this blog are here because of "My Little Pony's Little Ponies", which is basically G-rated fun with the worst naughtiness being smoochies between dolls. Applejinx's stories are not G-rated. Very ever so not. It would be difficult even to describe the central plot motivator of the series on network TV.
Jinx's work is not mere pornography; in these stories, graphically detailed sexuality and extremely dark emotional circumstances are employed with exquisite skill to create a tapestry of insight into character and human (well... pony, but you get the idea) experience, cumulatively among the very best novels I have read, not only in the field of Pony fiction, but at all. That said... there's a lot of sex and no small amount of violence in there, and it may not be something readers of my own fluffy comedy will enjoy.
BUT -- "Trixieverse Builds a City" is aimed at a much wider audience, and contains only some mild innuendo (most of which is only suggestive if you've read the Trixieverse stories to catch the references) and the occasional not-parentally-approved word. Although the ponies who narrate these Minecraft videos are technically the versions of the Mane Six and compatriots who appear in the Trixieverse stories, when away from their native context and wandering the Minecraft world, they're not very different from their canon versions; Jinx has a fantastic grasp on their personalities and mannerisms, even though the voice-altering effects employed take a bit of getting used to. If you like Minecraft and ponies, TBaC is a lot of fun.
Awww—I'll keep an eye out for your journeys. I too have had to abandon house, though it was more than a decade ago. Some things you never forget, and yes: fuel can come from strange places, and what doesn't kill you makes you write-r.
Yeah, I've had to pull up stakes all too often over the last decade-plus, but at least this time there wasn't any interpersonal drama involved, just financial crap; and I got out with everything I particularly care about, abandoning only some cheap Ikea furniture. Plus I've got my ponies with me here in the hotel, so I can't be too down. It looks like I'll be making the move sometime in July, though naturally there's still a lot of variables between now and then.