• Member Since 22nd Jan, 2013
  • offline last seen Oct 20th, 2022

Bradel


Ceci n'est pas un cheval.

More Blog Posts144

Apr
2nd
2014

April 2nd · 9:37am Apr 2nd, 2014

Well, as I suspect most of you probably figured out, I traded places with Midnightshadow—author of The Ambassador's Son and "Out and About in the Equestrian Kingdom" yesterday. A lot of folks playing the switch just did a bit of blogging or commenting, but we decided to go a step further and trade stories instead. You may have noticed some rather jumbled messages showing up in your feeds. Let me take this opportunity to clear that up for you all, so you know what went down (or up, as stories traditionally do).

Early on, Mids and I traded prompts based on what we thought would be fun to see someone else write under our names. Mids asked me to write everypony getting shipped with everypony, and I took a cue from some of his early romantic comedy work (like "Tonight We're Gonna Party") to put an idea together. I suggested that Mids take a look at "A Filly's Guide to Not Making Headlines", since it remains the thing I'm best known for, and go with a theme of Princess Angst—which seems to be a bit of a running thread in many of my stories.

We also did some crazy name, avatar, and userpage switching, just to enhance the confusion, of course.

The two resulting stories are things I've already mentioned on blogs in the last day, but I wanted to try to give a more detailed summary now that we're done.

Midnightshadow's story, "Heavy Lies the Head that Wears the Crown", is a little bit of a romp through what might happen if Twilight Sparkle decided, after mastering the media in "A Filly's Guide," that she might as well become a tyrant. Sort of. Except she's not entirely in control of herself, because of Equestria Girls and Spaceballs. No, really. I'm serious. Anyway, I enjoyed it and if you liked "A Filly's Guide," you might also find it fun!

My story, "Transference", owes a debt of gratitude to both Mids for coming up with the core concept and bookplayer for suggesting the setting and doing a little pre-reading for me (though it was sort of more a matter of me geeking out about the story and sending her 250-word chunks on Skype as I wrote them). The fact that a masquerade ball with mistaken identities was going to be heavy meta for yesterday's events went completely over my head until I'd written about a quarter of the story, but let's just say it became that much more fun to write when I realized it had all that lurking meta in it.

It's a shame I can't tag more stories in this post. I'm tagging "Transference" because I think it might be nice to make sure the people who favorited it know what happened. But at the same time, I wish I could also tag "A Filly's Guide," since Mids story was based on it. And I also wish I could tag "Purple Prose," because "Transference" is very much in the same vein of fast-paced risque comedy, and I suspect that the two will have substantial overlap in who enjoys them.

Anyway, I hope you folks had fun yesterday. I know I did!

Report Bradel · 258 views · Story: Transference ·
Comments ( 5 )

Transference was amazing. Utterly amazing. I'm re-reading it and still enjoying it. I wish I'd have made a better job of heavy lies the head but I didn't because I'm a terrible, terrible person.

It was utterly fun, and I hope you enjoyed the confusion!

Such shenanigans went down yesterday. I have a new goal: be big enough by this time next year to be invited to participate in them.

Kudos for actually fooling me for a bit :twilightsmile:

You see, I tend to open blog posts on my feed page without looking who they are from, and to use the story list more than the user box to actually see which author I'm reading. So my reaction to most other switching authors was, "Wait, why is the author referring to himself in third person? [scrolls up] Oh, yeah, he switched profiles." :pinkiehappy:

I have to admit, I had plans for April Fools Day, but the combined barrage just blew me away. Very nice work, guys.

1976461
'twas a fun read, and the confusion was, indeed, effective

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