The Purloined Pony · 9:06pm Apr 3rd, 2014
That's right: almost three years after I first wrote it, The Purloined Pony is finally on FiMFiction.net. For any of you who haven't read it before, it's a pick-your-path-style story starring Carrot Top, wherein you try to rescue a kidnapped Applebloom from some mischievous boggies. It's also one of my most popular stories, despite having been gdocs only until recently (when, as part of being inducted into the Pony Fiction Vault, RBDash47 put it into various ebook formats). If you aren't yet sure if it's your sort of thing, I just happen to have half a dozen reviews you can look over, which will hopefully help you decide.
So, why wasn't it available until today? Because porting it over here was a tremendous pain in the butt, that's why! See, there's more to it than just copying over ninety different pages, from the obvious (all of the links need to be manually changed to match their new story pages) to the self-inflicted (not having the page numbers and chapter numbers match up bugged me too much to let it stand, but I had to start with the introduction... so every single page number in the story had to be increased by one. Again, manually) to the I-don't-even-know-what's-going-on-here. See, it turns out that, for some reason, trying to use the import feature gave me hugely jacked-up results. Why? I don't know; this didn't happen with my other stories. But what looked like this in gdocs:
Turned into this when I hit "import:"
So, cleaning that up was fun. Honestly, I left a lot of the "invisible" garbage behind (who's gonna notice is the spaces between periods are bolded, right?) in the name of time-saving, but even so, clearing out the randomly-bolded words and letters, inconsistent and occasionally nonexistent paragraph breaks, inexplicably center-justified lines (not paragraphs--individual lines) and the like was a chore.
Plus, I find it personally draining to work on my old stories, even when it's something as straightforward as putting them into a new format. It's too easy for me to see all the things I wish I'd done differently, and that can leave me in a rough mood. Looking at my old stories always seems to be a stressful experience for me, I'm afraid.
But I did it! I hope all of you who've asked for this over the years are happy, but if nothing else, I'm glad it's finally up; it makes the page feel more complete to me, and I am a completionist at heart. And when Spring Break and March Madness coincide... well, I'm going to be spending a lot of time sitting on the couch with my mind only half-engaged. Why not use that other half for something vaguely productive-ish?
So: thanks to all of you who bugged me to get this up! And to my editors, LightsideLuc and Anonymous, and to... you know what, just go read the acknowledgements on the first page, it's all there. Now, why don't you go give the story a look! It should be going up soon, but if you hurry you can get a drop on all those suckers who don't follow me and (re)read it first. Enjoy!
EDIT: And just like that, it's into the feature box! Honestly, that's really reassuring to me; I was worried about how well this one would hold up (like I said, testy relationship with my old stories), but it looks like people are still enjoying it.
I guess I'm not the only masochist around :)
Good job, Chris. I know it can be tough looking back at our old stuff. And that formatting trouble sounds obnoxious as all get-out to fix.
Nice, one more for me to reverse-engineer!
)
(And I actually mean it. I tend to play those things one or two times, just to avoid the regret of not playing them in the usual way, and then I dive into turning the CYOA story into a flowchart. I often find that to be more fun than actually playing through the story; I'm strange like that
BTW, not sure if this would help in this specific case, but what often helps me with avoiding strange formating junk is to just select everything in Google Docs, use "Clear formating" (Ctrl+\), make everything left aligned, and then apply the formating anew; junk formating is often the result of multiple format changes without clearing the formating in between, so removing all formating and applying it in just one concise step seems to result in Google Docs documents that convert cleanly.
That was SO MUCH FUN.
I should have issued Vaulties (like Oscars); yours would have been Achievement In Most Individual Files In A Single Project Folder.
Y'know, I can't remember if I ever actually read this story. c.c Well, now I can!
1979817
I WARNED YOU, RBD
I WARNED YOU IT WOULD BE A PAIN
Seriously though, the finished product was wonderful, and after this, I'm even more impressed that you managed to put it all together without breaking your weekly update schedule.
Congrats on the port, Chris!
This is the day I've been waiting for.
And just like that, it's not only in the box: you got the first place. Definitely reading it later today, it's been ages since I read anything good with Carrot Top as a character.