• Member Since 22nd Feb, 2012
  • offline last seen January 10th

A Hoof-ful of Dust


You can't see the forest...

More Blog Posts18

  • 333 weeks
    The rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated.

    So, one, I'm alive. Had an extended stasis period, but I never forgot the fandom, especially the ever-increasing corner at FimFic. Hi. How about that movies, huh? That happened.

    Read More

    5 comments · 558 views
  • 442 weeks
    Curtain Call.

    So, that's it. All of Both Sides Now is posted, so if you're one of the people who tracked it and was waiting for it to be done before reading, you can do that from this point on. It was a fun experience -- hard work, but ultimately very rewarding. Once again, I'd like to thank everyone who made it better than it was to start off with, and also really anyone who read it and liked it.

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    11 comments · 560 views
  • 444 weeks
    Fan Service.

    Let's talk about shipping.

    I like shipping. It's where I gravitate towards when it comes to fanworks. It's cute and fluffy and, for all the flak that it gets from vehement anti-shippers, has the potential to be deep and meaningful and reveal a lot about the shipped characters and maybe even touch a little on the human condition... but when it doesn't, it's still cute and fluffy.

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    9 comments · 494 views
  • 446 weeks
    Dotting the Is, crossing the Ts.

    Hey, so... that story I was working on, the one with Twilight and Rarity and the dual perspectives, the first draft is finished. Would anyone want to do me a huge favour and pre-read it? No hurry -- it's 30,000 words, so it's not really a thing for one sitting. There's sex, but not all of it is sex. It's unsubmitted on my account here, but I could put it on Google Docs if that's how you roll (I'm

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    9 comments · 452 views
  • 451 weeks
    We now return to your regularly scheduled programming.

    So while I was away, I managed to write my 15,000th word of that Twilight/Rarity thing that came up a little while ago; it feels like I'm more than halfway done, but I can't tell just how much more. With short stories that are only a scene or two in length it's difficult for them to drift away from your original idea when you

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    1 comments · 453 views
May
8th
2014

The law of averages. · 8:09am May 8th, 2014

I would have posted this sooner, but my laptop chose to self-terminate and I've been without access to something with a real keyboard. More on that in a bit.

So, I've been diligently posting entries for EqD's Writer's Training Grounds, and overall I can't complain how they've been received. People are mostly positive about my stuff and I get a fair number of views -- I know I don't have the followers to ever get anything auto-featured, and I'm pretty sure most of the people following me have sort of dropped out of the fandom, or at least the fanfiction part of it, as I accrued them over a year or so ago (although there's a couple of recurring names I recognise among comments and favourites). A couple of entries I really felt like I put a lot of effort into, to make them proper self-contained pieces of fiction and not just little experiments or writing exercises, but I would say on the whole there's been more experiments than real stories. That's okay, though, because the WTG is about honing your craft and not letting your writing weapon go rusty, and I do feel it's done exactly that for me. So that's good.

Now, I figured I would just sort of plod away on through the last couple of weeks, and then I'd use the time I spent on the WTG for working on some proper stories I've had milling about in my head but haven't managed to get the motivation to start on, and that there'd be a fairly modest amount of attention to whatever I posted. I was looking forward to the Inspiration Manifestation prompts from the episodes, because there should be some angle to work with dark magic in some way, which is fun. One of the prompts, the one about some other pony being afflicted by the spell, went out of its way to specify that it needn't be another unicorn that became infected, so I started thinking about how the power to create anything you wanted might show up in a non-magical pony, and got stuck on the idea that it might be a little bit funny if it just... didn't. That idea quickly grew into infecting Big Macintosh, who is able to resist the corrupting spell by being so even-keel. My working title for the story was "Everything Zen", but I wasn't so keen on how the song sat with the story -- the title was right for Mac's frame of mind and the tone was okay for the angry restless spirit, but there was something a little... off about it. So, at the last minute, the name switched in my head to what it is now -- people know that R.E.M. song enough to make reference to it, moreso than a b-side from a b-tier grunge band nobody really remembers anyway. And also at the last minute, the description changed to fit the new title. It was originally something plain about the dark spirit of the spell finding a new host, but again, to reflect the sort of irreverent nature of the title song, it switched to something a bit more lighthearted.

And then It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine) stayed in the Popular Stories box for three or four days.

And I found out I didn't really want it there.

It's not a bad story. I like the way it bookends with opening by painting Equestria as dark beneath the surface and ending with making it seem a nice place still. I liked writing a formless evil presence. I like that the story has no dialogue in it. But it's also not really a good story, either -- it's very unambitious and I feel the segments in Big Mac's head are pretty pedestrian, and I'm sure I repeated a bunch of words because there's only so many ways to say "evil" and "dark". But it put together the magic formula of a catchy title -- it's a pretty good one even if you don't know the song -- plus a description with some popular keywords ("eldritch", "necromancer") that outlines exactly what is going to happen in the story. That's the part that bothers me the most, I think, because... well, let me pull up one of the reviews:

LIked the premise, but the delivery was a bit dull. I mean, we all knew what was going to happen from the story description. I wasn't expecting any suprises. This story does do what it claims to do. But the end result just didn't make a very compelling read.

I agree completely. The most interesting part of the story is the premise, and the Popular Stories/Feature Box is usually clogged with stories like this: an interesting idea with, at best, mediocre execution. That's kind of the way it has to be, when you have the general public determining what rises to the top, but I am always so sorely disappointed in stories that don't even attempt to be more than just a good idea. Granted, I'm also often disappointed in the "highly recommended" stories of various kinds, but that's because I have pretty high standards and I can at least see why most of these stories would get someone's stamp of approval -- I often ask of the ones that wander into being featured on their own exactly what this is doing here, and then remember that it has to be because of the cover image/description and that the story inside managed to be written at a not-godawful level.

To go off on a tangent a little bit, there was a period of time when the vernacular around me put "average" as something with a negative connotation, which at the time I was pretty opposed to since if it's average that means it's neither good or bad, doesn't it? I think now I was in the wrong about that one, because the greatest sin entertainment can commit is to be average. If something's good then it's good (nice tautology there), and if something's obviously bad then there's still a certain kind of trainwreck pleasure with ripping it apart, and it can often make an impression on you even if that impression is "This sucks!" -- when something is average it's forgettable, bland, interchangeable with everything else average. It doesn't stand out. It doesn't take risks. It's a three-camera sitcom with a laughtrack, it's a reality show around a cooking contest, it's a daytime movie about a woman who was in a bad relationship who now starts a good one. It's a lot of the stories on this site that get recognised and then fade away just as quickly, and now I've written one and it's bumped some better stories on my sidebar down and I have to keep seeing it and I just wanted to complain about it is all.

So what should you take away from this? Well, you cant take away that I'm being an insufferable hipster who wants their work to remain underground, or that it must be nice to be able to complain about something I wrote getting too much attention when you can't even get anyone to downvote your stuff. Those are valid reactions. But what I would like is for some of the people that came in with It's the End of the World... to go look at some of my other stuff, because it's better. At least, I think so. I like how White Rabbit and Rivers of Babylon turned out, and I had a good time writing A Horse with No Name and True Colors. If you liked It's the End of the World..., I'd be interested to know what you thought of the stories of mine that I like.

Anyway, back to that laptop. I ordered a replacement as soon as possible, but there was of course no guarantees on it arriving in time for me to complete the next WTG entry (it did and I did, and it's up now), so I wrote a reserve story to have in my back pocket just in case I ran out of time. I wrote this on a 10" tablet on and off when I had a minute, and it is completely terrible in many ways and would have remained completely terrible even if I cleaned up the formatting/spelling mistakes that come with typing with one finger at a time with a super-limited cursor. I was going to just trash it when I submitted Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger, but then I thought, why not tack it on the end here? If you feel like I've been a self-important tool for this whole blog post (and really, what are blogs about if not being a self-important tool), then here's something you can point and laugh at. Enjoy.

'I Was in the House When the House Burned Down'

It was a perfectly ordinary day for Spike the dragon. He wasn't stuck performing some menial task at the library that would take him all day to complete (but would take Twilight Sparkle all of thirty seconds with her magic); contrary to what many ponies thought, he wasn't some kind of indentured servant, slave to Twilight's beck and call. True, he did cook for her, but he liked to cook and, try as he mihht, he couldn't eat all of his specialty dish--a towering stack of cheese, beans, guacamole, chili sauce, and tortila chips he had dubbed Mt. Kilimanacho--on his own. Twilight's level of cooking experience was limited to sandwiches and breakfast cereal, and she didn't always rembember to bother with making even something so simple when she was deep into a magical research project, so Spike ended up making most of the meals. Similarly, Twilight was not the best at picking up after herself when she was in study mode, but Spike was more than willing to reshelve the trail of books she left in her wake. He was a neat dragon, and liked to make things tidy and orderly. He reckoned that Twilight wouldn't even dust or take out the garbage for weeks if she was really busy.

Twilight was a bit of a slob about some things, really.

Anyway, today Spike was doing none of those things. He was alone at the library with a pile of Awesome Foursome comics, reading one while hanging his head upside down off the edge of the couch. The Pony Torch, one of the members of the Awesome Foursome, had just set a gang of this issue's villain's underlings on fire, accompanied by his trademark catchphrase: "It's burnin' time!"

"Wish I could do that," Spike mumbled to himself, thinking back to Twilight bringing a harsh reality check to his attempts at pyrokinesis in the Crystal Empire. "Set fire to jerks and have a cool catchphrase. That's the dream." He kicked his clawed feet in the air, and intoned: "It's burnin' time!"

The comic burst into flames.

ImmediatelySpike dropped the flaming pages, and sprang to his feet to stomp out the fire. Being a dragon came with certain privilidges, and an immunity to basically all forms of extreme heat was one of them; pony hooves weren't as suited to quelling fires. As he stomped on the smouldering ashes, the first thought that went through his mind was how to explain away a scorch mark on the bedroom floor to Twilight.

The second was that he had just done something awesome and he wanted to know if he could do it again.

He turned his attention to the closest object, which happened to be Twilight's bed. There was no way he could actually set stuff on fire just by thinking about it... right?

He tried a cautious, "It's burnin' time?" and was rewarded with Twilight's bed becoming a blazing inferno.

"Awesome!" Spike exclaimed, the fire reflected in his eyes.

A sensible reaction might have been to put the fire out, or even to marvel at the unexplainable phenomenon that just happened, knowing salvaging the bed was impossible. What Spike did, which was the exact opposite of sensible, was to light up more things. He burned his comic books, the curtains, the stairs to the loft, the books, the bookshelves, the stove, that weird box from the weird tree that Twilight still hadn't opened. Spike burned it all, whooping and hollering, "It's burnin' time! It's burnin' time!"

It was at that moment that Twilight arrived home.

"I can explain!" Spike yelped, while trying, unsuccesfully, to block the burning bust by standing in front of it.

"Oh, you don't need to do that," Twilight said, seeming unconcerned with the conflagration around her.

"I... I don't?"

"Of course not!" Twilight beamed at him. "This fire is wonderful! It's probably the most impressive fire in Equestria."

"Do you mean it?" Spike asked.

"Of course! But, let's fly out of here before there's nothing left to burn."

"But Twilight," Spike said, confused, "I can't fly."

"Yes you can," Twilight said as she took to the air, "you've alwsys been able to fly."

Spike rose into the air just by thinking about it. He didn't even need a catch phrase. He flew so fast he wuickly left Twilight behind. Theburning library grew smaller until it was the size of a candle burning on a birthday cake. But the cake was huge and made of chocolate, and covered with gemstones. Spike swam through the icing and swallowed an emerald the size of his fist.

He staggered to the spomgeh shore, where a crowd was waiting to congratulate him on being the youngest dragon to swim across a chocolate cake. "You win!" an official-looking pony said as he pushed to the head of the crowd.

"I didn't even know it was a race," Spike said. "What do I win?"

"A date," came a breathy voice from somewherd above him, "with me."

Rarity descended from the skies, a holy aura surrounding her. Spike took her in a fierce and passionate embrace, and the crowd applauded. It is at this point you become convinced that this is a dream, as the recent events have reeked of pure wish fulfillment on the part of Spike. It is a dream, but it does not belong to the little dragon. All this really happened to Spike, as he became permanently awesome by unlocking the full potential of his brain. So awesome, in fact, that he pops in to your dreams to let you know about it.

Yes.

It is you who is asleep and dreaming.

And you're going to wake up with your brain unlocked, and be just as awesome at everything as Spike.

Ready?

Here we go.

Three...

Two...

One...

You wake up in the town square in Ponyville. Your first thought is indescribible immense joy as you take in the bright and familiar sights around you.

Your second thoughts are of indescribable immense pain as you are beaten to death by a mob of ponies fearing the strange gangly fleshy beast that just appeared out of nowhere.

You wake up in your real bed, covered in sweat. It turns out the whole thing was a dream, including the fake-out ending. You go to lie back down, when a voice stops you.

"Bad dream?" asks Lyra Heartstings, your pony waifu. She licks the back of your neck.

"No, just weird," you reply. "I'll tell you about it over breakfast."


The end.

...Or is it?

Comments ( 6 )

The story in the end was random. I don't favourite your WTGs but I sometimes read them. I have not left.

Most of what you had to say made sense.
Even a great deal of sense.
Most.
And then that mini-story happened.
Ahh. all the bizzare appeal of a story that screams. "I'm absurdly random and loving it!"
Heh
No wonder I keep track of you
~OvO

It can be very frustrating when what gets the most recognition ends up being something you don't think too highly of. But you're certainly not finished writing fanfiction, so there's plenty of chances to write something you are proud of and have it get the recognition it deserves. You know how important elements like story picture, synopses, title, and so forth are to getting people to read a story, and you've already pulled it off, so now if you combine them (a story you're proud of + it's book cover, so to speak) your chances will be greater. Though that's not to imply you haven't already been doing this the entire time.

Personally, I believe there's a way to both play to the crowd, and still maintain artist integrity and write an honest, original, good story, even though by most Feature Box entries it doesn't look that way. The crowd pleasing comes with how you present your story (pic, synopses, title, tags), and once they've clicked on it, they'll recognize a good story.

But again, I understand your frustration. It sucks.

Also, that story was just plain nutty haha--certainly didn't end the way I expected!

Part of the issue is, based on the few sentences you get in a description, it's much easier to tell whether a story has an interesting premise than whether it's written well.

2088885
Your name's one of the ones I recognise, actually.

2089265
No dammit that story's terrible. I don't even understand why there's a Random tag, it's like a license for people to write incoherent garbage; of all the tags, I'm pretty sure that's the one with the lowest signal:noise ratio.

2089564
Oh, I know. There's good stuff that gets featured too. And, like, I'm not writing to get recognised (well... okay, a little bit, but who isn't if they publish somewhere publicly viewable?), it just bugs me that stuff I did put work into that got hits is more or less equal in terms of feedback and such as something that was a completely throwaway. It doesn't really incentivise effort, but I guess that's supposed to come from yourself in the first place.

2090803
I suspect many of the unremarkable stories that feature get voted up before people read them, based on the picture/shipping pair/whatever other external factor. I know there was a couple of people who might have done that for It's the End of the World..., it came up in the comments.

Better to read incoherent garbage from someone who knows better, than to put up with the same through incompetence.
It provides perspective.
Particularly amidst your impressive list of other, fairly well-done shorts.
~OvO

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