• Member Since 22nd Feb, 2012
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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
15th
2014

Flawless victory. · 5:39pm May 15th, 2014

So, I did it. I managed to get something in for every week of the Writer's Training Grounds. Sometimes I wasn't especially inspired and sometimes I was pressed for time and sometimes (more often than not, I think) the stories didn't turn out that amazing, but I wrote consistently for a long period of time, and that was what I wanted out of the WTG. I was thinking, since I'm done with it now, that I'd take a look over the stuff I wrote, go over a bit what I felt worked, what didn't, what's good, what's bad, that sort of thing, a bit of a self-review to see if I've gotten better at anything along the way. I guess it's also a good way of picking out which of these entires are worth reading and which are worth sweeping quietly under the rug.

Let's go in chronological order, because that's easiest. I'll say something about the story, but also about the origins of the title and the choice of cover image, so maybe it might answer some questions like "why doesn't the title have much to do with the story?" and "what's the deal with all the pictures of trees?"


1. Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree...

This one is kinda choppy, partially because it was the first piece of fiction I'd written in ages and partially because of the tiny word limit during the first week; there was a quick establishing scene in the beginning of a dark bat-pony-shaped shape in Applejack's orchard that got the axe due to trying to keep the wordcount under 1.5k (which is a very, very small number). I like that there's a whole little narrative in here, with a problem and an escalation and a solution, but it feels wicked rushed. Also, I'm not sure I do Discord much justice when I write him.

Song title: "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree (With Anyone Else But Me)" by The Andrews Sisters
This is one of two song titles I've truncated (the other being "Synchronicity II", which doesn't make much sense as a stand-alone story), because the full title lends some implications to Fluttershy and Discord's relationship in the story that I'd rather avoid (more on that in a later entry). Other than that, the song and story have little to do with each other.

Cover image: Apples apples apples. Apples grow on trees. This is about as straightforward as it gets.


2. True Colors

I really like how this one turned out. I usually hate how limiting first-person perspective is, but I managed to find a decent voice for Coco Pommel (who is best season 4 pony) to keep me interested long enough, plus a lot of the story is a bit of my Rarity headcanon that I'd been sitting on for a while. It's not super-apparent in the narrative, but I decided Coco was a lifelong Manehattenite, and so her perspective is a little different than Rarity's, who dreams of the high-class life but grew up in the sticks in Ponyville, despite the fact that they're a part of the same world. Coco also orders the same thing I do from Starbucks, although these days I usually drop the cream and junk on top.

Song title: "True Colors" by Cyndi Lauper
Cyndi Lauper says "your true colours are beautiful like a rainbow", which fits pretty nicely for the first Rainbow Power key episode. Various bits and pieces of the song apply to Coco, just waiting for her time to shine.

Cover image: Trees growing from the sidewalk in an urbanised environment, for a story that takes place in the big city and about flourishing in an environment you shouldn't necessarily flourish in.


3. King of Wishful Thinking

This one is kinda... eh. I'm hesitant to call it comedy, because it's not especially funny, per se, it's more of, I don't know, a lampoon of classism, but it's not developed very much and sort of wanders off halfway through to fit the prompt, and then... idk, Trixie? I'm fascinated by this idea of racism in the MLP world, not as like the depressing kind of systemic oppressive racism that humans are pretty good at but just random individuals who, for whatever reason, have these ideas about superiority that not many others share; I came back to it at another time during the WTG and I don't think it's out of my system just yet. I dunno, there's something that's kinda funny about what kinds of stereotypes (and how true they may or may not be) that the different pony breeds have about each other, how non-pony races look at things, etc.. (I got quite a kick out of the Applejack being seconds away from slamming Trenderhoof with a "What do you mean, 'you ponies'?" later on in the season, by the way.)

Song title: "King of Wishful Thinking" by Go West
This is a silly song that has nothing to do with the subject of the story. The alternative title, taken from Aerosmith's "Eat the Rich" is closer in sentiment but not in tone. Hence, two options.

Cover image: A tree with one side alive and healthy and the other side sick and dying, representing the discrepancy in the family tree in the story.


4. If I Fell

Oh, do I have some things to say about second person perspective. The super-popular anonymous second-person narrator makes my teeth itch -- I understand what it's for, I just don't like it, having the central character in the story be a blank slate the reader can insert themselves into (and then insert themselves into the pony who is the subject of the story, hey-o). If anything, second person is more intimate, as it places no barriers between your and the narrator that can be there in first person. You should feel what that narrator feels like you're wearing a second skin; the blank slate usage is a bit of a waste.

About the actual story itself, Fluttershy's experience with flight is mine with driving; I wouldn't be able to forget that I was cruising along at speeds most animals aren't capable of in a ton of metal, with a bunch of other people doing the exact same thing at the same time, and I'd never be able to relax behind the wheel. I'm a little sad that this was the closest I got to writing shippy fluff, since the reason for the shipping in the story is just so Fluttershy has someone to bounce the question off of her; I like shippy fluff.

Song title: "If I Fell" by The Beatles
This is a love song about someone who has been hurt in the past, which feels like it fits well on Fluttershy. Also the obvious double-meaning.

Cover image: A tree as seen looking up from sitting among its roots, staring up at a clear sky.


5. ! (The Song Formerly Known As)

This one did not come off at all. I think it's the worst story I put together for the WTG. Part of the problem comes from the narrator being a parody of a mediocre author instead of an obviously bad one, so it's not as in-your-face about the fact that the prose sucks, but moreso the issue is that I'm not very good at zany antics -- my sense of the bizarre leans less towards Tex Avery and more to Monty Python. I've seen the concept of Discord messing with the boundaries of the narrative put to much better use, and the novelty of the narrative messing back at him isn't enough to save this story.

That said, I totally legitimately ship DiscoPie. Seriously, wouldn't they be great together? Pinkie doesn't even seem like she really dislikes him that much, not compared to the other Mane Six (who, granted, have pretty real reasons to be mad at him for what he did to them in that maze), and she's all into the whole chocolate rain thing and they can totally go off an cause beautiful fourth-wall breaking chaos together and oh my god I suddenly understand how the Harry/Hermione shippers felt. Like, FlutterCord doesn't jibe with me at all, since they're so obviously just friends and I can't image it ever developing into anything more despite the continual reminders the show drops about them. I mean, not that that's not adorable in its own right, I just can't see any romance in it.

Song title: "! (The Song Formerly Known As)" by Regurgitator
This isn't what you would call a well-known song, but it fits the story by being extremely non-standard and meta by referring to itself as a song. The text is a a further level of being meta, as it's a dance song about someone who hates going to clubs.

Cover image: A surreal angle of tree branches, with a vertical skyline in the background.


6. Don't You (Forget About Me)

This is weirdly popular and I'm not exactly sure why. I suspect it's down to Sunset Shimmer who, for as much as people bitch and moan about how awful EQG was, is pretty fertile ground as far as fanfiction goes. Bacon-ish mane design aside, she's got a bad attitude masking a sad past and an oh-so-exploitable character flaw: she's fanfiction dynamite, like Trixie if all her sad backstories were canon. I like how the structure works in this story, with it being purely internal input from Twilight and external from Sunset. They're reflections of each other, not quite the dark and the light but more the good and bad end, but Sunset's story isn't quite wrapped up yet; there might be a second chapter for her.

Song title: "Don't You (Forget About Me)" by Simple Minds
A title of two halves that only makes complete sense when you put both parts together, made famous by a film about high school. Completely perfect fit.

Cover image: A tree and its distorted reflection form a circle.


7. Who Was in My Room Last Night?

I wasn't a big fan of the prompt for this week, since how are you going to get two characters to switch roles/places/what-have-you and top Apple Jewel and I LOVE BEING COVERED IN MUD? So I just sort of tossed something together. The plot isn't very sensible and it ends on what I feel is a super-weak note, but I do like the interaction between the Mane Six, especially Twilight and Fluttershy having a little understanding about how damn oblivious Dash is being. I notice that I tend to shuffle Pinkie off to the sidelines if I don't have anything specific for her to do in a scene with the Mane Six, and I sort of find myself wishing that some of the writers of the show would do that sometimes too; Pinkie's got some of the best episodes when they're focused on her but some of the most annoying one-line contributions when she's out of the spotlight.

Song title: "Who Was in My Room Last Night?" by Butthole Surfers
This isn't quite the right song for the story, I don't think, but it does kind of fit the sloppy, thrown-together nature of the writing. I did sort of want to call it "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?" but that's got all sorts of dark overtones to it and I'm pretty sure that song is actually called "In the Pines".

Cover image: The image of a tree forms in the wake of the destruction from a flood, invisible except from a certain angle.


8. Pearl

There's a ton of little things in this story that I think went unnoticed. The first sentence of each "chapter" contains a colour, and the colours progress along the light spectrum from red to violet. In each segment, someone calls Sweetie Belle by a nickname, except in the last part where Vinyl uses her proper name. Both of these things allude to change, from Sweetie being a mouthpiece for that dumb band to being her own artist at the end. The song titles on her demo show up in the story and are all the chapter names, but they're ordered as they show up on her tape (this isn't super-obvious), and the first letter is also the colour spectrum sequence. There's also a symmetry to the chapters, where the first and last are set in tiny rooms and the coloured object is a pony's little personal affection (Fat Stacks' cigar and Vinyl's glasses), the second and sixth are set outside and the colour is the sky, the third and fifth have Sweetie's performances in them and the colour is the "opening" to the venue, and the fourth stands alone as being the transitional period in the middle, the colour of which is green while the scene is set in the greenroom.

But aside from hiding silly things in the story, I quite like this. I like Sweetie's bandmates and her idiot manager, how easy they were to establish in such little space. I like that the story has a proper narrative flow to it and isn't just a one-off scene. I liked poking fun at the titles of terrible pop songs (and a little bit also at the titles of deep and angry singer/songwriter material, too).

Song title: "Pearl" by Paula Cole
A song about personal growth and change. Pearls are also white, mostly, but reflect an array of different colours in the light, again alluding to the spectrum imagery.

Cover image: A tree packaged up in jars, referring both to the pre-packaged nature of industry music and the bite-sized segments of the story.


9. Them Bones

I'm not sure how comfortable I am insinuating Apple Bloom is a cold-blooded murderer -- my style of pony horror takes more from Stephen King and his array of supernatural beasties than Cupcakes-style "secretly, $CHARACTER was a sociopath all along" -- even if it was Diamond Tiara, aka worst pony now and forever, that she bumped off. I like the tone, sorta dark and foreboding in a non-concrete way, but making Apple Bloom seem scary makes me think of Deliverance for some reason.

Vaguely related, but does anyone know if there's fanart of Apple Bloom (or her sister) looking like Rosie the Riveter? I need this to exist. For personal reasons.

Song title: "Them Bones" by Alice In Chains
A violent thrashing song about how we all end up dead in the ground. Some of us earlier than others.

Cover image: The shadow of a tree falls across a graveyard wall.


10. Rivers of Babylon

This was the story that almost broke me. It was big and ambitious and because it involved the Mane Six going through separate adventures it pushed very close to the word and time limit, and I only barely got it finished. It was the only story in the WTG I went back after the fact and changed portions of. And I think it was worth it. I feel like I have a real problem making characters suffer -- some authors delight in it, me not so much, I really just want them all to be happy in the end -- and the idea for this was born out of figuring out what the worst possible scenario would be to throw each of the Mane Six in, what their lowest point would be, and how it could possibly end well for them, and I think I did a pretty decent job overall at putting these little ponies through the wringer. I like how disjointed the parallel stories are, that some of them are completely fabricated scenarios and some might be the future or alternative pasts, that they have completely different scales of time, that they're all completely separate and personalised hells.

That tree is from The Empire Strikes Back, by the way. It draws especially from the exchange between Luke and Yoda ("What's in there?" "Only what you take with you.").

Song title: "Rivers of Babylon" by Linda Ronstadt
Many artists have interpreted this passage of the Bible, but this is the version I'm most familiar with, a haunting vocal-only song about trying to remain true to one's self while homeless and lost.

Cover image: A naked tree blocks the light of the sun in winter, standing in for the block each character must surpass before they can emerge into the light.


11. Foxtrot Uniform Charlie Kilo

I'm not proud of this one. Not because it's low-brow humour, but because it makes the characters do weird and illogical things for the sake of the laugh. Like, it's okay for a giggle, but Lyra pestering all the stallions in a 50-mile radius to knock up her girlfriend is some Peter Griffin-tier levels of insensitive cluelessness, and it leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth. One day, I'm sure I'll pen a clever sex comedy. It just wasn't the day I wrote this.

There's one really deep geek reference buried in this story that almost nobody will care about, though. I play Magic: the Gathering, and every so often card names work their way into my stories. I don't go out of my way to put them in, or anything, just if it fits I'll borrow the phrasing. You probably wouldn't notice even if you were familiar with a large number of the cards. Okay, so anyway, some of these cards are worth a fair bit of cash, the same way rare baseball cards fetch high dollar amounts. You might have heard of the Black Lotus being cited as the most expensive card, easily worth thousands of dollars depending on condition of the card, but there's a few rare printings and promotional cards that outrank a Black Lotus in terms of value. The rarest would probably be a very specific printing of Hurricane, normally a green card but misprinted with a blue background in a very limited set that was recalled for destruction at the last minute. Only a few blue Hurricanes made it out into circulation, and they're worth a hell of a lot to collectors. The canceled set didn't have a proper name, or if it did I don't remember it, but it's often referred to by its production codename (Edgar), or by the time of year it was planned for release, in the summer. Thus, when Lyra says "bang her like a barn door in a summer hurricane", it's possibly the most oblique reference to anything I will ever make in my whole life.

Song title: "Foxtrot Uniform Charlie Kilo" by Bloodhound Gang
An entire song about euphemisms for intercourse. The line about put the you-know-what you-know-where is lifted from this song.

Cover image: A close-up of a flower from an apple tree. One could very easily consider flowers to be a tree's sexual organs.


12. Like a Rolling Stone

Of all the characters that have had their tragic pasts played up for sympathy, Pinkie's is perhaps the most legitimate; her pre-cutie mark life is pretty damn sad. I mean, she loves her family and everything, but she doesn't fit in at all with them. Her name doesn't even belong to her, in this story. I like her voice here, sort of resigned to the fact that she's going to be farming rocks all her life because she doesn't really know much else, and how Maud is this shining light for her. Pinkie is so upbeat and positive and easy to see how she picks other ponies up, so I wanted to build a scenario where drab Maud could be that for Pinkamina.

Song title: "Like a Rolling Stone" by Bob Dylan
It's mildly ironic that the lines "to be without a home, like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone" resonate more with Pinkie than Maud here.

Cover image: A still lake dominated by rocks, with two very small trees present.


13. White Rabbit

It took a long time, but something finally replaced Green Isn't Your Color as my favourite episode. Best CMC? With best Princess? Reenacting best Christmas story? With trippy symbolic dream sequences? For Whom the Sweetie Belle Toils made all sorts of parts in my brain light up and promoted Sweetie Belle to best pony, so naturally I had to do something I like doing when writing for this prompt, which is dream sequences. Writing things that obviously aren't happening is fun and I jump at any chance I get to make it happen. I'm also pretty interested in the kinds of hallucinations people have during things like guided meditation, near-death experiences, vision quests, etc. -- whether these people are confronting a part of themselves, making contact with beings humans have called angels or spirits or aliens, or some weird amalgam of the two I don't know, but it is a recurring phenomena the world over and it's only really Western people (and lobbyists from alcohol, tobacco, and pharmaceutical companies) to whom it's a completely foreign concept that altered states of mind are a tool for learning about one's self instead of a purely negative thing to be avoided at all costs. I'll also take any opportunity to include mysticism -- spells from the shaman class instead of wizard, to make a simple analogy -- in my writing.

Song title: "White Rabbit" by Jefferson Airplane
In a rare occurrence, picking the song influenced events in the story instead of the other way around; references to Alice in Wonderland and especially Celestia being represented as a white rabbit come directly from this song about drugs being used to expand your mind.

Cover image: A dead tree grows on a barren surface under a sky full of stars, an obviously non-real image.


14. A Horse with No Name

This was the story that made being part of the WTG completely worth it. I love this story, I had a complete blast writing it. I have no idea where the voice of the nameless narrator came from, but I could hear him loud and clear every time I sat down to write, and the whole tale just flowed painlessly out of me. Through that film project I was working on (and have since finished) I got more exposure than I'd ever had to Westerns, and while I didn't care too much for most of the ones that came out of Hollywood, I really dug Sergio Leone's Dollars trilogy. Like, I got what people saw in this long-dead genre. I understood new things about one of my favourite book series (The Dark Tower) and one of my favourite video games (Fallout: New Vegas). It clicked why people ranked Clint Eastwood as one of the most legendary screen badasses of all time. And somewhere between then and writing this, it came to me out of the blue that Eastwood's character in the Dollars films was like Derpy Hooves, because they are both blonde and nobody uses their name, and if I were to ever write about this, I could totally call the story A Horse with No Name. So I guess I filed that idea away until there came a good time to use it, and then it came out more or less fully-formed, background characters and little asides and all.

Song title: "A Horse with No Name" by America
I have no idea what this song is about. I'm guessing it's symbolic of something.

Cover image: A Joshua tree, a staple of the Mojave desert.


15. You Learn

I don't write very much stuff that's directly personal, but this story is (and as such, is therefore beyond reproach from criticism). Just that week, I'd had it sink in after, I don't know, a decade and a half, just why I'd had such a generally hostile experience towards schooling -- to make a long story short, "gifted" does not mean "extremely intelligent in all fields" but rather "learns and thinks in weird, non-standard ways" -- and this was my response to getting a sort of epilogue to that whole chapter of my life. It's not a good story, but I feel it was a necessary one.

Song title: "You Learn" by Alanis Morissette
Jagged Little Pill was a big album for me through high school, to which I had a long and strange relationship. It seemed only fitting that I pay it some kind of tribute.

Cover image: A tree is boxed in on all sides within a school courtyard.


16. Holidays in the Sun

I couldn't make the prompts for this one work at all. I think I started writing a sot of romantic comedy where Soarin and Derpy meet at the Rainbow Falls Traders Exchange and they're trying to go on a date that day because, I dunno, Soarin had Wonderbolt commitments for three months afterwards or something, and they kept causing chaos all around them because they're both insufferable klutzes, then scrapped it and started something vaguely serious about Luna being all apprehensive about being around big crowds for her first time adjudicating the Exchange, scrapped that and wrote this silliness. It's not cohesive in its style of comedy and it's not especially funny and it really was just written to make myself meet the deadline. The only thing I really like about it is the image at the end of Celestia being all "screw this, I'm on vacation".

Song title: "Holidays in the Sun" by The Sex Pistols
I don't even really like The Sex Pistols all that much, this was just the most fitting title I grabbed around for. The Soarin/Derpy thing would have been called "Falling in Love (Is Hard on the Knees)", which is a title I still want to use.

Cover image: The sun being blocked by the canopy.


17. It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)

I wrote a fairly long blog post about this one already. the tl;dr version is that it's magnificently mediocre.

Song title: "It's the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)" by R.E.M.
A pretty literal choice of song title: it'll be the end of the world if the Lich gets free, but it's Mac feelin' fine that prevents all that.

Cover image: A tree being engulfed by a parasite above an old temple. (That's apparently a picture of part of Angkor Wat, which probably isn't inhabited by the ghosts of old necromancers.)


18. Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger

Told you we'd get back to that racism eventually. I like this nameless griffon narrator, who hints at a culture of harsh nobility and castles on wind-swept mountains. I also liked setting up the pieces of the hotel room with the knowledge that I'd be breaking them all in the second half. I'd kinda like to trash a hotel room once in my life. Not a super-complicated story, but it is one with structure and I do like putting structure into these short pieces.

Song title: "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger" by Daft Punk
The title obviously refers to the regimen of an athlete, but the repeated but altered lyrics tie in with the echoing structure of the story.

Cover image: A lonely tree on a cold lake, with misted mountains in the distance.


19. Crossroads

I have a tendency to write long flowing sentences a lot, and I wanted to write something where I'd keep things short instead. What started as my first attempt at writing Vinyl Scratch and Octavia together (and trying to make them feel different to other fandom odd couple Lyra and Bon Bon, and I'm not sure I really succeeded at that) in a hip and cool setting turned into this weird epic metal nonsense that kind of got away from me a little. Normally I plan out all my symbolism and allusions and what-have-you beforehand, but I think this sort of went off in a whole 'nother direction; I had originally meant to insinuate that Octavia also had sold her soul for the musical prowess that allowed her to beat the Devil at his own game, but I don't think that's quite what the story is. Is she some kind of righteous counterpart, Vinyl's holy protector? Or does love just conquer all? It's open to interpretation and I think I'll leave it that way. I like it.

Song title: "Crossroads" by Cream
An unrecognisable cover of "Cross Road Blues" by Robert Johnson, blues artist who, as legend would have it, sold his soul to Satan at a crossroads at midnight for his skills at the guitar, and who was no doubt the inspiration for this recurring theme through music history.

Cover image: A super-literal image of a crossroads in the woods, because apparently it's really hard to find pictures of crossroads at night.


So, there you are. A summary of my however-many hundreds of horse words I wrote.

Now it's time to do some writing where I'm free to pick the subject matter. Feels good, man.

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Comments ( 2 )

Way to go! You should be proud of yourself, because that's no easy task. I'm sure it was tempting to just skip a week here or there, but you stuck with it, and that's awesome and something worth being proud of no matter how good your stories are or aren't. :twilightsmile:

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