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Alas, after a week of excessive toil and literary engagement, we have ourselves another mountain of--wait, only 15,403 words? WTF... did Kevin Nashbook this?
I'll pretend that this week's chapter reflects that I listen to readers. I like to think that I'm a good guy. I put the toilet seat down, even though I'm currently married to Team Fortress Two. (Minecraft is just a kitchen door mistress)
Let me tell you something about Background Pony. And I'll hurl all sorts of primate feces at the first person who insists that I'm cutting myself down. The fact is, I started this dayum thing without thinking ahead. The idea of the story is always simple... at first. Eventually, as with everything I have ever written ever, things balloon into superfluous atrocities. I've come to accept this as perfectly natural. The chapters of my epics begun tiny and insignificant, and then mushroom forth into horrifically large repositories of text. This is a wyrd thing, considering that I usually get through with all of my showing off in the initial quarter of the entire product. It would seem that as a piece of fanfiction gets more complicated, I have to attach more weight to it. That's why the last chapters turned out to be so John Goodmanish... or at least that's what I'm standing by.
I also tend to start stuff out without realizing what sort of epic scope I should have equipped myself with from the beginning. This results in my fucking up the timeline of Background Pony, because I never once thought that the chronological order of events would become supremely important. What's more, I'm too dayum lazy to go back and fix it until some marsupial TELLs me.
So, read this story. Enjoy this story. Take off your britches and make love to this story. But as soon as you see the signs of textual chlamydia, tell your doctor immediately... in that doctor is me... and in that it's not chlamydia, but typos or syntactical errors or logic gaps... or herpes. Whatever.
There's a part of me that lurves you all, that makes me let Undertaker toss me off the top of the cage, only instead of a Spanish Announce Table I'm crashing through it's a word processor. I wanna impress you guys, but I'd hate to look at the reruns on ESPN and think "godDAYUM did that look ugly on me at the time... before all the teeth and blood came out of my grin."
Anyways, enjoy The Firmaments. Next week's chapter is going to be the worst installment of Background Pony yet. I'm not kidding.
Goddammit, at this rate I'm going to have to make my own WWE!Pony pictures. X_X
-SS&E
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Comments ( 13 )
You keep saying that, yet every chapter is balls-out amazing. Shut up and write.
I will give it to you. The first chapter was amazing. But in my opinion, you should have just stopped there. Leaving it open to us to decide her future, would have been a much better story. In my opinion.
Pathos
Dang. On the one hand, I'm sad that I keep missing chances to help out.
On the other hand, it's "help" that I provide, and the success seen here shows that it's clearly not necessary.
I will continue to do what I can when the timing of things lines up, and I will be happy to do it, but it's good that I'm not crucial and my unavailability isn't stopping the presses. If that was the case, I'd feel like a monumental asshole. You keep doing what you do, and whenever the stars align I'll do what I can to help you out. If shipping heavy freight weren't so expensive, I'd buy you a pallet of Dr. Pepper.
The exact same applies to me. Only in my case, due to my innate textual constipation, the ballooning ideas grow faster than I can put them into words. You on the other hand... Your writing is what rightfully puts "explosions" in your name. It's what interests me in your writing; you somehow manage to accomplish what I could only dream of.
>>149572
Wasn't he a musketeer?
>>149626
I think he mighta been, but Pathos is also a writing device. It's one of the Aristolian Appeals (I'm enjoying the irony of talking about rhetoric while mangling the names too), and it means an appeal to emotions. As SSaE describes BP as "emotion porn," this is an accurate description.
If you're still with me, the others are "ethos," an appeal to ethics, and "logos," an appeal to logic.
Annnd, at the risk of some form of feces being thrown at my head, I think Background Pony is amazing. It's the reason I made my FIMfiction account in the first place, so I could follow it. Sure, say I have no taste, I know that. Point out the chronological laxness, or the lack of weight you put on it, sure. But, the thing is, Background Pony is still REALLY good! If this is "bad" work, then where's your "good" work? Did it turn into a light so bright it had to be shut away?
>>149626
Yeah, they were Mentos, Pathos, and Hairymouse, and there was some other guy who hung out with them named d'Artboard. Funny names if you ask me, but that's what you get for reading the internet instead of your literature homework.
"Next week's chapter is going to be the worst installment of Background Pony yet. I'm not kidding."
For some reason, this is making me look forward to the next chapter even more.
"Eventually, as with everything I have ever written ever, things balloon into superfluous atrocities. I've come to accept this as perfectly natural. The chapters of my epics begun tiny and insignificant, and then mushroom forth into horrifically large repositories of text."
I've been having this problem too though not nearly to the degree you've been having. My first "major" chapters manage to be in the good 4k - 7.5k word range. Then they shot to 10k words. The most recent main chapter almost hit 15K so I had to break it into two chapters and the next chapters do not seem to be getting any shorter. I attributed it to having more characters, events, and facts to keep tract of but now I can't be certain. If this is happening to you too then maybe I am wrong about the source of the problem.
Perhaps it is because, as I understand my own story more I have more to write about. So maybe when I start I only mention what is absolutely necessary because that is all I really know. And when I get far enough along, I start feeling the need to mention every little detail like I did early on even though every detail is less vital per word.
Regardless, it is a problem, as a novel can be as little as 50k words. So somehow entire narratives can be done in what you or I am doing in three or four chapters.
The other idea I have is that your story (and mine now that I think of it) seems to be set up like a series of shot-stories. Each chapter is its own narrative arch which really is not what a chapter is meant to do.
Ah well, not sure if anyone will read this or care but I'll leave it up since I already wrote it and it has helped me consider something about my own writing.
>>149538 Dat picture
>>150856
Wow. SS&E, you're good. You must be, because (judging from the comments in chapter 9) I seem to be the only one who recognizes that Bonbon now exists. Which is pure amazing fangasmity.
(Confectionery? Cream-colored face? Vanilla-flavored aromas? Curly blue and pink mane? Loving all upon Lyra? How could these people be so oblivious?)
I am, for the first time since starting this fic, actually anxious for the next update (you've done a good job at ending each conflict before moving on to the next chapter), because I want to know what you'll end up doing with the French candyista. Also, crazy magical booklearning to be done.
Edit: Is the title of this blog post referring to Bonbon's many voices, or am I missing something/jumping to conclusions?
Every time I think that next chapter could not be more mind-shaking than one I just read.
Every next chapter I understand that I was wrong last time.
Emotion porn? May be. Amazing anyway.