Seven Hundred Followers, or How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Steal Titles From Old-Ass Movies · 11:13pm Jun 27th, 2014
First of all, Aragón, I’m so glad you could make it. I knew you’re always very busy.
Oh, it’s no big deal. I’m not that busy, really. In fact, I’m not busy at all. I love the fact that you’re interviewing me. I don’t know what I would do without things like this. This is the reason why I’m alive.
…Oh. Well, that’s disturb—
Nobody has talked to me in weeks. I’d forgot how sweet the human voice sounds. It’s like music. Please, never stop talking.
Uh-huh. You’re officially being a creep right now, so let’s move on to something different, please—
I’M SO ALONE.
Yes, I’m ignoring that. Ahem! Do you know why we’re doing this interview?
BECAUSE I FEEL SO ALONE.
You know, I’m feeling very tempted to get the hell out of here right now.
PLEASE, NO.
Dude. Seriously.
OKAY, OKAY! I’LL TRY TO—Ahem. I’ll be professional, I swear.
Good. So! You know why we’re doing this?
Why, yes! I have over 700 followers now, which marks the moment in which I can officially start acting like a prick and nobody can tell me to stop.
To be honest, you’ve always been a prick.
Of course. I mean, I make a blog post every time I get X followers. That’s the prickest pricker thing a prick can prick.
Indeed. So, you’re aware you’re a horrible person.
I prefer the term “anti-Gandhi”. Gives me more class. The thing is: you need a little bit of ego when you’re on the Internet. If you’re confident, people is going to respect you, yes? There’s nothing bad in loving yourself a little. If that implies throwing flowers at yourself now and then, and writing a blog post that mostly says nothing but “envy me, I have 700 followers now”, then, well. That’s how life works.
I’m going to read that as “I’m an insecure prick and I’m afraid I’ll die alone.”
I’M SO FREAKING LONELY.
Indeed. So, a thing most people wonder about you is, how did you get so many followers? What was the key to your success?
I don’t really have an answer to that, actually. You see, I was an absolute nobody, and then Daring DONE! came, and suddenly I had followers and people was reading my stories.
And to be honest? I can see why. If you look at my stories chronologically, there’s a huge quality jump from Daring DONE! onwards. Namely, everything before that story is crap, and everything after it is less crap. So to those guys who now and then ask me how to get followers, my only answer is to write and write and write until you become better. I’m still learning myself, to be honest.
And no, I can’t really believe people read my stuff either.
I was actually asking how somebody with such a horrible skill could get any popular.
Oh.
Seriously, your stories are the literary equivalent of a very old woman scratching a blackboard.
…Why does it have to be a very old woman?
Also, you only write comedy. Why’s that?
Because it’s easier for me to write, and far more entertaining. When I write a joke, I usually laugh at it. If I write anything else, I don’t laugh at it. See? Writing comedy is funny! Who would have thought?
Mmkay, this is getting boring. Let’s make things juicy. I’ve heard you have a very long name. Is that true?
Yeah. Y’know, we Spaniards—
Wait. You’re a Spaniard?
Are you seriously asking me this? I flaunt my spanishness like a peacock showing off his feathers while surrounded by females! Ladies.
You’re comparing yourself to a gay bird.
A gay and fabulous bird, thank you very much.
So anyway. Names. We were talking names.
Oh, yeah. Well, no-frigging-body on my Skype list calls me Aragón, so I guess I can share my real name here. It won’t make any difference. Take a deep breath, fellas, because it’s pretty long:
My IRL name is [x].
Bam. Look me in the eye and tell me that’s not royal as hell.
Okay, that’s… That’s actually impressive.
Thanks. It’s a Spanish thing, at least in the part of Spain I live in.
And you live in…
My nick is Aragón, dude. Three freaking guesses as where do I live, smartass.
I’mma say Barcelona.
…
…
…
Gotcha, didn’t I?
You’re a freaking prick.
Glass houses.
Hmph. I actually do live in Aragón in summer and Christmas, but during the scholar year, I live in Barcelona. Pretty cool city, I might say.
So you’re a student.
Technically, I’m a firefighter. Everybody’s impressed by the size of my firehose.
…
…
No.
Get it?
Shut up.
GET IT?
I’m going to punch you.
IT’S FUNNY BECAUSE I’M SECRETLY TALKING ABOUT MY PENIS.
You are everything that’s wrong with this world.
PENIS JOKES ARE FUNNY.
And 700 people are following you. I’m assuming at least half of them have to be braindead.
Oh, that’s not one of my usual jokes. Hilarious as they are, dick jokes are not the main core of my stories… with maybe an exception, I guess? But still.
Uh-huh. So your comedy is not like this… I refuse to call it “joke”.
I’m starting to believe you are attracted to me and act mean because you want to hide it.
Please, just answer the question. Say something about your comedies. I’ll go buy some pepper spray while you’re rambling.
Okay! Well, I have many influences, actually. I’ve been reading since I was just a little child, but, strangely? I didn’t really start reading comedy till a couple years ago.
In my humble opinion, I’ve yet to find a finest comedy author than Sir Terry Pratchett. His books are at the same time exciting, beautiful, and incredibly funny. It’s one of my favorite authors by far, and I’ve read a lot during my life. While I wouldn’t call his works “life-changing” (I reserve that title for truly masterful works – A Hundred Years of Solitude or Crime and Punishment come to mind) I’ll never stop recommending him.
Thus, he’s definitely one influence. Another one is the website Cracked, definitely. Other comedy authors like Wodehouse and Eduardo Mendoza (he’s Spanish, so I’m pretty sure you don’t know him) also come to mind.
By the way, as we’re talking about comedy: Dragon Ball Abridged, Yu Gi Oh Abridged, xkcd, Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, and Perry Bible Fellowship are definitely comical works that have influenced me greatly that you can find for free on the Internet. Convenient! You should check them out.
Hmmm. Ah. You finished? I’m not done with the spray. Keep rambling.
A-okay! As I said, I have those guys as my main influence… which is not to say I imitate them in my writing. Sure now and then I’ll include a paragraph inspired by them, but I try to find my own voice when I write.
That’s actually one of the best things a writer can do, by the way. When you read a work by Terry Pratchett, you know it’s by him. I can say the same about some Fimfic authors, of course—Chris recently described a Blueshift story as “Blueshiftian”, and I assure you that term means a lot.
So I guess I say those comedy writers are my “influence” in the sense that they taught me that comedy is an art form, really. My style is not similar to them. I like to believe I’m starting to get a particular voice in my stories, but I’m still too young and too unexperienced to say otherwise. Still, my latest story had a comment that went more or less like I hadn’t even clicked in this story; I just read the title and description and thought “yep, probably by Aragón”. I loved that comment.
Uh-huh. Boring. Hey, look at this!
What?
*Psssssht*
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEGH!
Heheh.
OH GOD, MY EYES!
MY EYES!
AIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEGH!
Yeah, pepper spray hurts a little, doesn’t it?
WHY WOULD YOU EVEN DO THIS?!
I felt like I had to spice things up a little.
…
…
ARE YOU F*CKING KIDDING ME RIGHT NOW?!
Look, you don’t have a monopoly on puns, okay? So, let’s continue with the interview, please.
MY EYES AND NOSE ARE ON FIRE!
Stupendous. So you try to find your own voice via your comedy?
GOD THIS HURTS!
Dude.
YES, YES, I KNOW! Ugh.
Anyway, yeah, I try to find my own voice. As far as I can tell, apparently that means including beat moments (“silence”) and rapid-fire comedy. I love fast-paced dialogue, so I tend to include it everywhere.
That sounds cheap.
And you sound like an idiot.
Okay, knowing more about how you write is boring. You talk about that all the time. Give me something juicy! Talk about your real life!
Why would you even want to know about that.
Because I want to laugh at you! Now speak!
Well, okay.
I’m a 19 years old male, living in Spain, as I already said. Y’know, that country with the bullfighting, and the sangria, and the siesta. Right next to France? Yeah, that one!
I’m studying two careers at once: Law and Economics. I prefer Law by a landslide, but Economics is useful, so I thought “eh, let’s try this.”
Two careers at the same time?
Yeah. To be fair, it’s a special feature my university offers: many of the classes I take are both valid for Economics and Law, so it’s not as hard as it sounds. It’s still hard as hell, but, you know. It could be worse. I could be on fire, for example.
By the way, now’s the moment when people stop believing me, I guess. I wasn’t a child genius in the literal sense of the world (like Mozart or something), but learning is apparently uncommonly easy for me. I learned how to read when I was two years old, and by twelve I had already read Shakespeare (to be fair, I did it only for bragging rights). I’ve always been in the top three of my year in college/high school and the only reason why I wasn’t the first is because I’m too lazy to study as much as I could (my teachers made sure to tell me that time and time again).
So I’m not a genius per se, but I am smart, or at least that’s what I like to believe. That’s why I like rapid-fire comedy: I talk fast, and usually I crack jokes all the time, but I like to do that as quick as possible, to move on to another subject. I also ramble a lot, as you can see. Rapid-fire comedy allows me to write an entire story in which the characters talk insanely fast (in my mind, at least), and nobody has any trouble following what the others say. That’s my ideal dream, right there.
So you think you’re smart. That’s smug on your part.
I learned English on my own, via reading comics and listening to Manowar songs. You tell me.
Okay, I’ll tell you: you aren’t smart.
Blargh.
That sure was an intellectual question. So you crack jokes in real life, too?
All the time. Puns are my favorite, by the way. Puns and dark humor.
Dark humor?
Yeah, that has caused me trouble now and then. I remember one time, when I was in highschool, a group of classmates of mine had gone to Auschwitz during summer, and then they had a freaking three-hours-long conference about everything they had done and seen there, and the horrors of the war, and you couldn’t do anything but listen to those four idiots talk nonstop. I got tired pretty quickly, as you can imagine.
So, at one point, one of my classmates said something among the lines of “and, apparently, when the Jews got in Auschwitz, the Nazis told them that they couldn’t get out of there, unless they came out with their feet first. Because they would get out of there on a stretcher, because they would be dead!”
And I yelled: “THERE ALSO WAS A GIANT SLIDE AT THE EXIT!”
People laughed, some teachers scorned me, and my classmates refused to talk with me for one week or so.
Wow.
Yeah.
So you’re both smug and an asshole.
Why are you so fond on insulting me?
I find it endearing. So you self-diagnosed that smart thing, or…?
No, no. Professionals have looked at me. Of course, an overactive mind also means I’m extremely neurotic (I FREAK OUT EASILY) and that I have nightmares one for every two nights (and I’m afraid of shit like mirrors), so… Yeah.
That sucks.
Eh. It could be worse. I could have herpes.
Yeah, about that…
Hm?
Um, never mind. Sooooo… Have you read any good fics lately?
Actually, I don’t read that many fics anymore. I went through a phase of reading EVERYTHING that interested me a little, but right now I’m too busy reading classics. Can you believe I’ve never read anything by Dostoievski?
Ah?
Yeah, I have a lot of books in my house (both my parents are avid readers, so I was raised among books – I have more books than my highschool’s library, for example), but I have little to zero Russian literature. Talk about weird. So I’m catching up on that.
So you don’t read fics.
I do read fics, it’s just that… Well, lately I ain’t feeling the urge to ingest ponywords on masse. I still enjoy them, but the only way I can bring myself to read a fanfic is if somebody actively asks me to do so.
So if somebody asks you to read their fic…?
I’ll probably do it, and then I’ll comment on it.
Huh. That was easy.
I know, right? Turns out you can get a lot of things out of asking. Hell, I jokingly asked three reviewers to take a peek at my latest story, AND THEY DID! How awesome is that?
Cool, I guess?
I freaking love when people I know and/or admire read a thing of mine, or when they favorite it or comment on it. One of my biggest dreams is to be able to do that one day; to favorite a story and then have its author freaking out about it. “OMG, ARAGÓN FAVED ME!”
Still a long way to walk, but meh, I’m still young.
Well, that’s fine, I suppose. Anyway, this interview is getting long, and you didn’t even crack a joke in a long time.
What can I say? I like to talk about myself.
Uh-huh. You do realize there’s only one way we’re going to end this interview, right?
What?
*Psssssht*
YOU C*CKSUCKING SON OF A WHO—
You're...from Spain? *mind blown*
Aragon-senpai, can we chat on skype about story writing sometime? my username there is bgchandler
You and I have very similar comedy likes, and as I was telling Bad Horse this morning, 100 years of solitude is what got me into fantasy before G4 ponies even were a thing.
Since you said to ask... Will you read one of my stories Aragon? Trixie Complains About Random $#!% is my most popular story ratings wise, but I can't figure out why, because it's just random comedy I wrote in an hour and a half. But people say it makes them laugh. So I'll just leave my USER PAGE link here; it lists my top 16 stories right at the top. Pick one that sounds cool to you; they're all short.
I plan on finally reading some Terry Prachett on the way up to EFNW (I've been meaning to get into discworld for about half a decade.).
I really liked this interview, even if I suspect you were the interviewed AND the interviewer, and should probably check into a psych ward.
I look forward to what you produce in the future, Aragon who used to have a tower as his profile picture
Have a great day!
I can't think of a comment for this because there's too much stuff to comment on to fit into a single witty line! I'm going to grammar nazi you now also because misgrammared, misspel, and mispunctuationed stuff angers me.
You use three hyphens. That is not normal. Use only one, two, or one em dash for these circumstances. You're a terrible human being who will continue to be a creep if you keep on using three.
Period goes after the quotation.
Actually it's Aragon, not accent on the o.
There is an extra apostrophe at the end of didn't.
This is surprisingly few errors for a very long blog, not even a fic, written by a person who learnt the english language via comic books.
Only the really smart people read Perry Bible Felloswhip. The rest of us have to settle for Perry Bible Fellowship.
Also, funny post. Yet... Those are all words that could have gone into the Long Story Short sequel. If you didn't have reviewer control powers, I might complain about that.
Put it out with your hose, mister fireman.
Very enjoyable post. I liked learning more about your education and how you learned English. Wow, dude, you are smart. In my class since I checked, I'm ranked pretty low... Or that could have been because getting a B in my Latin class put me way back regardless of course difficulty. I do admire your ability to pick up a language. Ever try learning a programming language?
2239777 Hey, that's my job! And of the rest of the editing team.
If there's an accent, there's an accent. Don't argue with the guy who lives there. My region calls Louisville, "Looaval" for some reason,
2239883 You misunderstand. I understand that the city has an accent. His nick, however, has no accent. If you don't want to take my word for it, you can check the top left corner of this web page at your earliest convenience at see for yourself. And I will guess that you're city is pronounced that way because it was named after French person, and as my french teacher so eloquently put it, the french language is anal.
2239953
2239953 Hey, that's pretty much how my Latin teacher described it!
"French is just badly spoken English!"
2239956 Potato pototo, tomato tomoto.
I knew blackmailing Present Perfect would pay off some day. Kudos on the recognition! And don't worry, plenty of us fangasm when you post stuff already.
Presuming they went feet first. What of laying on their stomachs and sliding face first?
2239774 We can just as easily click your name as it appears in the green box.
2239953
Fimfiction doesn't let me write "Aragón", but that's certainly my nick. I pronounce it like that in my mind, at least, and as I'm the one using it...
2240017 I hope you're kidding.
2240534 derp.
2240814
2240638 I never kid about potatoes. Although admittedly the tomato part was a bit over the top.
2241474 Just thought you were kidding. You gave an example of exactly the opposite of what Zevski said.
Two words that sound the same but mean different things. Two words that sound different but have the same meaning.
Would you believe that I started learning English on my own by playing Leisure Suit Larry?
(Comics in English, back then, were mostly unavailable where I live, and the Internet was unheard of. Though I was soon complementing my gaming-based English learning by going through the local library's copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica; I was the rare kind of kid that would read encyclopedias for fun
)