Exercise Your Literary Brain Muscles! · 1:37am Jul 9th, 2014
So I've got a friend, and he's got a thing that needs doing...
Hopefully, many of you are already aware of my Royal Canterlot Library co-conspirator co-curator Chris's wonderful ponyfic review site, "One Man's Pony Ramblings". If you aren't, you should be. He has a lot to say, not only about stories, but about writing in general. We don't always agree on everything or every story, but he's someone whose opinion I definitely care about.
Chris tries to post new reviews or articles every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, but he's going to be out of commission for a couple weeks at the end of the month, and he's looking for guest columnists who can fill in for him. He's looking for a very specific type of article—but I think that it's the sort of thing some of the folks following me are very well-equipped to handle. You can read the details on his site, but I'll give a sketch of what he's looking for below so you can see if you might be interested.
What Chris wants, are posts that take an in-depth look at individual Ponyfic authors. He's looking for articles that can discuss an author's complete body of work, with a particular focus on (1) threads that connect the stories together (whether the author intends them to be there or not) and (2) how the author has grown (or at least changed) in her/his storytelling ability. To that end, Chris is looking for posts on authors who've written several stories over a significant length of time, and whose work totals up to at least 50,000 words or so. (Also, no picking yourself; and try to avoid picking your friends—the best thing would be a discussion of an author you like, but who you only really know through their writing on the site.)
Chris is looking to get about 10 guest columns together, but right now he's still well short of that goal. You can get more details on his site—here's the link again—but hopefully this is enough of a taste to help you get an idea of whether you'd be interested. I suspect a number of you might think this is a cool idea but feel your analysis chops aren't up to snuff; to that I say "Fah!" We learn by doing. Chris needs columns, and we're all amateurs here anyway.
Personally, I'm really excited to read these things. Author-level reviews aren't things we see very often in the fandom, and I suspect whatever Chris gets in will be pretty darn interesting. And I'm sure y'all can think of a number of authors for whom this sort of in-depth analysis would be really interesting. I know I can, but providing my own suggestions feels a bit like cheating.
Aside from one. Chris is a really cool writer in his own right, and personally, I think it'd be cool if somebody surprised him with some analysis of his own stuff, after he's put so much work into reviewing other people's stories. Though don't everybody go jump on him, 'cause that'd get boring.
Anyway, I really, genuinely hope some of you feel like you've got the free time and the interest to participate in this. I know Chris could use the help, and based on the sort of comments I've seen from a lot of you, I'd be very interested to get a deeper look at what y'all think about these here Ponyfic authors, too!
Author level reviews are pretty heady stuff. I mean, I've probably over the past year and a half read a good dozen of Skywriter's stories for example, and know his style pretty well, but I could tell you diddly squat about how he's changed or gotten better or how his stories compare and contrast with each other.
I'd Also love to look at how Imploding Colon*'s Austraeoh series has changed over time, but there's a snowball's chance in hell that I'm rereading over a million words to do so.
That being said, I might volunteer if it means I can do an Author review of Chris himself, if only for the meta lols.
*Yes, he's SS&E, I know.
What, you guys don't try and make friends with everyone whose pony stories you like? For shame.
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Sure I do. That's why we're not friends.
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(Incidentally, if my sarcasm was unclear to anyone, let me just say congrats on your story that I favorited winding up in rotation among the top 50 or so stories on Fimfiction.)
I'm torn. On the one hoof, I want to volunteer. On the other hoof, not only am I overbooked, but my reviews of stories I like tend to degenerate into gushing, and reviewing something I don't like is more painful than I can take without using profanity.
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I have to admit it is terribly exciting to me every time it creeps back up the rankings. Not that I, you know, watch it do so or anything.
Well, this is interesting. I've been a semi-regular reader of Chris' for a while now, and while I often disagree with his assessments, I do pretty much always find his analyses interesting. By semi-regular, I mean that whether I actually read any given post is kind of random, partially because I somehow subscribed to all the blog comments instead of the posts, so I'm most likely to read posts that get interesting looking comments. But yeah, he seems like a cool guy, writes a good Cadence vs Celestia story.
As for actually participating in this stop-gap thing, I dunno. It's a thing I could see the few who know what I do thinking I'd be interested in, but I don't know if there's anyone I want to review. I generally have to be pretty inspired by whatever I just read to write a big long comment, so authors are a whole 'nother story, and it seems silly to do the big ones, like Skywriter, not to mention that someone else has already announced their intentions to cover him in the comments section.
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Well, I didn't know if you'd be interested in it as such, but I figured it was worth mentioning at least in case you would be, since you're high on my list of people I think would be good at it. But yeah, I can relate. There are only a couple people I think I'd be all that interested to do myself—i.e. that meet the productivity guidelines and that I enjoy reading enough to want to do that sort of digging—and almost all the ones that leap to mind have bodies of work that are so large there's no way I could tackle them with the amount of free time I have this summer.