That was the big one (May contain spoilers for the Looking Glass World of Cheese and Pie) · 7:58am Sep 22nd, 2014
I think that a chapter that's over 15,000 words is pretty big, don't you?
I'm not usually a giant fan of super long chapters or super-long fics, but this one was an exception. And in fact, I think this fic can forever stand as the monument to WHY I DO NOT WRITE LONG-RUNNERS. This thing will have only 14 chapters when it's done. It was originally planned to have half that number. But it was complicated.
Bits of this chapter--the swing dance bits--have been written for months, and were planned from the beginning. But I also wanted there to be a certain mystery to the fic (too bad there's no 'mystery' tag!), and that means that you have to have left evidence of who mighta dunnit all along. I don't think it was especially complicated, actually, and in some ways, I'm not crazy about the unsubtlety of Dust's villain monologue , but hey--people were guessing and coming up with all kinds of theories, so that's a good thing, right?
Because I wanted VERY MUCH not to turn Cheese into a Stu--I like him too much for that--I had to make sure that any abilities or skills he had weren't out of nowhere. So if I was going to conclude with a big swing dance number, that meant I had to establish it as something he knew how to do and to have it in as a theme all along. If the cupcakes were going to be a thing, THAT had to be a thing all along. I actually have a chart or a spreadsheet with antagonists or potential antagonists, plot elements, and themes, broken down by chapter. So if I dealt with Trixie in the previous chapter, say, I didn't need her, and needed to reach for someone else for a while. Cheese's family situation--that had to come out in bits and pieces (you still haven't got the full picture). The romance plot. All of that stuff. It had a little glyph and lists under each chapter heading.
So by the time I got to the Cake Festival, I had all of these plot elements to tie up, and they're there in the long description:
At last Pinkie Pie is getting her chance to run the Canterlot Cake Festival, but, to her annoyance, she isn’t permitted to run it on her own. None of her four best friends can be her assistant, so she’s forced to take on Cheese Sandwich, a geeky accordion-playing new student, who is both very strange and very familiar. Cupcake exploits, explosions, aunts, obscure branches of magic, swing dancing, and other typical high school hijinks ensue.
Cupcake exploits? Check.
Explosions? Check.
Aunts? Check.
Obscure branches of magic? Check.
Swing dancing? Check.
Typical high school hijinks? I guess? Checkity-check.
Yes, I'm big on planning. That's why, if I ever DO get to the non-CheesePie related long-runner I have on the back burner, it's gonna be episodic with no definite destination and it's gonna take its own gosh darned time. But I will say that once I had the OUTLINE for the chapter, writing it went fairly quickly. Believe it or not, that first little interchange between Applejack and Rainbow Dash was the hardest to get started, and then I was on a roll.
EDIT: Oh, yes! And the cover! Well, when I wanted a cover for this, I knew I'd wind up having to commission something, and I went shopping for the nicest EG-inspired pictures I could find, and I fell in love with Quere's art, especially this:
--because face it, that's just darling. So I contacted her and asked if she'd be interested in doing a CheesePie commission, and thank gosh she didn't say, "no, screw you, PInkieDash is my OTP." I get the impression that she even kind of likes CheesePie. So I hugged myself quite a lot, and then I realized that DUH, I'd asked her to do a transformation picture, Dash's WINGS are in the picture and DUH. I assumed that she was banging it out and that I'd have to account for the anthro transformation thing and worked it into the plot. But actually she works very deliberately, and she asked which I'd rather have, and by THEN I was torn, and she was nice enough to send me a sketch of Magical Girl Cheese and Regular Cheese, and Magical Girl Cheese is adorabobble, but I thought he'd be too spoilery. So that's how Magical Girl CheesePie transformation happened, and was planned back in April, long before we knew it would happen in Rainbow Rocks.
(Now I have to go look at Magical Girl Cheese in my Secret Folder, 'cause he's just that cute.)
EDIT OF THE EDIT: That's also one reason the Party Cannon wound up in the plot--because it's in the picture and not the other way around--I think. But also because EG Pinkie actually wishes she had some sort of a party cannon. So I had Cheese give her one.
It's past my bedtime and I am way behind in getting ready for school, and I have this last chapter to do, but it will be sweet and fun. Once it's wrapped up, I can toss up an Ask Me Anything About EG Pinkie and Cheese post, although I don't promise I'll answer if spoilers are involved.
As for the new movie--well, obviously I'm excited, and obviously, I know it'll Joss some stuff in different ways. In some ways, I'd love to get a sighting of Cheese and in some ways I wouldn't. I think it's possible, because there's at least one character from Season Four who's in there. So my only wish really is that we don't get a precise location on what looks as though it'll be Pinkie's slumber party. As long as we just see bits of the house and her bedroom, I can tell myself that it's really the Cakes'. If we get a definite location, like a sighting on ALL of Pinkie's family, then, well, headcanon shot to heck. That could also possibly mean the smash of a future sequel, but I'm thinking that maybe it's legit if it's a sequel to my own work.
Oh, yes--do feel free to ask me about Trixie in this one. Pretty soon, it'll all be open season.
I'm writing a chapter like that for DIvine Jealousy and the Voice of Reason. which is why you haven't seen anything new from me for a while. I have to do it this way because I ended the last one with Twilight and Luna re-emerging from their conversation, so I can't split it up any more.
Can't cut to the other Mane Six any more because I've brought them up to the end of Twilight and Luna's scene chronologically, and it would be boring -- "Waiting for the Princesses" pushes the readers' patience as it is, though I thought I had some nice character development in there. No sane reason to cut to Discord save for short vignettes. Bulkie's already reached the same point chronologically. So I have to see things through to the end of Luna's Tale, which means I have to keep it relatively short and "relatively" is still going to be pretty long. Fortunately, she can skip over some of the parts that Discord already flashbacked from his POV, which is logic-straining (she doesn't know what he thought about) but nobody will notice -- you wouldn't if I hadn't just told you -- and I can cover it by giving her a digression or two he didn't mention.
In retrospect maybe I should have broken up their long scene differently. Ah well, this is the sort of thing I'm learning by practicing fanfic. Do you know this is the first time I've juggled multiple POV's that threaded together this way, in anything I've written? Fanfic is good because it's taking me outside my comfort zone, before this I'd only ever done single-POV or two-POV short stories to short novellas. Now I'm writing multiple-POV novels, and this is the sort of thing I can't learn as well by merely reading about it.
I am in awe of you. That's the sort of thing the great and sainted E. E. "Doc" Smith used to do. (It was because he did things like this that his novels actually flow really well despite his purple prose, and why writers who try to merely mimic his style without understanding his technique produce crap rather than the gold he spun out).
You've done a good job of it. Cheese has special powers, and he's likeable (even loveable, you've established him as someone Pinkie can believably love rather than merely Mr. Designated Romance Protagonist ("Ah, Designated! Or 'Dezzy,' for I sense a deep intimacy between us! Your generic attractiveness has won my heart! Let us segue to a happy ending!"). But he doesn't slop all over the story and push everyone else out of their canon importance to the situations.
You're writing a really awesome story.
Wow. That's a truly impressive amount of planning. I know I've gotten the threads of a plot tapestry tangled more than once. Bulleted lists may not cut it for me...
In any case, you've done an incredible job with this story. The only things that came out of left field were Cheese and Pinkie when no one was watching them. I'm fairly this story is what first brought you to my attention, and you have in turn convinced me to adopt CheesePie as one of my few pony true pairings. Mandatory Fun definitely wouldn't have happened without your influence.
In short, thank you for being you.
Still incomplete? Good. It means that it will be longer when I finally read it.
(And after that, you will have no more excuse for not writing ponies! Well, except a sequel...)
EDIT: 16k words long chapter?! Dude, that must have been a beast to edit.
I wish I had that sort of dedication to something. (I dabbled in fanfiction. I had about four stories in the works and the longest one only had about four chapters. Planning would probably do me some good. I need to close this bracket.)
Please write a sequel? This story's super awesome, in ways I can only sorta describe.
I wanna see that Cheesy picture