Aug
3rd
2012
Some Recent Non-Pony and Semi-Pony Writings · 6:15pm Aug 3rd, 2012
Most of the writing I do:
Is largely unrelated to Ponies. The new illustrated edition of my 1998 novel The Blood Jaguar, for instance, has a large cast of talking animal characters, but not a single pony.
Likewise, the two shorts stories of mine being reprinted this month--"River Man" in the anthology Already Among Us, and "Familiars" in the Ursa Major Awards Anthology--while the first features talking cats, rats,and coati mundis and the second focuses on a sorceress squirrel, again, neither one, I'm sorry to say, has any ponies.
My one non-reprint story this month, however, "Thoughts on Early Spring," is one of the 15 pieces in Kazka Press's anthology Bronies: For the Love of Ponies. The ponies are in the background, yes, but they are there!
Mike
So, what's the deal with this 'Bronies' book? A bunch of stories about the regular kind of magical talking horses?
180294
Kind of:
The guidelines specifically said "no fanfiction," but other than that, they were pretty general--science fiction or fantasy stories about people who liked ponies. I made my narrator a fan of FiM--he's working on his fanfic as the story opens--but I never refer to the show or any of its characters by name, and the fantasy aspect is provided by the other talking animals the guy ends up meeting.
If you take the link to the anthology I provided up in the main post, they've got three of the stories available to read for free, and a fourth, Kij Johnson's Nebula Award winning "Ponies," you can find on the Tor books site where it was originally published. Now that I've read the book, I have to admit that most of the stories are a little on the dark side for me--I've never been able to get past Chapter 9 of Fallout: Equestria because of all the shooting and suffering and zombie ponies and all--but a couple are just right for me and they're all worth a read.
Not that I'm an unbiased observer or anything...
Mike