Cleaning out the backlog · 5:42am Oct 28th, 2014
For personal reasons previously mentioned, the majority of my horsewords this year have been for the Writeoff Association's ponyfic competitions. Those stories are all complete (modulo editing), but not all of them have made their way over to FIMFiction — I'm in the process of fixing that!
The Dragon's Riddle, which earned me some shiny bronze-colored pixels in the minific competition earlier this month, got posted (in a slightly expanded version that meets FIMFic's 1000-word minimum) on Friday, and though I don't think it ever hit the featurebox, it's already outperforming a few of my stories which did. Today, I also added two more writeoff minifics (Eponalepsis and The Slow Fall Of An Unfamiliar Star) to my short story collection. Both of them were my "also-rans" in earlier minific competitions — Slow Fall scored 8th to Riddle's 3rd (still pretty good out of 49 entries), and Eponalepsis barely limped into the top half in the competition where Daring Do and the Curse of Ahuizotl scored 14th. They're a little different than my usual — one's an Equestria Girls prequel and one's a sort of ponderous mythic ouroboros — but I think they're each still worthwhile.
Also previously written and on their way toward the light of day:
The Case of the Cowled Changelings — Detective fiction! Fancy Pants gets drawn into a web of conflicting lies when a scared guest approaches him during a masquerade ball he's hosting — and if he can't piece together the truth before the Guard's battlecaster arrives, he has a lot more to lose than an anonymous friend. A gold-medal winner six months back, then I ripped it halfway apart and it got stuck in an edit cycle. I'm wrapping up some final repairs on this (though I procrastinated this weekend and got no fic-work done, and money-work is going to eat my life for the next 8-9 days with our big fiber-optic network launch project). Should hit the site in early November. However, I do need cover art for it; I could assemble it from what few vectors of cloaked ponies I've been able to find, but if anyone wants to volunteer, it would save me a day or two and I could do something nice for you in return (a blog plug, a story critique, a microfic, or even a few bucks).
Mark of Destiny — When Earth breaches the dimensional barrier with Equestria, they discover that the same Cutie Marks that give ponies sentience also turn people into superhumans. A roller-coaster HiE deconstruction/reconstruction, and a bronze-medal winner two months back. TBH, I'm not sure whether to put this through a severe edit cycle or not. Nobody liked the ending (even if a number of people were impressed by it, and even if I wrote it that way entirely deliberately). It could also use some massaging where it shifts gears in the middle, and the cold open rightfully came in for some criticism. On the other forehoof, even in its current state it scored third in a crowded field, and if I start ripping it apart it'll be months before I post it, especially since I don't have a clear goal in my mind for how to rewrite it.
The Sun Birds — Celestia and Philomena fly two pebbles across the ocean. Lush worldbuilding porn that tied for sixth in the minific competition five months ago. This deserves a major rewrite and expansion; it really should have been more like 3,000 words than 750, and I know what I want to do with it. Unfortunately, it's on a back burner, because "no new horsewords before I finish the next chapter of HR2" is my current rule.
I like the sound of that last one, oh yes. But then, I love me some description porn.
Two comments:
1) Now I'm imagining Fancy Pants as an aristocratic amateur detective in the vein of Lord Peter Wimsey (they both use a monocle! and though Fleur's more obviously decorous than Harriet Vane, I bet she's no slouch in investigations, either).
2) Once you finish with The Sun Birds, we will finally find out the airspeed of (un)laden and laden Equestrian phoenix.
I liked Mark of Destiny quite a lot, but that cutie mark at the end...
The thing is, I can't really think of anything else that so succinctly summarizes that specialty.
The Sun Birds sounds interesting. I'm looking forward to reading that. Of course, I'm glad to hear about the possibility of a new Hard Reset 2 chapter. That thing was the most gripping reading I've found recently. Rereading the entire thing shortly after finishing it once was not enough.
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Haven't read any Wimsey stories, but I hope Fancy Pants lives up to that legacy! Avoiding spoilers as much as I can: Fleur doesn't do any sleuthing in Cowled Changelings, but I like the idea of a sequel, and if I do, she will have a prominent role.
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You see my dilemma, then.
Thing is, that Cutie Mark explicitly integrates, and reflects on, the social commentary of the rest of the piece. (Serious spoilers!) Mark is not, and never was, an Equestrian. The pop-culture nature of it is — take your pick — a signifier of his cultural appropriation, and/or a reconciliation/"third way" of both the Equestrian and Earth approaches to Cutie Marks. He isn't taking a power, he's defining a role for himself, in a very Equestrian way — but he's doing so in a way that would be impossible for an Equestrian, on multiple levels.
And the format of the final section not only reconstructs the standard HiE tropes, but also explicitly projects the resolution of the story's central question onto the audience. It's kind of uncomfortable; it's too direct. Part of me insists that I wrote it to be uncomfortable, but making it stick in people's craws is not necessarily the best way to make them think.
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Re Sun Birds: I'll see what I can do!
Nothing like catching up on the backlog!
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You should, they're excellent! Fun, well-written and extremely smart detective stories set in the inter-war England (with some of the short stories wandering further afield), they are true classics of the genre.
Why does it seem like two out of three cool people I run into (if not more) work in computers or networking? You, Ghost, Xas, and that's just the people on this site...
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Mark is worth a lot of talk. (Maybe I should read the writeoff comments on it.)
My brain is writing a sequel, with or without me, so for whatever it's worth:
One problem I keep running into is, if I solve their problem for them (whether by super-diplomacy or closing the portal or some other option) -- whether or not it works, and if it does work it might only work temporarily (depending on what it is) -- I run into the same problem they already have, of humans swooping in and taking over and pretty much ruining everything. And that's just as bad.
But it's kind of explicit that they aren't able to solve it themselves. So if I don't do something, nothing gets better and we trash another planet and to add insult to injury I feel guilty about it too.
I run around and around like this -- I can't solve this for them, but I can't just sit back and do nothing, but if I do something isn't that just as bad -- and it's just a nasty place to get stuck in.
(I used "I" there simply because it's the correct pronoun, given the circumstances.)
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There was actually a disappointing lack of comments on Mark in the Writeoff thread — plenty of feedback on the story, but no debate on the central theme, not of the sort that you seem to be looking for (and the sort that I was hoping to engender). You're one of the first to engage with it that way. Definitely hoping publication spurs more of that.
If your fingers write the story your brain is working on, definitely let me know. I can hurry up Mark's publication schedule accordingly.
I enjoyed Mark of Destiny because (and I know this probably isn't what you want to hear) it was stuffed full of uncomfortable. The abuse of superpowers, humanity running roughshod over Equestria, Mark's interesting and eventful journey through ponyville, the surprise ending, etc. It seemed like every part was engineered to be as uncomfortable as possible. The premise, the unfortunate implications, and the scenes themselves. Unless you do some super heavy editing, that's the story it's going to be, and I'd predict plenty of upset readers.
The lack of comments might be because while we've all seen that some people will loudly complain when they read something they dislike, plenty of others respond by not commenting at all. That's my guess at it.
Now if you want to actively stir up a shitstorm, keep in mind that while you've got good ingredients it's still waaaaaay too benign. Crank a few levers up to eleven first.
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I appreciate hearing that. Enjoying it because of the uncomfortable is actually just fine with me; it's definitely meant to challenge the wish fulfillment even as it deliberately follows those patterns. The trick is to make it an enjoyable sort of uncomfortable, in a Watchmen sort of sense, rather than something that gets people tuning out because it's harshing their buzz.
If I had to summarize my goal … I want to drag people down into the dark, and then light a candle and show them the pit is climbable. Maybe get people reflecting on how the problems in the story come from things that need fixing in the real world, too.
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Maybe the biggest problem with that goal is that the problem isn't just caused by social/societal dilema, it's also caused by the setting itself permanently making the Equestrians stuck a rung below the ladder from Humans. You even explicitly have Discord saying so. I get that having the Marks make humans stupidly overpowered (at least relative to Equestrians) is an obvious way to show it being misused and abused, but it's also the kind of cosmological inequality that explicitly cannot be overcome. If it was my story to write (and it isn't, so feel free to disagree) I'd try and scale things back such that marks would give those who have them significant advantages but not any kind of out-right unassailable superiority over unmarked humans or Equestrians. I though human's ability to specifically choose a mark for themselves ("Optimization of clean-room processes for quantum transistors." What a waste.) to be much more compelling than, well, magic powers. Maybe that's just me though.