Further Context · 7:07am Jan 19th, 2015
Things as I spoke about them in my last blog largely went as planned. I finished up my studies, did pretty damn well in a few things, and I'm all set to start work at the beginning of February. Got my shoes and shirts, slowly learning what an iron is for, etcetera and so on.
One thing that I've been doing a lot of since I finished up at university is driving. The part of my country (big city) I'm working in is quite different from the place where I studied (small university town), especially with respect to traffic and relative distances. For my four years of study, I was able to walk everywhere I needed to go and when I finally got around to getting my drivers' licence, was able to take 30-second drives to everywhere I wanted to go. So dealing with highways and roads where everyone goes twenty over the speed limit and people who hoot at you if you take one nanosecond too long at a stop sign has been an adjustment.
There was one trip at rush hour in the pouring rain on an uncertain route I just couldn't make, and so I had to call my family to help me out. It brought to mind Stage Fright!, my fic where Sweetie Belle nearly faints from stage fright at her first singing audition and needs her friends to come up and help her. The lesson I wanted to get across in that story is that sometimes you're just not ready to do something yet and that it's okay to get help from your friends and family. How well I presented that is of course another matter entirely. I've always been somewhat dissatisfied with Stage Fright! -- it's a first, flawed attempt at a children's story, and giving it an unusual message -- one that can easily be read as endorsing giving up in the face of challenge -- like that doesn't help matters.
But the corollary to that message, which Stage Fright! touches on briefly in some dialogue in the final chapter, is that even though you're not ready now, you can be ready in the future, so long as you work at it. And that's what I imagine Sweetie Belle would have done after the events of that story, and that's what I've been doing with my driving since I was unable to make a trip. It's the attitude of a generation brought up on video games -- you're going to fail the first time, and times after that, but you're going to keep trying over and over, learning from each failure until you get it right.
On a separate subject entirely, I've been poking around a neat site called Scribophile with some original fiction works. What I always liked about this community was the sheer number of active reviewers and readers -- there's always someone to help you with a story you're working on, and to tell you what they thought of a story you've finished. Until Scribophile, I could never find a reasonable alternative to that in non-pony non-fanfiction words.
Scribophile reminds me a lot of the preliminary discussions we had on /fic/ about Demetrius's planned ponyfic review site (see comments of last post), and it works. It even has a native system for making Google Docs-esque inline comments and suggestions in works. There's a karma system where you earn by reviewing and spend by posting, carefully tweaked so that the average user will have to make at least three reasonable-sized critiques for every (3k words recommended) snippet of their own stuff they post for critique, with bonuses for critiquing new things and things which don't have critiques yet. The dark side is that the site works on a free/premium model, with heavy feature restrictions on free accounts (only two stories posted at a time, no formatting, etc) but you can work around that without too much hassle. And hey, webhosting ain't free[1].
The userbase is more Nanowrimo (middle-aged housewives) than brony fandom (college-age males), but you can definitely receive decent quality criticism, and are practically guaranteed to have at least three people give input on each piece. I don't think I'd pay for a premium account though, volunteer criticism/workshopping being the crapshoot that it is.
[1] I heard a story about a fellow who wanted to get a website up, but thought all the hosts he talked to were shysters because they charged monthly fees. Surely you just throw a website up into the cloud and it stays there, right?
