New story and some translations! · 11:32pm Sep 18th, 2015
Hey folks,
I just hit 'send' on my latest story, a controversial entry from the August Writeoff:
A Once and Future Darkness
link
Strange dreams are haunting the night in Ponyville.
The dreams are lucid and clear, indistinguishable from reality. And sometimes, when ponies wake up, the dreams don't go away.
Hallucinations stalk the waking world. Reality is bending in ways that Twilight Sparkle doesn't understand. But she intends to get to the bottom of this mystery and save Equestria from whatever is hiding in the darkness.
Twilight Sparkle wonders, sometimes, if pony in her dreams is the real her. If that is her soul laid bare.
She's about to find out.
It's been a long time since a story of mine generated this much controversy -- it pretty much consumed the discussion boards for the Writeoff for the first several days of the competition. The result was a story that made the finals, but only placed seventh or so. This was the same Writeoff that horizon's excellent The Last Dreams of Pony Island did not win, because (imo) not enough people appreciate poetry.
In other news, I'm plugging away at the latest chapter of Salvation. It'll be the next item out the dock, probably in 1-2 weeks.
Finally, Nostradamus T is an awesome guy who likes to translate pony stories into Chinese. There's nothing much cooler than seeing a story you wrote translated into another language, and this guy just finished five new stories of mine!
Love and Other Bandages: http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_bc1c2e6c0102vx81.html
The Contest(part one): http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_bc1c2e6c0102w3h2.html
The Contest(part two): http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_bc1c2e6c0102w3h4.html
Naked Singularity: http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_bc1c2e6c0102w5s3.html
I'm afraid of Changeling: http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_bc1c2e6c0102vwho.html
For Whom We Are Hungry Chapter one: http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_bc1c2e6c0102w88l.html
For Whom We Are Hungry Chapter two: http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_bc1c2e6c0102w8lr.html
For Whom We Are Hungry Chapter three: http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_bc1c2e6c0102w8w8.html
For Whom We Are Hungry Chapter four: http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_bc1c2e6c0102w954.html
For Whom We Are Hungry Chapter five: http://blog.sina.com.cn/s/blog_bc1c2e6c0102w9h1.html
Yay more salvation!
3402041 If Jake R sees his shadow do we get three more weeks of waiting?
I have a few of my fics translated into Chinese. It's amazing that people like stories enough to make them accessible to others.
I'm genuinely looking forward to seeing how Darkness has changed.
It's not poetry, but what I read felt almost poetic, in the best sort of way: it had that same sort of vivid imagery and ethereal, sublimated quality, and I suspect yours suffered in the judging for a lot of similar reasons to mine, except with yours people couldn't go "Poetry
" and toss their discomfort into a single easily-labeled box. (Not to open a can of worms, but I suspect that that's where many of the complaints about "not pony" came from: people trying to find a simple and convenient (and wrong) label for a dissatisfcation they couldn't express. I mean, the exact same arguments applied to Pony Island — as you specifically pointed out — and yet not a single person registered their objection to it in those terms.)
Looks good, Gardeyz. I'll read it when I'm back behind a computer. Knowing you I'm gonna love it.
Also very happy to hear about more salvation. Rare and Dash working out their salvation in fear and trembling
Having read it, I can understand why Darkness would be controversial! Nevertheless, it's a great story.
Also, I'm excited about the prospect of more Salvation.
And finally, congrats on the translations! It's a big world, yet curiously small sometimes. Things like this shrink the vastness into a comprehensible, or at least graspable, bigness.
Man, I didn't notice this until now. Very curious to see what you've done with it.