Surprise! The LOEG! · 6:28pm Aug 6th, 2012
So there's this thing I was a part of, organized by the wonderful Wanderer D, called the League of Extraordinary Gentlecolts, wherein I swapped stories with Cold in Gardez as a part of a little experiment. Before we both started writing, Cold in Gardez and I agreed on a prompt, and used that to tie our stories together. Then, my story was posted under his account and his was posted under mine, in an attempt to bolster views for underrepresented authors, and to see if anypony would notice the difference. It was a fun little prank, for me at least, but if I've offended, I apologize.
Now, as to my thoughts on the matter:
I was really gratified to see the positive response to Cold's work, which is really wonderful. His approach to comedy and random-osity is something I can only admire, and I really recommend anyone who enjoyed Things Could be Worse to check out his stuff. His comedic work is humorous and fun, and his more serious stories are wonderful as well.
The response to my own story was really positive as well, and I had a great time watching people's comments on it from a different perspective, as it were. It's brought a few things about my writing to light that I'm going to have to work on (namely my horrendous abuse of commas, which I thought I'd eliminated), and I really loved that everyone seemed to enjoy my trippy, somewhat nightmarish approach to romance despite the problems.
It was also fun working from a prompt, which is something I haven't done in years, and writing like this with a deadline made it more enjoyable and satisfactory when I finished the whole thing. It was like running in a race, in a way, and I was exceptionally happy with the 12,000+ words I wrote in such a short time.
Now as to the experiment as a whole, it was really cool to see the data defy our expectations in a few places. We expected that the lesser-known authors, even with the more well-known authors' fics in hand could not hope to triumph over the beast known as Popularity. As it was it was a pretty close thing for some and for others it was the exact opposite, and that was quite gratifying to see. It's heartening to know that lesser-known authors are being looked at, and that the success of a story is not as strongly related to popularity as we once thought. Of course, it's not exactly scientific, but it definitely was Science!
I know some people are going to be upset about this, but it was all in good fun. If I've offended, I do apologize for that, but not for doing the swap in the first place. It was fun, it taught me a great deal about my writing, and it introduced me to several interesting and entertaining authors.
Cheers!
NEEERD.
Still don't know why anyone should be offended by this...
Now I've been hit twice
when will the new Backwards Through the Mirror come out.
275270
As soon as it can, I've got a couple other writing things I'm doing at the moment, and I'm also working on art.
275342 but... but..... i need my fix plz give soooooooooooon
Your story is like cocaine, people go crazy unless they get their next hit.