Author's Notes on Vinyl Scratch's Uninvited Guest

First off, thank you for reading my story. This is the third fiction I've made public on FimFic, though it's the fourth one I've completed and the seventh I've started to any significant degree.

I've decided to do things a bit differently here. Instead of doing long Author's Notes at the end of each chapter or explaining things in the comments, I'm going to just link people to this blog post. Hopefully it's preferable to me clogging the comments section with my own comments.

So, first off, I don't know what the publication date on the first chapter will read. On my setup, it's saying June 6th, but it was made public on October 12th. First off, YES it took me over four months to write a story that totals around 5000 words. I'm sorry. I have a lot of other commitments, I'm not a fast or driven writer, and I don't like to submit anything unless I'm satisfied. The fact that I originally made a continuity error in my previous story, "Sunset Shimmer Buys A Burrito", drives me nuts, although I'm thankful someone pointed it out so I could fix it.

This is the first story I've decided to upload in parts. My first story, "Ponyville Holds An Election", got no buzz at all, something I attribute in part to uploading all seven chapters at once rather than spacing them out over the course of a couple of weeks.

The reason this story has the title it does is because I realized nearly every story I've written or wanted to write for this site has the format "X [verb] Y". In fact, this story was originally called (and still is on my Word Docs) "CMC Meet Vinyl Scratch". That's very representative of what the story is, but I wanted something a little less mundane.

Incidentally, the inspiration for this story actually comes from the radio sketches found on the second Trigun soundtrack, wherein Meryl tries to collect insurance premiums from various cast members and gets hilariously rebuffed each time. I decided to flip the perspective to have three different antagonists (in the literary sense) visit a pony. Why Vinyl? Well, she's pretty chill and would put up with a lot more than any of the lead cast. I also wanted to see if I could write a Vinyl Scratch story where she did not say anything. I failed, but the whiteboard was a good way to have her communicate without actually needing to speak. Maybe I should have left out the few lines of internal monologue, but sometimes her sarcasm has to be communicated with more than just body language.

This is the second story I've tagged as a Comedy. "Burrito" used to be tagged as such too, but critics convinced me to drop the tag, even though I intended it to be a comedy. Having reread the story last night… they were right. Dear god, is "Burrito" bleak! I seriously did not notice how depressing it was while I was writing it. I guess I'm not good at comedy. This time, at least, I'm trying to be comedic and not bleak. Will I succeed? Or will readers find my work boring? I know my writing style tends to the academic, for which I apologize.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy this story as it comes out and/or after. Next up will be a Sunset Shimmer one-shot that's already completed. After that will be my first new story in months, a alternate-POV retelling of "Burrito" from Sonata's perspective. It's not going to even try to be a comedy.