New short stories for the Short Story Throne, and a year in review · 1:44am Jan 2nd, 2016
Hey folks,
All the short stories.
Just a quick note that two new shorts are up in my short story collection, I'm Afraid of Changeling. They are:
- Point/Counterpoint, a short comic sketch in which Twilight and a faceless corporate bureaucrat face off against each other over product liability.
- The Calligrapher, a short slice-of-life look at a mare and her father.
I was fortunate enough that The Calligrapher took second-place in the recent "Things Left Unsaid" Writeoff. The next Writeoff will be an original fiction short story contest, which I'm super looking forward to.
Year in Review
Stories Published: 9
Words Written: 112,398
Chapters Published (not including new stories): 9
I had a lot of fun in 2015. Aside from spending my first full year living in Japan, it was also a great year for writing, both about ponies and original stories.
Pony words started in January with big shoes to fill, coming off All the Mortal Remains. Fortunately, the Writeoff continued to be a great source of inspiration, and eight of the nine stories I published in 2015 had their genesis as Writeoff entries. For anyone who's still looking for reason to join the Writeoff and subject yourself to the public review that comes with it, I can't offer any better evidence that it works.
2015 was the year that I feel I really began to understand the craft of writing and how to produce stories that approach the bar of professional and literary products. Short stories like Babel or The Destruction of the Self are, I think, pretty close to the level of writing that one would see in a literary journal. Longer stories like Land of the Blind and A Once and Future Darkness had their own merits, and my old standby, comedy, still apparently gets the laughs. In fact, my two most popular stories so far this year were National Geographic Presents: Big Princess Week and The Time of Their Lives.
The Writeoffs also did something new and amazing this year -- they started offering Original Fiction competitions. There have only been two so far (the third is in a week or so), but I managed to perform well in both of them, taking silver in both events. It may seem like a little thing, taking second place in an internet writing competition, but we had some amazing authors participating in both events, and the fact that I was able to perform well against writers like that helped answer a question I've been wrestling with ever since I joined the fandom: would I still be a good writer if I weren't writing about ponies? The jury is still out, but I'm starting to feel like answer might actually be yes.
Finally, the year closed out with a fun little piece I wrote for myself: The Adventuring Type. It's not as long or serious or ambitious as ShortSkirts&Explosions' Rainbow Dash epics, but it serves much the same point. I get to write as much as I want about Rainbow Dash being silly.
And that's pretty cool, I think. If you'd like to read along, you can find it here:
I hope everyone has a happy 2016! Can't wait to see what everyone does!
Two things:
1) How in the world did you do that formatting magic up at the top with that picture?
2) I'm loving The Adventures of Rainbow Dash: Iceberg Wrangler! The Adventuring Type so far, and I'm looking forward to more of that story, as well as Land of the Blind and, of course, Salvation.
I miss the original goofy title, though I'm guessing you changed it because you plan on expanding the story beyond icebergs.
The o-fic writeoff rounds seem to have given a fair few that similar boost. I'll be interested to see what you come up with next.
3657663
It was either secret Japanese web-coding techniques, passed down from father to son for hundreds of years.
or
the {right_insert} BBCode function (replace {} with [ ] to use).