New story: Little Orphan Tiara · 11:12pm Mar 24th, 2016
Tags: Random/Comedy
Description: Due to budgetary constraints, Ponyville's orphanage is being closed. With a little help from Mayor Mare, Care Taker is determined to find all her charges a home before it does. In her favor, Ponyville is a generous and loving town, with plenty of ponies willing to adopt a foal. But working against her, one filly has rather high standards in who she is willing to be adopted by.
I wrote this story for a prompt for the Diamond Cutter Anthology, "Diamond Tiara is victorious". It is sort of a silly prompt in some ways. Protagonists are generally victorious, after all, barring a few story types. I contemplated taking the prompt in a literal direction. The British navy has had, over the years, several ships named 'Victorious'. I considered making DT one of those ships. It could have worked. Similar things have been done with ships, tanks, and countries in anime, after all. But I didn't. Instead, I went with DT being an orphan.
Now, for pretty much any story of mine, I can tell you what gave me the idea. Some song, some forum discussion, a progression of thoughts... something. Not for this one. I don't really know how I came up with the idea of making DT an orphan. Maybe it had something to do with another DT story that has Spoiled Rich as her step-mother. *shrug* Suffice it to say, at some point, I just had the idea of orphan DT with crazy high standards for who she was willing to be adopted by.
Silver Spoon and her family was supposed to have appeared in the fic, but that section got cut. Had it been written, DT and Spoon would have gotten along fine, and Spoon's family would have met DT's approval. However, the thought of raising two "Silver Spoons" was going to send her parents hightailing it out of the orphanage.
The front end probably should have been trimmed down a bit, to get to the silliness a bit faster. Maybe a newspaper article or something for a quick info dump, and then go from there, rather than providing the info at a slower pace in a way tied to Care Taker. Give the story a bit more consistent tone overall. But that would have had some drawbacks of its own, so it is what it is.
Little Orphan Tiara can be found here and here.
Now, time to find a suitable cover pic to use dArt. And then to figure out what to work on next. Cranky for Mayor? The Date List? Chapter 12 of P&P&S? I don't know, but I'll figure it out.
Edit: And some cover art created.
