I could turn Terror In The Glass Factory into a book. · 8:50pm May 3rd, 2016
This Bad Idea(TM) occurred to me this morning, and I haven't been able to get it out of my head.
Terror in the Glass Factory is (that is, would be) a prequel to the Mirror Fidelity series showing how Shimmer met Shining Armour and established herself as a monster hunter in Manehattan. The story came to me from the title alone, and in my head it's a decently-sized one. Given my writing schedule, if I were to write it all out then between planning, drafting and editing it would take me at least a full year, after which, like, six people would read it. It would come on the heels of an aggressively dark series about sex, suicide, and the least popular ship in the entire fandom. It seemed to me that if it ever did come out, the concept would be fated to instantly vanish into obscurity.
But what if, instead of writing it as a prequel fanfic, I wrote it as a piece of original fiction?
I mean, thinking about it, it's barely an MLP story at all by this point. The two main characters are some dark AU interpretations of characters who have barely/haven't even appeared canonically, in a location that we've technically never seen, surrounded by a supporting cast of original characters. The villains, too, are basically original. The Fidelityverse changelings aren't giant magical shape-shifting pony-beetles, but are instead tiny, sapient, carnivorous butterflies who happen to also be improbably good mechanical engineers. Add a couple Fae elements and I wouldn't even have to change the name.
Imagine this: You're someone who knows nothing about MLP (a stretch, I know) and you're in a bookstore when you come across this young adult fantasy novel set in a world much like ours, but slightly more magical. A brash young woman comes to the big city to hunt a group of evil biomechanical shapeshifters called changelings, only to be held back by frequent run-ins with the police - not because they don't believe that changelings exist, but because everyone knows that changelings only hunt in forests and small villages, dummy. The only one who listens to her is a cute police cadet with a busted leg who makes it his personal mission to keep her out of trouble, if only to stop her from causing his boss constant headaches, and through their unlikely partnership they uncover a Terror that will rock the city to its core - a Terror in the Glass Factory. All the while, their budding romance brings light to her self-destructive rashness and his self-destructive passiveness, and through each other they avoid becoming what they despise the most. Starring Not Sunset Shimmer, Not Shining Armour, Some Police Guy, Some Other Guy, and an evil industrial executive named Greta Oto.
Imagine that you have read this story and have some kind of opinion about it. Imagine that you were to come online and discover where this story originated. What the heck would happen?
So that's, you know, a thought that I've been having. (Buy my book.)
Being one of those six people who would read the hell out of that story, yes do that.
I have no idea what would happen when people started finding Mirror Fidelity from that, but I kind of really want to find out.
3917287 Thankee kindly.
I would certainly be interested. Just put up a blog post celebrating your first published book. :)
4068777 Oh, you mean kind of like this one?