Book printing for Five Score, Divided by Four! · 9:01pm Jul 3rd, 2019
tl;dr version: Books will be printed for the (newly updated and re-edited!) Five Score! [Mature Version] We are trying to gauge interest right now, so click here and sign up if you think you'd be interested! (No need for any payment yet). Full post below!
Hey everyone, Twisted here, it's been ages since I've talked with you guys, and indeed ages since I wrote Five Score.
A few months ago, a member of the community reached out and asked me if I wanted to have Five Score printed as a physical book. I told him I loved the idea and had always planned on doing such a thing, but I needed to finish my re-release re-edit of Five Score first. As it stands, when I first wrote the story, I was an objectively terrible writer on a technical level. Lots of bad grammar, endless typos, no consistency in tense during scenes, etc.
I slowly mastered these things as I wrote the story, and I'd like to think I became fairly competent by the end of the story. However, that still meant that those first ~12 chapters I wrote were genuinely terrible from a technical perspective, and had remained in their sorry state ever since.
So, before I would agree to a book printing, I needed to go in and re-edit everything and re-write those bad chapters. I initially thought I'd only do the first 12 chapters, but I figured I might as well re-edit all of them. And then I got a bit carried away in how much I was editing within them. Needless to say, It ended up being a much bigger project that I ever expected.
Because once I had a pen in my hands and started editing things...
well...
Things got pretty involved. I ended up rewriting and rewording entire paragraphs, usually because of a few recurring problems:
- Really bad style choices or phrasing that doesn't belong in stories (like people literally saying "rofl" or "wth", or emoticons inside dialog)
- Updating the story so it actually fits more into the present day canon with there being 9 seasons, instead of everyone in the story acting like the show ended in Season 5 as before.
- Updating the mature scenes so they don't all come across as oddly homophobic (e.g. "Omg, we can't be doing this, you're a guy and I used to be male!!"
). And overall just making the clop scenes flow a bit more naturally. - Cutting out some of the arbitrary scenes that were tie-ins to dead-end side fics. The major tie-ins are still there (CMC, etc) but many of the one-off mentions of random unrelated characters have been trimmed down.
Anyway, point being, there were a lot of small things that I have been long overdue in fixing, and I finally managed to get it all done. Though, somewhat regrettably, I only updated things on the mature version of the story. It was already a headache, not to mention a massive time sink, to go in and manually do thousands of small changes on the Mature Version. I just don't have the fortitude nor the time to repeat the entire process and redo all the chapters on the Clean Version. But I figure that might be for the best, now you can treat the Clean Version as the "vanilla, original Five Score", and the Mature version is like the "Special Re-Release of Five Score! With updated grammar, modified plot elements, and all the deleted scenes! clop elements!"
So, the book to be printed will be this newly updated Mature Version of Five Score. Right now we are just trying to gauge interest, so no need to bust out the credit cards just yet. If you are interested in getting a hard copy, click this link and fill out the form!.
Also, ideally, we're going to try and get Acesential to include artwork for each chapter, as well as for a few key scenes. Here's one of his Five Score related sketches to give you an idea:
Dash: "Aww, I think he likes you!"
Jack: "Don't you be getting any ideas fella"
I hope you guys are still interested in the book, since due to economies of scale, the more people we have planning to buy them, the cheaper each one will be to produce! Let us know if you have any questions, and even if you're not interested in the book, feel free to go and read the freshly updated Mature Version of Five Score today!
One of my all time favorites. Really hope there's enough interest xD
Cool Cool Cool.
Glad you're still alive.
Even if the price is over £100, it’ll still be worth it. This story is an important part of FIMfiction history, and I’d love to have this read on-hand for future readings.
I would love a physical copy of this great story, no matter which version.
I would love a copy, but being on a limited income due to being unable to work, i'd actually need to know an estimated price before hand
Dang it.
I'd have to say I am sad for the fact that there will be no SFW version of the book, mostly due to the fact that this story was the first thing I read when I came to Fimfiction, is my first favorite and more... yet I was a minor then. And even now, I am way less into clop than some people- though I am glad the flow is better.
It seems your main problem here is not having an editor for the SFW version. Do you think if someone would be up to offering their service, you might consider updating that one too? I'd for one be up to taking the essential edits you did for the mature version and switching it to the clean, but as a writer myself, I know you'd probably want to read everything through afterwards and might not have the time. Still, a suggestion is a suggestion.
I wouldn't really say it's necessary. Mostly because acknowledging the rest of the series would require acknowledging Discord's character development. While he was a rogue wild card during season 3, the Season 4 finale pretty much cemented him as one of the good guys.
I imagine it would also affect dialogue relating to elements added after the story was finished, such as Starlight Glimmer, the Map, Flurry Heart, and the School. I'm not saying it can't be done. I'm just saying it's no as simple as changing every 5 to a 9. You're probably already aware of this though.
I'm not sure about the clop scenes, since I read the clean version, but having a preference doesn't necessarily make someone homophobic. It would be perfectly natural for someone to be confused about their sexuality while they slowly change genders. Especially true, since they don't mentally change, and may still see themselves as their human gender. If you feel it needs some revisions, that's fine. Just do it for the story's sake, and not to cater to a politically correct audience.
Sounds good. Running a search for "Five Score" yields 67 results. Adding the Complete tag narrows it down to 15. Aside from those, only 3 incomplete stories have been updated in 2019. I suppose what I'm saying is that not enough side fic authors finished their parts of the story. Cutting them would give you a chance to repurpose or rewrite their characters, if you see fit.
You're going to need to help me out here, because what precisely came off as fearful of 'the gays' (as though they were monolith) about people being flushed with new hormones of the opposite gender in the midst of a magical, gender changing transformation? Especially when, up until that point, the sexuality of the characters were fully heterosexual in nature? That's a pretty big shift in sexual proclivity (i.e. going from one to the other), to say nothing of sexually experimenting during the transformation process rather than even waiting until the transformations to have fully completed in some of the cases.
Even is the ending wasn't what I wanted, I'm still a major fan of this story.
I'd totally want to get a printed copy.
Yay! That's great news! I've been hoping for a printed version of Five Score for a long time – to be honest, ever since you mentioned the idea in a blog post five years ago. I thought we'd get one printed by Avonder eventually, since it did quite well in the survey he did back in 2017.
Oh! It is him isn't it? I was going to ask about international shipping, but that would explain the lack of separate US/international estimates since he's located in Russia.
I'm hyped my dude I've been waiting for this since the story ended but that being said I do have a couple of what I hope to be helpful criticisms.
First I wouldn't call the whole "Omg, we can't be doing this, you're a guy and I used to be male!!" thing homophobic as that is in my opinion a very normal reaction for someone who just had their species, gender, and sexuality changed against their will, that being said you're the author not me and if you think it's for the best you should change it, just make sure you're doing it to actually make the story better and not just for political correctness sake.
Second I personally wouldn't bother with making the story more inline with the canon due to the fact that so much has changed such as new characters and more character development, for example I can see season 3 Discord doing what he did in the story, I can't however say the same for season 9 Discord, that being said you could make it work it would just take a lot of rewriting to do so.
With all this being however I am quite excited for this and can't wait to buy the final product.
Totally ready for a re-read! Parts of the story felt slightly off with all of the "side fics." I'm super excited!
Is it so wrong to want to see a snippet of their new life? Cause I feel like it might be another block buster!
I wish you the best of luck. Five Score was the first "super long" fanfic I've read (MLP or otherwise), but somehow I completely missed that there were both a SFW and NSFW version.
I can completely relate to the massive undertaking that is editing. I did something similar for a fansub project of mine to redo over 200+ episodes of a series, and man it got overwhelming quick. Best of luck to you.
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That wasn't a "gotcha question", I asked this in all genuine seriousness.
As one of the best fan-fics I have read, period, I would still consider purchasing this book even though my heart still aches, to this day, from your portrayal Discord in it (and I'm well aware of how odd that sounds). But your number 3 in that list gives me pause to reconsider, especially when using a pop-slang word like 'homophobic' (of which I attempted to make clear in my first reply), since it would change the framing and thus the personality of the characters in the story in a significant way.
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Appreciate that.
Though, now I'm a touch confused. That didn't come off so much as 'not so homophobic' but rather 'just a little cleaned up' which is something that would behoove someone attempting to go into print. So the phrasing of 3) now comes off as more odd than ever, well, the first half of it at least.
I was quite busy last week with a 4th of July related trip out of town, but I'm back to answer any questions!
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As Unified Dreams points out, I know some people would have preferred to have a SFW version. I wish it would be easy to offer either version, the problem however, is the economy of scale when it comes to book printing. Everyone would end up having to pay substantially more if we split the book printing into two smaller orders. Apologies for not having selected the SFW version as the one to be printed!
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As far as the concerns about the "what do you mean reducing homophobia!?", perhaps I worded that pooly in what I meant by cleaning up the clop scenes. I'm not trying to make anything more "P.C." just to be a snowflake. Nor am I using buzzterms like homophobic just because I'm "woke" or whatever. The changes were made because the original text was crudely written in those parts and the themes weren't used as well as they could have been.
Back when I first wrote Five Score, those were the first clop scenes I ever wrote, and the first thing I've ever written with TF/TG themes. Obviously, in any such story involving gender changes and changes in hormones/sexuality, there will be dialog and scenes related to the characters evolving to learn and understand their new feelings, new hormones, new sexuality, etc. This is a complex topic to try and weave into a scene, and at the time of writing I had been a complete novice writer with an utter lack for subtly or nuance. So instead of having Dash naturally and slowly comes to terms and embrace her new sexuality, in the original text her initial clop scenes were about as subtle as a brick to the face. (i.e. "We can't have buttsex because that's what gay people do. So if you want to fuck me, stick to vaginal only") I mean, it wasn't just bad writing, it was a really poor way of Dash explaining her feelings towards her changing sexuality. In the rewrite I stuck to the same themes: Dash initially being very resistant towards any notion of attracted to stallions, because that’s not what she is used to being attracted to, etc. And then her eventual coming to terms and adapting to her new sexuality and femininity, and so on.
So the reader can now see the protagonists realistically showing hesitation towards embracing their gender/sexuality changes, but gradually adapting to it, and eventually accepting and embracing their new interests and tastes. I felt it was fair to summarize that entire tangent in the bullet points as simply “made the clop scenes flow better and less focus on some oddly homophobic parts”. Because rather than Dash resisting thoughts of stallions solely because “gay sex is wrong!!!” the theme is now a more realistic “I’m not comfortable with being attracted to stallions because I’m not normally attracted to men, etc.”
TL;DR: It went from "we can't do X because that's gay" to a more realistic "we can't do X because I'm not attracted to guys. And if this body is making me attracted to guys, well that's an uncomfortable thing for me to come to terms with."
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As far as the "there's no need to make it in-line with Season 9". I agree, and honestly, even this newer version of 5score doesn't follow our timeline of the show very accurately. However, I still made edits over some of the needlessly confusing details that pointlessly complicated things for the reader. Things like characters referencing numerous several episodes that never happened (because when I originally wrote it, MLP was only on Season 4, but the show within Five Score had a Season 5) or just erroneous details like how the CMC never got their cutie marks, Flurry Heart being a thing, etc.
Like I said, it's still clear to the reader that this is an alt universe of MLP, only now that fact is a bit less glaring and the story feels less dated.
A friend told me I was acknowledged.
cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/452346793888317440/607978655892766740/unknown.png
So that's neat. Glad I could help!
Print it up! I will buy a copy!
I would never buy or be interested in the mature version, but the teen-rated version means a lot to me, I found some of my best friends through it. So if there's ever a print of that, I'd definitely consider it.
Is it okay to upload any of Acesential's art that you've shared on Fimfiction to Derpibooru? Like, this sketch and the drawings of the main human characters in color?