Why You Should Read "The Skyla Pseudonym" by iisaw (if you haven't already...) - - - Top Shelf #4

Thought this blog series was long dead? So did I!

Overall, my passion for this fandom has definitely cooled over the past few years, and even my enthusiasm for the endless possibilities of fanfiction has ebbed. Over this past year or so, I even started picking up real, non-pony books again (and finishing them!) in situations where I'd traditionally be reading a fanfic on my phone instead.

That said, I still haven't given up on steadily plodding through my Read-Later list, not to mention keeping up with new chapters of several ongoing stories (the day Diaries of a Madman ends will be a dark one indeed). Part of what keeps me going, on that long and lonely road—even though I'm still not caught up on the last season and a half of the show itself—is that I know any one of these fics that once caught my eye might blow me away like my old favorites once did.

Since my fic-initial reading frenzy wore off, I thought I'd never add a new story to my Top Shelf, simply because I knew I had changed, and I could tell I wasn't ever going to react to a fanfic like I once would have.

The Top Shelf is a special place, for fics that stand above the rest, transcending the genre (for lack of a better word) and the amateurism we must admit we expect from it. How exactly they do so is a bit complicated, and might vary from case to case. Generally, the stories must be of a professional quality—minus the polish of a professional publishing process, of course—or else be true examples of what makes the medium (better word?) of fan fiction unique and important in the world of literature: how it can give us amazing stories and brilliant works of authorship that would be impossible or even unimaginable to write or read through any other, more "original" literary vehicle.

Whatever the deeper reasons, what makes a story Top Shelf material boils down to a single question: would I pay to own it in print?

This has been my guideline since I first started these shelves, and I'll hold to it as long as I keep reading stuff on this site. However, the considerations that go into answering that particular question are the kind that change over time as life changes. After all, to have shortskirtsandexplosions or Aquaman sitting on your IRL bookshelf next to Tolkien and Orson Scott Card says something significant, both to others and to yourself. But what and where that bookshelf is, and who might be reading the titles on it, can really change what that statement is.

Back in 2014, I would've proudly made fanfiction a sizeable portion of my home library. And I'm not saying anything like I've become ashamed of displaying my more eccentric literary tastes for anyone to see—on the contrary; I'm still happy to explain it all for anyone who asks, and stand by it in the face of any and all ridicule. But until now, I didn't think I could still feel as strongly for anything new.

There have been others in these intervening years that I debated over for a while before consigning to the Middle Shelf as a matter of course, due to this attitude. But when I came to the point of decision after finishing this story, I realized dismissing it, as I had been doing, would be a particular disservice.

So, after I admitted that threshold had been crossed, and this story truly didn't fit in among the ranks of the Middle Shelf, for the first time in several years, I seriously confronted the Top Shelf question:

"Is this a story I would pay to own in print?"

It was especially tough this time since this one actually is available in print, so this wasn't a theoretical question; if I wasn't willing to put my money where my mouth is, the question wouldn't really be worth much, would it?

So I gave it some serious thought. Yes, I thought I would be willing to have it in my personal library for the rest of my life. No clue if I would ever pick it up and reread it, but apparently that's hardly a requirement for my books. The actual price tag is extremely reasonable, so paying for it is no problem.

What would I say to people who ask about it?

As I thought about it, I was reminded of another one of my Top Shelf titles, Friendship is Optimal, and my reasons for including it. I chose it for Top Shelf because it wasn't even truly fan fiction; by all definitions, it was an original science fiction novella (largely centered around licensed property, but not truly derivative of it), and a pretty good one at that.

Likewise, I thought of The Immortal Game, the first and founding member of the Top Shelf. Apparently I never wrote a blog for it (though I was sure I had at some point), but I chose that one for Top Shelf because it's an excellently-written fantasy-adventure novel, not just adventure fan fiction (or "despite being", some might say).

So on that metric, would this story hold up enough to recommend to outside readers? It took some soul-searching to realize it, but my answer was yes.

I'll be ordering a hardback copy for myself soon.

The Skyla Pseudonym

Firstly, as I just suggested via the precedents I brought up for the deciding factor in this inclusion, The Skyla Pseusonym is a top-notch adventure story, even by mainstream fantasy industry standards. I wasn't fully convinced of that until about the third act, when the conflict finally picked up some real stakes and the plot started to drive forward under its own power, rather than the more relaxed, reactionary pace of the second act. (But the tradeoff was well-worth the slow buildup, let me tell you.) But after that, when I looked back, I realized iisaw had been smuggling in bits of this pro-grade action under my radar all through the whole series leading up to Pseudonym.

Oh, on that note I guess I should start with the first three installments, and the Alicorn Mystery Series as a whole.

As a preface to this section, I want to point out that my approach to this series was fractured and not at all focused. I didn't read the books back-to-back; in fact, I can't say I exactly read any of them cover-to-cover, even. As I've been doing with fimfic stories for years now, I mostly kept them open in a tab on my phone for incidental reading, to fill time when I had nothing else to do but wait—during work breaks, in the bathroom, things like that. It wasn't until about the last half of Pseudonym that I started taking it out at every opportunity, out of a desire to read more.

Now, I freely admit that this way of reading through the stories on my Read Later list may not be giving them the fairest chance to compete for good Shelf spots. Again, this is part of what's changed since I was really, truly active on this site; I'm just not motivated to dedicate time to reading fanfic, like I used to. It's a shame in that sense, but it can't really be helped.

So it's entirely possible that I might have a different opinion of the (so-far, hopefully) four books in the Alicorn Mystery Series if I had first read them all together, back-to-back, as a series, giving them the level of attention they deserve. But that airship has sailed, and this is the universe we live in.

I greatly enjoyed the first book, The Celestia Code, when I read it back in . . . *scrolls through comments...* Wow, only January? (Chisolm Trail, this winking year . . .) Anyway, it's been long enough since (somehow) that my memory of it has degraded a bit, and the same goes for the other two books as well. (Let's just hope my memory of the one I just read stays fresh long enough for me to finish this post.)

So like I was saying, I had a lot of fun with Code, and looking at it now, I'm a little surprised that it's as long as it is, because the only reason I ended up assigning it to the Lower Shelf is because it felt a bit too short—or, perhaps more accurately, incomplete.

The outside presentation of Code—title, cover image, description, etc.—is all effectively a promise of a grand, millennium-spanning mystery, probably triggering some urgent modern-day adventure for Twilight . . . But that's not quite what the story actually delivers.

Certainly many of the elements are there, and I can see how the story ended up dressed as it is, but I couldn't help feeling a little disappointed that it wasn't more exciting—and not just because of the expectations I had going in, either; to me, the story sorta felt like it wasn't taking what it set up as far as it could've based on what it set up for itself as it went. Until well into the third act, there just wasn't much at stake. (I'm sensing a pattern here . . .)

That aside, though, the story was respectable in several aspects. The characters were very likeable, largely through consistently-excellent characterization, and though the plot was a bit underwhelming and seemed averse to taking risks, it was clearly well-thought-out to an admirable degree.

Though there really wasn't anything in the way of a sequel hook (in fact it wrapped itself up so neatly that I might have forgotten there was one if I had missed the link), I could tell I shouldn't pass judgment on it purely by itself, and I had a feeling the payoff I was craving would show itself in the series as a whole.

Which leads me to something I should add to my earlier preface about my experience reading the series, though it's a bit hard to put to words: the Alicorn Mystery Series is a bit of an anomaly as a series, because the books don't entirely feel like sequels to each other. Part of it is that they usually don't follow each other directly (as I recall), but instead are each separated by time skips of indeterminable length (at least to readers quite like me).

Hopefully I can explain this . . . Where most book sequels feel like the next leg of a journey, iisaw sequels feel more like progressive levels of learning math: once you've finished one, you feel accomplished and expert in the tools you've mastered so far, though you have no inkling of what their actual use is or what's still in store at the next level; and once you move on and get into that next course, you start to realize how everything you've already learned can be put together into a platform to do something new and larger.

Likewise, when you finish a book in the Alicorn Mystery Series, it feels like the story has ended. New discoveries have been made, and the characters and world must come to terms with the new normal. But in the next book, taking place a few years later, you see how those discoveries and changes really did alter and widen the world—organically and believably—and that in turn now leads to a new story; not just a new adventure or even a new generation, but an evolution. It's a fascinating sort of almost fractal reiteration with consistent continuity throughout, and I can't think of any other story series in media that I can really liken it to.

So on to The Luna Cypher. As I described, the resolution of the last story sets the basis for this one, and though the connection is organic and logical, as I said, Cyper feels more like a standalone story than an actual sequel, and that's mostly due, I think, to the vast difference in tone, and, really, genre.

Where Code was all about mystery and serious implications, Cyper is full of action and decision-driven. In other stories that might be a jarring shift, a change the author makes just because they want to write something different, but here, it's actually a wonderful illustration of Twilight's character growth, during the first book and afterwards. Her role evolves in consequence to her actions, in a way I find myself wishing for in almost every story I read, anywhere.

I actually refrained from placing Cypher after I finished it, since I was eager to get to the next sequel and I still felt that I should judge the series as a whole rather than in parts. (I've now gone back and put it in the Middle Shelf.)

Funnily enough, though, the next book, The Twilight Enigma, feels even less like a sequel to Cypher than Cypher did to Code, to the point where I'm pretty sure when I picked it back up after a long period away from it, I might've forgot entirely that it was part of this series.

Of course, it's another drastic tone shift, this time to a literal swashbuckling adventure, splitting back and forth between the beginning and end of a long quest. And once again, though it builds from and towards the events and decisions of the other stories in the series, it itself is a very self-contained story, that still manages to continue serving Twilight's series-spanning character development.

This was really the one where iisaw's (and team's) talent for thorough, yet naturally-implemented research, for which I have infinite respect. It's not unusual for authors on this site to do extensive research into a topic, but the way they use it in their stories most often tends to feel a bit shoehorned, almost as if the author is trying to look smart. And while I'll admit that iisaw isn't entirely innocent of that, sometimes toeing the line of what counts as necessary information to include in order to serve the narrative (more so in earlier books than later ones), more often than not I was surprised at how those details were woven into the story itself, sometimes becoming effective plot points themselves.

In a similar vein, as the series went on, I realized more and more how impressive the action was. At first it was limited to alicorn magic duels, which are nothing new and relatively easy to reimagine in a new, unique, and interesting way, and are consequently hard to do exceptionally (again, see The Immortal Game). But soon enough the action expanded into other forms, ones which are harder to pull off memorably and skillfully, but have a much higher ceiling to be impressive if you can. Pseudonym is really the one with the best examples of this, but oh how I wish it had more.

I gave Enigma a Middle Shelf spot right away after finishing it, since as a story by itself it was well-rounded enough to clearly earn it. After today, I may have to go back and reread it someday to reconsider if it's worth buying, too (I can think of a couple of couple others on the Middle Shelf I probably owe that to . . .).

If memory serves, I jumped immediately into Pseudonym, the latest entry in the series (but, importantly, not stated to be the last), but I went away from it for a couple months to read an actual book or two instead. The beginning didn't really hook me, since as I said earlier, there's not much sense of urgency for most of the story.

Eventually, though, it found its way back to the top of my immediate reading queue, and I hashed it out all the way to the end, with more and more enthusiasm as I went on and began to realize how good it had been all along.

So now we're actually to the book itself. Why should you read it, if you haven't already? After all I've said about slow buildup and missing payoffs, you might not actually feel very sold on it so far.

Let me be clear, and reiterate once again: I didn't really read this book, or this series, with the attention I should have paid it. If I had (and if you do), I would've realized a long time ago that it would lead in the end to a Top Shelf title. As it was, I had a feeling from the beginning that it could be leading to something outstanding, and the biggest compliment I can give to The Skyla Pseudonym is that I'm reserving a spot on the Top Shelf for its sequel, whenever it comes out. All the best parts of Pseudonym's plot in the third act that I keep referring to are really just setup for the driving conflict that's in store for the next book. Pseudonym has exactly what I hoped to find in Code, and it turned out to be just what these really good stories needed to become exceptional.

The next best compliment I can pay it is that it ruined the next story on the list for me, which is always a sign of great writing. Having a solid team of editors is one thing, but the underlying writing in Pseudonym is good enough, without any help, to set an unrealistic standard for whatever's unlucky enough to follow it. I mentioned the characterization of the first book, and that's another strength that's at its strongest here in Pseudonym. Twilight is firmly and consistently the protagonist and viewpoint character, even though this particular story is arguably less about her than the others, at least for most of it. And at the same time, the main supporting characters are subtly deep and dynamic without ever actually edging Twilight out of the narrative spotlight or being forgotten or neglected by the author at any point. Keeping the balance between all these elements is a skill that's rare to see in amateur authors. iisaw, I'm confident you could get an original novel published on only the second or third submission if you ever want to try your hand at the mainstream. I hope you go for it.

I honestly can't wait for the next installment of the Alicorn Mystery Series (and I just realized I should go follow iisaw, since I haven't done that yet). I suspect we're only waiting on iisaw because he's not sure how to make Cadance prominent enough in the story to earn the title spot.