Side B: A New Leaf

Thanks to a piece I published last week called Your Faithful Disciple, I happened to be put in the feature box for the first time since joining the site, which happened at this point very close to a decade ago. In that time, I’ve put out only a handful of stories, many of which sit unfinished. But being featured inevitably attracts attention—attention for which I am grateful, and which has translated into the form of a bevy of new followers. To you, I say welcome.

The work I posted today dives into this issue somewhat, and since I intend to explore it more deeply below, I don’t want to dwell overlong on it up here. But the piece, at one brief point, uses music as a jumping-off point to discuss art and the kinds of ponies (or people, or creatures) that create it and why.

As part of the process of writing this, in conjunction with some general personal discovery lately, I have sorted out a lot of things about myself, as well as why and how I write. The more immediate realization was that, despite being on the site for nearly a decade, I have done very little with it; despite immersing myself in the massive anthology of written work produced by this fandom, I have done very little to interact with it. I read and love stories, then let them be without a comment or a favorite or even the bare minimum of effort in a thumbs up. 

I am, in a word, a lurker. And having finally, actually, become cognizant of that fact, I intend to change it. And the first step toward that is introducing myself. So.

I am LysanderasD. You can call me Lysander or Ly if you like; I answer to both of these. I’ve got a bachelor’s degree in English with a certification in publishing. I like words. I have dedicated a significant portion of the last decade to horse words in particular (but not exclusively; I dabble in Pokémon and Final Fantasy XIV writing on the side). But the most distinctive thing about my approach to words is that I do not think of myself as a writer, but an editor.

My passion isn’t in the writing of the words. Nor is it necessarily in the positive feedback I get for writing them (though, as anyone who has ever written anything knows, the feedback is nourishing all the same). What I live for is, like Octavia in Four Thirty-Three, the moment between; the conversation and connection between creator and audience. My passion is in ensuring the message (whether it is mine or someone else’s) is clear; that the author knows what they want to say and how to say it; what they want the audience to know and understand; and how all of these factors come together in the creation of words.

As a consequence, I’ve become very good at recognizing and qualifying what I like in written works, which has resulted in the convenient side effect of me knowing how to write what I like. So I can write, and I’d like to think that I write fairly well (though I definitely have “a type” of work I prefer to stick to, as it were); but I am not a writer.

I love character pieces. Ultimately almost all writing is character pieces when you get down to brass tacks, but what I really, actually love are stories that are about characters rather than stories with characters in them, which are different beasts. I like taking the time to get into a character’s head, to see their thoughts, learn their habits. And I love seeing characters interact; I especially love self-aware interactions, by which I mean discussions about the nature of relationships, and characters discussing the changes in their own relationships. It’s this particular love of mine that draws me to MLP, which is almost tailor-made to tell these kinds of stories; it also probably shows through in my favorite works, many of which are stories about self-discovery, self-awareness, and the recontextualization of relationships in light of that particular awareness, i.e., device heretic’s Eternal, Daetrin’s Apotheosis, and Starscribe’s Synthesis and, lately, Fine Print.

It is also, though I was not aware of it at the time, why I wrote Silence and Motion.

Silence and Motion was not the first piece I published to this site. That particular honor belongs to what was originally intended to be an anthology about the princesses, one that I never really properly planned out and so sputtered and died. But Silence and Motion is the piece I think of first, and even if I cannot say it ever caught on under its own power, it, not Speak to the Silence, feels like the first proper piece of pony literature I wrote.

Having said that, I think it has aged poorly. I’ve changed as a person and as a writer since I finished that piece. There is a not-insignificant part of me that really wants to go back and clean it up, to bring it closer in line with something I would write today—but I will not be doing that. For one, it stands as a benchmark of me in some of my earliest days of interest in this fandom (an interest which, for the record, is still going perfectly strong). For another, the piece as written was put together with the help of a friend I know only as Alex Muffin, with whom I shared a great deal of my early time in the fandom and whom I have since, sadly, misplaced, and I look back on the time spent with Alex very fondly and hope that, whatever became of them, they are doing well now. For a third, ObabScribbler was kind enough to do a reading of the fic (a link to which can be found on that story’s summary page, if you are interested), and I would be doing her a disservice, I think, to do any heavy tweaking to the work after it has been so beautifully recorded as-is.

And so we have the work I posted today, a second “chapter” added to Silence and Motion which I have since split into two “sides,” with Side A being the original work and Side B being Four Thirty-Three, which is the same series of events but told from Octavia’s perspective. This satisfied the itch I had to retell the story, as well as satisfy something I’ve wanted to do for a long time, which is play with perspective.

Both sides of Silence and Motion are about the same characters, in the same relationship, experiencing the same events. In many places, the text is deliberately very similar or even identical between the two. But they are very different stories. Octavia and Vinyl note things about the other that they fail to note about themselves; they perceive the events differently, have different thoughts going through their heads. Even the prose style between them is different, with Vinyl using an unrelenting, rambling stream-of-consciousness and Octavia having much more structured and organized thoughts. At the risk of tooting my own horn, I’d like to think I did a pretty good job the second time around, and took more pains to linguistically center the work and put more auditory language and references to noises and silences in Octavia’s side, which was a failing of mine in Vinyl’s.

But there is danger in that, too, and I admit to some degree of anxiety that Octavia may be a lot more boring to read, a lot harder to glean character out of because of the way I’ve written her—deliberately phrased her and contextualized her in such a way that tries to show rather than tell, but makes readers have to work harder to see it compared to Vinyl wearing her heart on her metaphorical sleeve. I quite like the work the way it is; but I respect that it is hardly perfect.

But beyond being a character study, Four Thirty-Three is also a (very brief and admittedly reductionist) discussion on art and those who make it. In the context of the story, it refers specifically to music, but it could be applied more broadly to art in general, be it auditory, visual, or written. Broadly (very broadly; this is not meant to be a catch-all), artists (to condense the idea into a singular word) create art either because they are fundamentally drawn to the process of making art; or they do this because they value the response of the audience to their art. At the core of both motivations is the idea that the artist has a message, or a vision, or a song, which burns deep inside them, and they are motivated to share it, either for themselves or for others. That is, in essence, why I do not consider myself an artist as such; I have never felt that pull, that burn, that ache—though I know it exists, and have had it described in loving detail to me by those who feel it. 

Four Thirty-Three also allowed me to finally, after a fashion, fulfill something I had intended to do with these characters much earlier on, but could never manage to get down the way I wanted it to. I had a flurry of story ideas featuring Octavia Melody and Vinyl Scratch which I collectively thought of as Experimental Music; most were, and some are, still beyond my ability to tell in the way I wish to tell, and so they will remain untold. But for the time being, at least I’ve fulfilled a small part of my dream.

The conversation between writer and reader is ever ongoing and ever a challenge. But I thank you if you’ve chosen to join in on that conversation with me—whether you’ve actually commented or not.

A few things to close out this blog. 

First is that I intend to put more of these out in general; even if I am screaming into the void, I have kept my mouth shut for far too long and I’d like to at least leave my thoughts somewhere other than in my head. 

Second is that, for those followers of mine who watched me because of Your Faithful Disciple, thank you again for your kind words and attention. You may be pleased to know that I have a much more actively speculative sequel in the works, the working title of which is The Dreamer and Me and the plot of which will explore a hypothetical connection between Izzy Moonbow and Princess Luna.

Third has to do with groups—I have barely explored them, even though they’ve been a part of the site almost from the beginning. Should my works be placed in any? If so, which? Perhaps this is worth a more extended conversation at another time.

Fourth and last is that I am open to editing works. If anyone is putting together a written work and wants advice or a firm editorial hand (I can be gentle, too, if need be), do not be afraid to seek me out. I love talking about stories, both in a vacuum and in the context of working with the author, and I would love to help you turn your unpolished idea into a refined gem. In a similar vein, if anyone is willing to edit for me, I am 100% open to having that conversation; I've worked with several writers/editors before, including the inestimable Shortmane.

Thank you for reading. Until I inevitably have more to say, I will sign off here.

LysanderasD