Well first of all, best luck to that editor of yours. (Resisting urge to make soap joke)

This was fun, and it seems you have a very great deal of things lined up to make a story. I'll be waiting, keep it up and good work!

-Sage

Good fic so when does Volume 2 come out?

4037217

Thank you. Volume II will make an appearance as soon as I'm done with finals... in about two weeks or so. I just have to go over the current chapter summaries (and build them up a little more) with my new editor to make sure everything is good to go. Longer volume, more characters, more locations, more insanity. Should be fun.

3998117

Thank you.

4322066

Just finished the next chapter and sent it to my editor, so hopefully it will be up soon. Lots of background stuff had to go into it, craziness.

That was a fun chapter.

4478220

Thank you, it was fun to write, though quite long. Now that I finally have some time off again I plan on writing like the wind.

4929234

Hello,
In regards to your comment; “I feel like this story was rushed ... a lot” in some ways it was. I was incredibly busy at the time, still am in fact, so it didn’t get as much attention as it should have, and it was also a matter of trying to quickly write down ideas that were coming to me before they faded. It was as well trying a new style of writing (never done first person before) and done with a disregard for how I generally develop/polish (writing out all the chapters then editing/drafting et cetera). The first several chapters had editing for mistakes but no comments on story progression/narrative what have you, and I literally wrote the chapters in a single go, sent them to the editor then only made the changes suggested before publishing to FimFiction.

“(dont hit me)” Umm… okay, I won’t.

“Girl gets "saved" by a unrealistic character.” There is a reason why she was saved and for why the character who saved her chose to do so. He, in all likelihood, would not have done so for other ponies found lying in puddles of their own blood… and other things. Further volumes will examine the motivations, background, and personality of the Mysterious Stallion, who is in some ways an obvious expy for the Mysterious Stranger (and whose realism is quite blatantly lacking even in the Fallout games where he appears). Also, if you hadn’t guessed, he was drunk when he “saved” her.

“Girl who barely has ANY fight experience” how do we know that she doesn’t have any fight experience? There’s actually a bit of hinting in the story that she was involved in a profession that involved/required physical prowess. She ended up in two violent confrontations on that hilltop. And, just because she doesn’t remember past experiences doesn’t mean that she cannot take advantage of them. Her “retrograde amnesia” presents as extensive damage to her episodic memory (why she can’t remember anything about her life) and some minor to moderate damage to her semantic memory. Her procedural and implicit memories are relatively intact. This means she is fully capable of undertaking physical actions that would often be below conscious reasoning and awareness. If she learned to fight before waking up on the hillside, which she very much did, her loss of autobiographical memories doesn’t hinder her ability to use those fighting skills, they are what most people would refer to as muscle memory. I’ve seen this happen more than once in real life, which is where the basis for the idea came from.

“decides she wants to kill the equivalent of a deathclaw” she makes no decision on wanting to kill a Hellhound. As far as she is aware, raiders or some other problem that she thinks she can deal with is to blame. She has no idea that it is a Hellhound, despite the clues, until she is actually confronted by it. Also, her choices in the matter are limited. She needs to make a certain amount of caps in a short amount of time or be sold into slavery. While there were certainly other options, she either wasn’t aware of them or didn’t think they would work. She does have a massive head injury after all, even if she is physically capable it doesn’t mean that she is thinking properly.
“with a minigun” huh? The Hellhound doesn’t have a mini gun, he had a scratch built magical energy weapon which was about the only thing the service rifle managed to damage. You might be thinking of the damage that the caravan did to itself with their own weapons, opening fire when the Hellhound rose up in their midst and hitting each other and equating it to the Hellhound having a mini-gun. The only mini-gun that makes an appearance in this volume (fairly sure it’s in there) is the one belonging to Limerick the earth pony caravan guard. It is never fired.

“using the worst gun ever (really a service rifle? Varmint rifles are better than those heaps of hellhound crap)” I would say that the service rifle is at the low end of the scale but unless you’re making a subjective assessment, it isn’t the worst gun ever. You also have to realize that she had to work with what she could get. Service rifles are durable, easy to maintain and use, have a good magazine capacity, decent accuracy and would be effective against the kind of enemies she was expecting (i.e. not a Hellhound). As can be seen she did make a very poor choice, but that was because she didn’t know what she was up against. She also feels some level of comfort and familiarity with the weapon, but that’s a story for much further down the road. I do like Varmint rifles though.

“Girl has very short fight scene” I guess you can consider it short by comparison to the chapter or the story as a whole. The confrontation is about 1300 words in an 11,000 word chapter but if you’re looking at typeset, 300 words per page, as it would be in a published novel, that’s 4.33 pages. It’s also a comedy, the focus isn’t necessarily on action, but how long would you expect her to last, in her condition and with her gear, in a fight against a Hellhound? You had an issue with her getting into a fight with a terribly powerful enemy that should easily and quickly be able to kill her but you want the fight to last longer…

“with no injury to the protagonist” she does get injured. The slave collar prevents her from getting killed by a single swipe of the Hellhound’s claws but she’ll have permanent scars (as has been the decision since writing began) on her neck from the little bit of the claws that got to her. She takes a glancing blow that goes right through her armor and gets knocked around the place pretty badly, receiving multiple blows while doing everything she can to avoid the Hellhound’s claws. And while the timing is convenient (until the reader knows why the Mysterious Stallion was really there), the Hellhound was right about to kill the protagonist, and, if we’re going by Fallout conventions as to why she survived, she has high luck and decent strength and endurance.

“Girl finds out she is a mother and IMMEDIATELY goes baby crazy” I wouldn’t say that she goes baby crazy, but I associate that phrase with a woman really wanting to have a baby, not with the situation at hand in the story. Also, remember, she is thoroughly wasted/hammered/drunk at the time. Emotions are running high. But, more than anything else, you have to look at it from what we would consider her viewpoint to be. She has no memory, no knowledge of who she was, and Mistletoe does know something about her past, something that he has kept from her. Imagine the people around you, who you are beginning to trust, are lying/hiding the truth from you on something very important to who you are. As well, she woke up alone on the hillside. She understands the fear and uncertainty that go with being alone, in danger, afraid. She is empathizing with what she believes her children are feeling, or felt. Here is not only a link to her past, a possibility to find out who she was, but a reason, a purpose, a raison d’etre. She has been aimless, wandering, not knowing what she wants to do as well as not knowing who she is. This can solve at least the former half of that problem.

“(I might not be a girl but I would just not care and keep drinking whiskey for all the protagonist knows those kids died years ago)” and there, in the first part of your words, is a viable answer to why she goes “baby crazy” at the time. It can be difficult to understand the workings of the mind of the opposite gender, because men tend to not think like women and women tend to not think like men. Also, a very worrying indicator of your potential for Anti-Social Personality Disorder that you would continue drinking in that circumstance (she was, as well, already out of the bar and away from the whiskey by the time she finds out she’s a mother). For all she knows they are long dead but that pales next to the importance of her need to know if they are or not and in finding the answer as to where they are, what happened to them.

“I mean this is like a bad cheesy soap opera.” I take back the no hitting thing… just kidding, mostly. Well, it would certainly be a unique soap opera. Also, do you watch (or have you watched) soap operas that you can make an educated comparison between the two or is this using a metaphor based on what you believe soap operas to be? I mean, I can add cheesy musical cues, paternity issues, and dramatically bad dialogue if need be.

“I still like it” that’s good/nice.

“but I really don't want to like it.” That’s no so good... but hah! Like a train wreck you can't look away.

Hmm… it seems like you have a lot of issues with the story, since your comment listed no positive aspects. If you would like to provide constructive criticism, ideas, and other helpful comments I would be more than happy to take them into consideration/under advisement, and can provide access to the Google Docs where the chapters are written and edited before being posted if you think you can (or would like to) add to the quality of the story. Also, this entire volume, which may feel rushed, is the length of a short novel (so there is a lot of content) and acts primarily as the prologue to the rest of the story which will be told in future volumes, and be less rushed (hopefully).

Your book has been advertised on the new facebook group page: https://www.facebook.com/groups/foebooks/ :)