• Member Since 18th May, 2013
  • offline last seen January 29th

Pump It Up


Dead, but also undead. It's complicated.

E

Twilight is on break, and plans to go to her parents' house for the week. However, the weather decides otherwise, and she's trapped in her apartment at the castle! How will she ever get home?


This story is 100% approved by Twilight's Library! :twilightsmile:

Chapters (1)
Comments ( 22 )

please put it on my group Holidays, please. :twilightsheepish:

3677509
Okie dokie lokie! :pinkiehappy:

Thanks I'm honored to have it on my group.:twilightsmile:

Now we see that Twilight's OCD never takes a break, not even on the the holidays.
Nice story, short and sweet IMO.

Not bad,
Your descriptions were the only issue I noticed, they were dry. For example these sentences...

At the end of the hall was Twilight and Spike’s room. Although it was small, it had enough room for a bed on the right wall, a desk on the left, and a bookshelf on the wall opposite the door.

Could have flowed like so...
Twilight and Spike shared a room at the end of the hall. It was a small one, filled with a bed on the right, a desk to the left, and a bookshelf opposite the door, but just right for them.

In case you're wondering, 'was' in the first sentence should have been 'were' (it's a verb for a plural subject), changing the verb to 'shared' solves that and it's more descriptive. Generally speaking, you should put the subject before the verb. The second sentence is technically two, as 'Although it was small' and 'it had enough room' both have a subject (it) and a verb (was, had). This means you had a comma splice. Putting a 'but' before the second 'it' would have been enough, but then 'although' would have been a redundant modifier. In mine, I removed the second subject, turned the list into a modifying phrase instead of a part of the sentence, and clarified the size issue with a second modifying phrase. I think it works better, but then I'm not exactly impartial.

-Honey Mead

3681239
I'll go ahead and fix that sentence when my brain is better able to process.

I will have this edited, so hopefully that will liven up the descriptions. I struggled with them simply because I wanted to get going with the story. I like to read the descriptions, but I stink at writing them.

I just wish I had actually read this around Christmastime. Ah, well

tinyurl.com/llaz5ct

This story has officially been deemed an Opal by The Gem Hunters.

Good, but something I can't describe just felt off to me.

Comment posted by JumpingShinyFrogs deleted Mar 14th, 2014

4082983
Thank you!

It was probably the clunky descriptions that threw it off. I had trouble writing them, so that probably translated into the execution.

4343546
Thank you for your review! I really appreciate it! :pinkiehappy:

Hello, I am your WRITE reviewer today, and I'm here to have a gander at your fic Let It Not Snow.

Firstly, a quick note. Unless the policy has been changed recently, EqD only accepts submissions for single chapter stories that are over five thousand words in length. Multi-chapter stories can begin with a first chapter not less than three thousand words, provided that subsquent updates eventually bump it over the five thousand mark. As such, you simply got shut down for being too short.

Secondly, a quick spotting of thingies:

Spike nudged his caretaker their room

I believe there's a missing 'to' or 'towards' here.

his voice was lost among so may others.

Likewise, an 'n' is missing here. All in all though, a goodly standard for grammar that supports an already good story.

What we have here is a short and sweet little fic. There's no overarching complexity in its delivery which lends a pleasent sort of innocence to the whole thing. I'm presuming that this happens a fairly short while before Twilight and Spike head to Ponyville, as they are very much their familiar selves here. That Spike is not to be out comes as a bit of an unexpected development: it suggests that they're even younger than I originally felt. It's not critically important by any stretch, and if anything that moment is an excellent example of showing as it suggests, perfectly in context for the characters, this small titbit of exposition.

I particularily enjoyed the opening depictions of snow, particularily when it is described as being an icecream atop the school's sign. There was something really sweet in those descrptions that really did the trick for me, though that image was lost a bit once Twi and Spi had got themselves into the apartment. At that point, it becomes less vivid and bright, somehow, less fun.

The pacing is rather quick throughout this short fic, at times maybe a little too quick. The beginning within the classroom validates itself because yes, it does show Twilight having the intent to do something, meaning that there is motive and plot here. Once in the apartment though, the story makes a point of shoving her into a holding pattern, and this took something nice away. For such a short story there isn't really time or word-space to spend on things as ultimately trivial and forgettable as tidying up. Yes, it expresses Twilight's cooped-in frustration, but does little else. If anything, it was a missed oppurtunity to empathise with how Spike feels.

Likewise, the moment with Moon Dancer suggests an inkling of something - of Twilight broadening herself to friendship and social contact, Twilight herself reinforces this tickly 'is this a subplot I feel?' sensation when she has this moment:

I can just hear Mom now: “You’ve got to try new things and take risks! You can’t be sheltered your whole life.”

And yet there's no further development than this. Whether or not there even IS a thing going on here, it feels like there is, and that it hasn't been resolved.

References - You've got quite a lot, all things considered. The Fantasia one was...a little distracting, really. There wasn't much point to it, it didn't mesh well with the simple holiday appreciation the rest of the fic emanated and seemed to be there only to prove that such a reference could be shoe-horned in at all.

The radio broadcast- I rather enjoyed this. It really did, and was my favourite part of the fic alongside the opening dialogue with Spike, where Twilight is baffled as to how one could be bored at all when in the company of books. You wrote a good, lighthearted and snarky Spike, and it's sad that he gets more and more sidelined as the thing develops. Where the Fantasia reference felt out of place and forced, the Derpy one was very much clever and fitting. It has a plausible deniability about it that I find charming, and it supplements the innocent tone of the story nicely.

Your imagery is affectionately writ, when it is done. The early decpitions of snow, the radio itself in ebony and gold, such descriptions really gave a degree of substance and colour to the reading that helped make the story more visual than others. Unfortunately, as the pacing gets stalled up in the apartment so too does this imagery.

Twilight is recognizeably frantic, but it comes across as a little too constant, like she were in a constant state of highstrung reaction, and became a wee bit tiring, I'm afraid to say. Again, it's cute in the moderate doses but at the panic-all-the-time approach this story took, it Twilight's anxiety manages to neither mesh with the theme nor be a plot point in its own right to develop and resolve.

The ending...happens. It doesn't seem to be heralded by any bit of the story, it just arrives unannounced. There is the letter, but even that doesn't really count since it arrives a literal instant before they themselves do. From there Twilight eagerly has them launch into the poem - this coming all out of the blue for the reader, who had no way to know anything about this - and while the poem is nice, it just ends the fic, just like that.

The ending happens because the story runs out of words, not because anything gets resolved: there is no moment of warm fuzzly payoff, there is not so much as a moment for the parents to really establish themselves in the scene.

To conclude: while Let It Not Snow is short and sweet, bringing with it pleasent imagery and moments of gentle fun, the narrative itself comes across as incomplete, suffering from a pacing that was a little too fast for the premise to cope with compounded by a certain distractability with things that weren't important to the plot (I'm looking at you, cleaning brooms.)

Would EqD have approved this, had the 5k criteria been met? Yes and no, I think. If its present form could somehow be stretched, than no, as I think the two issues I mention do drag Let It Not Snow down just enough to make the EqD crew shy away. And yet transversly the longer word count could very well merit the yes, as that wordcount would have given you the sedate, peaceful snow-fall pacing the story needed, provided it's not pointless distraction filler (brooms again) but theme and plot serving elements, particularily giving a little more love to character interaction and developemnt.

So...yeah. Now that I think of it, Let It Not Snow is a prime example of just why EqD has the 5k min wordcount rule to begin with.

P.S. - ending on the poem, while not wrong as such doesn't help with the sensation of sudden, incomplete drop off. It's not impossible to end on a poem, but to do so successfully there needs to be manner in which that ending completes the story, like the audio track accompnying a movie's credits. Here, it's more as if the poem was asked to stand in for an absent climax and the poor thing just didn't know what to do with itself.

I'll be happy to further discuss any point of this review with you. Simply ask.

EDIT! - I'm made to see that the one-shot min requirement is in fact half what I stated, which means that rejection from EqD wasn't purely wordcount. That said, much of what I said still holds water, particularily in how your limited word count suffers from being too distractable, even wasteful with what it chooses to spend those words on, and having a too-quick pacing that, like a strong wind, prevents the snowflakes of niceness to settle properly.

4548008
Oh, thank you so very much! I knew there had to be something I did wrong; after all, I'm not perfect. I know that my descriptions need work. I'm a little disappointed in myself for letting Spike fall by the wayside, and I knew the ending felt iffy.

Again, thank you so very, very much! :pinkiehappy:

4550268

I'm happy to help. Any questions or queries about what I've said, just let me know.

Comment posted by Reeve deleted Jul 15th, 2014

I found this fic both enjoyable and frustrating. By far the best bits were the exchanges between Twilight and Spike. Not many writers seem to be able to get the tone right there, but I thought you nailed it. :twilightsmile: It was also fun to see a pre-"Amending Fences" Moondancer. My problem was the final section: I didn't think the poem was as good as the prose that preceded it, and the way the story just stops after that felt way too abrupt. So a mixed bag -- but I really was impressed by those Twi'n'Spike scenes.

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