I'm a Kirin from a lovely little plateau in the Frozen North. I write when I can, but I love playing games just as much... guess which is easier.
After reading about the opening of a museum in Canterlot, Twilight decides that the magical watch being displayed there is too dangerous to be kept out of royal hooves. Or maybe she just really wants that watch?
Either way, it goes about as well as you expect when it comes to the life of Twilight Sparkle.
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Every princess needs a hobby...
This sounds a awful lot like the plot of "Stealing the Diamond'' from the Henry Stickmin games.
Amusing, especially that apparently Rarity has taken orders for clothes from Celestia before for similar things. Not bad at all, I did love the hi-jinx the sisters got involved in, feel a bit bad for the guards and the curator; they likely all lost their jobs over this.
The ending was okay, left on a laugh, though it felt like something more should have happened. Hard to explain.
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I didn't really want to drag it out more than I did, might do a short sequel about the aftermath in the near future. But at some point I want to do a story about how the Princesses get removed from power and have to live together in a flat in one of the cities.
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I haven't played that game in years, but I suppose it is similar. Those games were wicked.
Felt very stream of consciousness, and the joke delivery was often very flat (despite the actual jokes being pretty decent). Not bad for a first story, though.
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Thanks for the feedback. I'll be sure to work on that.
Very enjoyable
Alright, so, I’m here to tell you that you suck.
Did I get you with that one? I don’t think I did, but it was just too tempting. I’ll be a bit more serious now. I don’t think you suck—in fact, this fic was rather good, though there’s definitely some room for improvement.
I’ll start with some of the less pressing issues. First and foremost, the story flows rather well, and your grammar is mostly solid. I noticed a few occasional slips into the present tense, some missing/incorrectly used punctuation, and some typos here and there. The only recurring thing that stood out to me is that you keep using an en dash (–) in spots where an em dash (—) or a double hyphen should be used (--). But that’s a rather minor thing.
Moving from strictly technical aspects of your story to matters of style, things start getting a bit more interesting. I don’t think I have ever said this before to anyone, but you’re trying a bit too hard to be funny. You have clearly shown that you have what it takes to write a good comedy, though you should try to hold yourself back a little bit—you oftentimes manage to land a good joke, but it is sadly followed by two subpar ones that take from the humour a fair bit. Give the readers some breathing room between the jokes, and it’s going to make the story far better. Hand in hand with this goes the tendency to cram in too much information and funny similes and remarks into your sentences. It’s gotten better as the story progressed, but it still resulted is some rambling, clunky, run-on sentences. So, toning that down should also help make the story a bit more tight and less meandering. Speaking of meandering, there were also a few scenes that seemed to be just filler—Twilight’s meeting with Rainbow and Grey Steel, for example. (Also, if you want characters talk about sciency things, I suggest you do a bit of research on the topic. There were some dubious bits in Grey Steel’s speech.)
All in all, this is a rather good random comedy, though sometimes you tend to go a bit overboard. If I were to liken this fic to anything, I think it’d be a tangled pile of string. A rather nice pile, but seeing it as a neatly packed ball of yarn would be far more satisfying.
And that’s pretty much it. Let me know if anything was unclear, if you have some additional questions or if you’d like me to elaborate on something.
Good luck in your future writing!
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Thank you so much for the thorough feedback, and admittedly you did get me at the start; I literally just woke up 5 mins ago.
Excuse time:
This story was basically an experiment to see if I had what it takes and what I need to do better. I came up with the idea while on the loo, like all great ideas. I found that I just enjoyed writing it and actually using at least some skills I've learnt, but I wasn't really writing for a serious audience. However, I still wanted to try to push my skills and ideas past what they've done before.
I think there are too many "jokes" because I couldn't come up with a humourous situation for the story. So I felt like I had to make up for that by sliding in little bits that popped to mind. As for the low quality-ness, it's not really the humour I usually do. My humour normally revolves around character interactions and behaviour. This story did not have many opportunities for that. But now I know what people's preference for "funny" is: Quality over quantity, be consistent and don't make a pun about a fork because you thought it was a good idea at the time.
For the dashes, I'll just do some research into it and see if Microsoft Word will let me change the type of dash/hyphen with a shortcut.
For the errors in grammer and whatnot, I was the only set of eyes that checked over it until it was published. And my eyes aren't used to picking up on things my brain doesn't know too well. When I converted it to gdocs I genuinely thought that it was putting things in and changing things just to mock me. I don't think I need an editor, but I might need a pre-reader at some point if I want it to be perfect. But I don't mind as long as it's readable to the extent that it becomes enjoyable.
Grey Steel is not a scientist, he referred to his entire industrial process as "sciency things". He's just a boy with an unrealistic dream. And I don't think Twilight explaining in detail how it might, or might not, work is going to compute in his brain. And it would drag out the dialogue, which I really don't like. I do research into things when I need to and when I need to make sure an idea makes sense, but I won't put an explanation in if it doesn't fit the character. If Twilight was talking to someone like Sunburst then I would have them talk about it in great detail because it suits their characters.
All in all, your feedback is incredibly useful and appreciated. I'm writing a sequel that shows the aftermath, and there will be a lot more character interaction. I'm actually using a plan for it this time, so we'll hopefully see an improvement to the structure and less filler. Or it could be worse than this.
Also, could you provide an example or two of where a joke fails and any typos? It's just to make sure that we're talking about the same thing.
EDIT: Improved SPaG, replaced en dash with em dash — I know the difference now. Turns out I had part of the proofing tool turned off.
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Yay! Uh, I mean, sorry about scaring you. And you’re welcome, I’m glad you find my feedback helpful.
I highly recommend getting an editor (or proofreader, if you prefer, even if it’s not a fitting term for someone working with a fanfic) that could serve as your second pair of eyes, as well as a bunch of beta-readers that could mimic the audience and tell you what works and what doesn’t. As for an example of a typo, I recall you mistyping breathe as breath. There were more, but this one got stuck in my brain as really memorable for some reason. And a rather good joke that was sort of ruined by a following joke, I’d say Twilight’s pancake beard followed by a bunch of remarks is a good example.
Lastly, about the science and research. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t want to push you to turn a simple chat into a scientific discussion. It’s just that a large part of what Grey Steel suggests is actually something that is done rather often, so it’s not really as unrealistic as you make it to be. Sorry for the confusion there.
Oh, and not all great ideas come from the loo... some can also be born from lazing around in bed
Looking forward to reading the sequel!
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I'll get a friend to read through the next one, even though he doesn't like mlp. They read a part of this one and immediately spotted a mistake but stopped because it's a rather long fic, and the whole not liking mlp thing. But I'll ask about for editors and all that once I get a better footing at this.
I need to break habits that my school drummed into my head -- I'm not doing this to get the most marks on a test. God, I hated English. The only thing that made it enjoyable was constantly referencing quotes from plays and poems, it actually helped some of my friends pass. There are some of those references in this fic. References from 'Exposure' and 'Storm On The Island'. I'll always put a reference in my stories, the sequal opens with an RDR2 quote.
Also, I did not know that you can use soot as a fuel. Damn, if I was 200 years younger I'd be at the top of the pyramid. Although, in this fic they've only just started making radios so I doubt industrialisation has properly taken off yet. I guess you can always trust that someone will have the same idea as you, for some the idea came to late.
Just changed the breath to breathe. I think Iit would've been higher quality if it wasn't so long for a first fic, but as I said it had no plan beyond "Twilight steals a watch, eventually, I guess." And as someone else here pointed out, it was pretty much all stream of consciousness. I won't be making any drastic improvements to this fic because I'd like to have something to base improvements off, and people can see the improvements I have made from their (primarily your) feedback.
Overall, I'm happy with this fic for what it is. There are lots of things that I would do differently now, but I don't mind being wrong because I get to learn something new. Next time shall be different.
Thanks for your help, both your blogs and your comments have really helped. Give me a shout if you need a brutally honest opinion on anything or anyone.
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Getting someone with an outside perspective to read the story might be a little tricky, but I think it can be pretty helpful as well. In case your friend doesn’t want to help out, you can always ask around for help in some of the specialised groups on this site. And yes, leaving this story as an etalon of your skill seems like a fine idea.
As for the soot bit, some of it is filtered away, but the rest is carried along with gases from blast furnaces and such to heat up more furnaces and machines (and sometimes even nearby homes) in the complexes of steel mills and other heavy industry. That’s also why all of these places are usually spanned by kilometres of large pipes.
Oh, one last thing: There should be no spaces around an em dash—so it should look like this.
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Neat.
I looked the em dash up and it's down to your personal preference to put spaces or not, and I prefer having the spaces. But what do I know? I just learnt this 24 hours ago.
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Yeah, it comes down to personal preference and the manual of style that you use. I prefer the spaceless version simply because it’s shorter
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Ey, thanks! Means a lot. Be on the lookout for a sequel in the future, don't know when, but it'll happen.
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Expect it before the new year.
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Cheers G
You need to work a bit on keeping your tenses and first / second person usage straight.
Otherwise an enjoyable read.
No build up, just sorta slap the reader with that?
Sure the premise is in the title and summary, but that's super blatant and halted my suspension.
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Fair point, it is an unnecessary detail that is kinda jarring. However, I fail to see how there can be suspense at this point in the story because you pointed out that it is indeed in the title.
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Some of you may have completely forgotten about this story (I wouldn't blame you) but I've had a sequel in the works for a while now to tie up loose ends. I've gathered all of your feedback and applied it to my new story, and I think it's a stark improvement over this one.
I invite you to check out my new awesome story:
- MLP: FiM
- Adventure
- Comedy
The results of Twilight's actions unveil after her train derails off Canterlot Mountain. An injured Twilight flees the crime scene, only to meet more dangers on her way home. Celestia and Luna get interrogated.10837048
Enjoy
I really enjoyed the story and I got to thinking how boring it must be to present the face of law and order for eternity so how freeing must it be to once in a long while plan out an elaborate heist to steal back some lost ancient possession.
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Glad you enjoyed it!
Yeah totally, that's why I also have Celestia and Luna getting up to no good too.
Hope you also enjoy the sequel