Silverstream can't wait to get home to Mt. Aris for the holidays. Sure, she had no problem staying behind last Hearth's Warming, but it did mean she missed the first ever Three Days of Freedom Celebration. With everything she has planned this year, it's sure to be a hoot!
But when she discovers something about one of her friends mere days before departing, she finds something she'd hoped she never would – a friendship problem that can't be solved.
This story was written as a gift for Jack of a Few Trades as a part of Jinglemas 2020. Happy Hearth's Warming!
Featured on Equestria Daily, December 13th 2021.
Chapters (1)
Very nice. I think you might've gotten Ocellus' colour wrong though, says she's green.
Pretty devious solution to getting someone that stubborn to budge.
Oh my god this is so freaking cute.
I thought you got Silverstream's scattered, upbeat personality down really well! I love the way that she's bubbly even when she's concerned or just trying to puzzle things out.
Gallus would totally just be grumpy about how wet everything is. XD
Awww, this was great. You had Silverstream down to a tie. Seeing all the friendship lessons being brought up really gave it a feel that this was truly the second year for these guys. Truly they are learning from the best.
I loved it ❤️
I doubt there will be a sequel featuring the Three Days of Freedom but you got my support if you do!
Finally managed the time to sit down and have a read. This was really good, dude! Silverstream is at her best when she's trying to help others. She's a giver, the kind to put her whole heart into everything she does and nothing less. You really did a good job with her characterization. My only complaint was that Gallus was mostly off-screen, as my favorite thing about best birbs is when they're together and playing off one another, Gallus's deadpan and sarcastic attitude contrasting with her bubbly and sincere one. They're a great example of opposites attract. The scenes where they interacted were awesome, but I just wish there was more of it!
Considering this is the first fanfic you've written in four years, color me impressed. Writing is a bit of a perishable skill, but you did a good job on this regardless. And it was big! Way bigger than most of the other jinglemas entries. When I saw the wordcount it felt like waking up Christmas morning and seeing that the biggest present under the tree had my name on it! I appreciate the effort you went to for this story. You did good with the best birbs. Thank you so much for this wonderful gift. Happy Hearth's Warming :)
Thank you everypony for the kind words! They really do mean so much, truly.
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Fixed! Along with close to a hundred other things - only a few are typos, most were swapping some words out for suitable synonyms to avoid word repetition, cutting the odd adverb or adjective, or correcting occasional incorrect tense usage. Nothing that changes the story's beat-by-beat incident at all.
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Aw, thanks buddy! My main desire was to present a complex, nuanced problem, and how Silverstream approaches it, and the theme of shouldering a burden so others have a better time, and how that works on both Silverstream and Gallus' sides, and the general complexity and density of all that. But, the second most-important part after that was how I handled the third-person POV. Which is basically another side of the same coin of her characterisation.
The thing is, the great majority of fanfiction I've written in past fandoms has very much been in "this is a movie/tv episode, but written" mode. Mostly because getting into animation was my goal for a long time, and I learnt how to write scripts well and everything. If I'm being frank, while I could write a good story and keep the characters in check (though I rarely expanded them beyond what the property itself would do), this had two side effects. Firstly, my need to describe at least partially the visuals of every scene - they never got bloated, but it didn't really help all that often all the time. Second, I tended to have a wide 3rd-person POV, rather then a limited one. So direct character thoughts and insights were limited.
Coming back to this, having not written a published fanfiction in so long, I knew I didn't have the time to courage to totally change style. So I made a decision fairly early on to do a limited 3rd-person POV, and have the whole story be from Silverstream's POV - basically to force me to adapt. And, well, it did. Sticking to just one character forced me to get inside her head, and then bring that out here, and let it inform how she perceives every other character and every event. And that she is already super-familiar with every physical location in the story already was a nice side effect, meaning there was no need for most visual scene descriptions either.
However, I didn't want to go to a super-tight 3rd person POV either - that can get overbearing, and be hard to handle for both the writer and the reader. So, I sought to try and emphasise Silverstream's characterisation less through constant "this is what she's thinking!" moments (the big moment where I do, however, do this is the several paragraphs on her initial trip back from the office, which serve to set up her personal stakes in heading home for her first Three Days of Freedom Celebration), and more by small asides in the middle of sentences, and brief thoughts on how she perceives things. Unobtrusive characterisation, I guess you could call it.
Look like it worked, seeing as Silverstream's characterisation has been the constant source of praise from every commenter thus far! Glad you liked it!
He would, wouldn't he? Although to a fish and an underwater creature, water doesn't feel wet when your totally in it - the feeling we associate as 'wet', and what Gallus too would, is to do with the reaction to the air and how non-marine bodies react to it. I can picture Gallus getting a lecture on that from Silverstream or some other seapony, and just rolling his eyes at it all.
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Thanks for the praise! That wasn't a totally intended effect, but the notion of more complex friendship lessons, and having to make choices between two conflicting principles, absolutely was. While remaining subtle about it, my intended effect there was to show how in learning something, you move from a surface-level understanding of it to a more deep understanding, and rather then learning the answers in a spoon-feed manner as you did before, use what you learnt before to be able to puzzle out the answer. There's a reason the story features Silverstream recalling two workarounds central to math, one theoretical and one very number-focused, and reaplying them to her current situation (also, I wanted to side drop the fact that the School of Friendship does teach other things, but not call attention to it - unobtrusive world building, you know).
But yes, the story does very much play into this being their second year, being the same Hearth's Warming that "Best Gift Ever" happens in, and that bleeds into every facet of it, some intended and some not. Glad that satisfied you!
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Aw, and I loved that you loved it!
Funnily enough, the original draft of this story DID have all that too, and the events depicted here existed in a super-truncated form as a prelude (I've seen plenty of fanfics around that have some of the setup be only in the blurb, and not in the story, so even what I had in mind is mild compared to what others have done - to me a story should always make sense even without remembering what the blurb says). The problem was, other then the notion of Gallus being a sad sack through it all, and it leading up to a quiet, intimate (but platonic!) heart-to-heart between him and Silverstream, I couldn't figure out an actual story. Which probably would have been fine for many viewers, and for Jack of a Few Trades, but while I wanted a nice, heartwarming story, I wanted it to actually, you know, have some meat to it.
So I decided to just outline the events of the prelude, figuring that outlining that as a short story might help to get me going in the writing process, or see if it could stand on its on… and it just followed from there. And I ended up with this lengthy tale (for Jinglemas word limits) of a complex friendship problem, what it means to handle a burden alone and for others to shoulder it with you, respecting others' desires but working around them to still help them, and all that.
That said, I haven't discarded the notion of a followup chapter of the events that the three go through at the Three Days of Freedom Celebration! The only issue is, I both needed and wanted this story to end in a manner that felt complete and fully resolved, so some things I might have left open-ended were resolved in the coda. That, and I still would need to figure out what happens in the second chapter. And it needs to thematically and tonally feel of a piece with this story, in terms of more complicated friendship problems, how one tackled them, burdens, and all that. Right now, I can't help but see it as slightly more dour.
So I'm probably going to leave this story as-is. But, it could still happen! Keep your eyes peeled, my friend.
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Aw, I so happy you really liked it! While producing something I personally felt was worthwhile, had substance and, frankly, could stand on its own beyond being a light and fluffy Jinglemas entry, was my primary goal, producing something that you deserved (and yes, I really do mean that; I really like you as an author and your work) and that would please you was a close second.
You should see my reply to hawthornbunny a bit above for more on this, but the end result of my characterisation of Silverstream was dialling back my old style of fanfiction writing into something that was more intimate in the prose voice - a 3rd person POV that was confined to one character, but without being a super-tight, limited, 3rd-person POV either. I didn't want to do the kind of POV that breaks every other sentence for character thoughts, nor did I feel comfy making that big a leap in style. I wanted us to be seeing it through Silverstream's eyes and perception of events, but not obtrusively so (hence Twilight and the others only having their teaching prefixes in dialogue, not in description).
So, sometimes consciously and sometimes subconsciously, I sought to drop little details here and there to boost her characterisation. Many of these are simply how she perceives things (writing Twilight, Rarity and Spike as Silverstream perceives them proved to be a very interesting writing exercise). Obviously there's her having to decipher a certain emotion or facial reaction, given her time hiding away, and those are great, but I didn't want to overuse them. Some are her making comparisons to previous events that are similar, which are both for the purpose of humour but also to illustrate how she sometimes uses past things as a basis for current ones (the moment with Gallus where he reacts a certain way, she recalls how Winowa looked at them when Applejack brought her to class, and then she placed that as bewilderment, shows off both of these).
And yes, of course, her bubbly approach to everything is key to her characterisation. Again, I sought to not overdo it, keeping the number of her thoughts and dialogue that used exclamation points to emphasise excitement to the right amount, for instance, so it's not overbearing or distracting. And it was a similar story with her wanting to help Gallus, which really is the main thrust of the story, of course. As you might have guessed, I wanted more depth then the usual "one character is being a sad-sack loner" type of story, so hence we have both Gallus not wanting to be a burden, not wanting others to accommodate him for selfless reasons, and Silverstream respecting his wish and not just telling all her friends and them figuring out how to help him again (incidentally, the callback to "A Friend In Deed" only came to me while writing that moment, but its so apt, showing how Silverstream is less-hyper then Pinkie just enough to stop, think about what he wants and why, and at least think about what to do before proceeding).
My writing plan is basically to outline the whole story, incident-by-incident, before actually writing it, and while I can and will change things after the fact, this is so I can focus on it technically when writing it, make the prose all needed and feeding into the story and characterisation. At least, it was for this. That's probably why I'm a little surprised people are mostly talking about Silverstream's characterisation, and not the friendship complexity and themes and everything to do with that - for me, I wrote the latter twice, in outline and prose form, so it's more vivid to me. But it's fair - good characters are often everything, and they're why we love this show.
You may also notice that I have very few paragraphs that are just lines of dialogue. This originates as a holdover for my "visual-heavy" writing style, but most of the time, lengthy chunks of text that are almost nothing but dialogue are lazy. It can be done with a purpose (more often in comedy) but it usually is not. With little exception, that's now how I write. But, I wanted the story to be economical in words, so I sought for every non-dialogue detail in those scenes to have a purpose. Much of the time, they're to show how Silverstream perceives things without drawing attention to it, of course. When I was done, this (I hope!) has the nice side effect of making the story dense despite not necessarily having as much incident as others with a similar word count. It it still meant to be an easy read, friendship complexity and all.
I get that, I do. I really, really do. Honestly, it wasn't intentional. While this story didn't write itself, once I knew the key points, a lot of the incident did, and it was just where it took me. You already know I'd decided to make Silverstrem the POV character, and that was enough of a challenge. I'd never given writing the Student 6 a thought before, frankly, and while Silverstream was already my favourite, I found myself liking her even more upon rewatching her for research in "The Hearth's Warming Club" and "What Lies Beneath". Gallus, I found a lot to work with from a plot perspective, being the inciting incident and all, but perhaps I didn't yet feel as comfy with writing his normal flat, blunt sarcastic attitude? I'm thinking that's it, and since I really wanted this story to be well-executed all around, and stand on its own, I (subconsciously?) narrowed the focus a little to be mostly Silverstream onscreen, and still have Gallus be the plot's main focus and dilemma. I'm very much a "be ambitious, but on a manageable scale" sort of person. Plus, while Gallus and Silverstream are the main focus, I don't really favour a story that totally ignored that there are others around the main focus either, except when doing so actually strengths the story. Hence the way it evolved.
I can certainly see the possibility of you, during that middle sequence with Silverstream and Twilight, Rarity and Spike, thinking "okay, this is great, but when are we getting to Gallus being around again?" And, you know, fair enough. Other then that being where the story took me, it was largely because the main draw for me was still the complexity of this friendship problem, and the many layers to burden and how we shoulder them, and how to help a friend who doesn't want others to help them so they can focus on their own happiness in the short term.
There were points throughout where the thought struck me "should I rework this so there's more of Gallus onscreen, as that might be what Jack wants?", but every time I tried to, the story suffered from the changes made to it. Moreso, it didn't actually give him more time, it just shortened the length of scenes he wasn't in. Plus, given the story's length, you still got a fair share of Gallus in terms of words, so I figured it would be okay.
You might be intrigued to know that the story's original version had the events here as a prelude, and the actual story being the Three Days of Freedom Celebration with the pair at Mount Aris & Seaquestria. That would have had Gallus onscreen nearly the whole time. However, I could never figure out the actual story, other then him being a sad-sack the whole time for reasons I hadn't calculated yet, and it ending with a quiet, intimate (but platonic) heart-to-heart between the two. So I wrote the prelude's events first, just to see if it could stand on its own - and the story just built from there. So I scrapped the original main chunk, down to having the coda epilogue to wrap this one up. I'm still floating the idea of doing the original version's events as a second chapter, and I know you'd love that. Personally, I think this stands best as it is, but it could work! I'd just need to balance its final story and tone so it feels like a necessary piece with this, rather then a separate story that just happens to follow on from this one.
Ah, I haven't PUBLISHED fanfiction in that time (truthfully, it's closer to five years). I've written a few I haven't published, several more in finished, detailed outlines, and other in varying stages of completion. Then there's my original fiction, screenplays, and non fiction writing like my YouTube channel. So I've never stopped writing (including revising and trimming), generally. It was just an acknowledgement that it's been a while since fanfiction specifically. But as I view all fanfiction I write nowadays as partly a grounds for buildings towards writing some novels (not that I aim to be a full-time author, this is for the sake of stories I want to tell more then anything), that was my main prose purpose.
While I didn't mean for the word count to get that high, I did want it high enough. As I said, I wanted it to be more then a simple and short fluff piece like many Jinglemas entries often are. But I did also think that it felt right to give you a big, fat, juicy story too. Perhaps on a subconscious level, I was thinking it meant you'd still get plenty of Gallus. Who knows?
This story was actually close to 10K words originally! Most of the cutting came from general prose and scene description, but some was from taking Applejack out of the office scene (which strengthened it, given the decision of favouring generosity over honestly would be much harder to make fly with her around). Originally, that part was close to half of the fic, while in the final version, that middle sequence is only 35%. All that time spend on the group puzzling out the problem is important, so I kept cutting some parts and putting them back in because of the way it flowed. Similarly, I also cut the Prologue and Epilogue at one point, but put them both back. I needed the latter to show that Silverstream will tell Gallus the whole story eventually, while ending on a mostly happy and upbeat note nonetheless. The Prologue in Twilight's office was needed to set the general scene and tone and mood before the conflict starts without being obvious about it, as well as allowing the inciting incident of Silverstream leaving behind her report card to not be a lazy plot contrivance that happens offscreen.
Long story short, I cut a lot, but felt everything left in was needed for one reason or another. Besides which, I certainly know I'd have loved getting a story with this much in it and this much substance, and writing for yourself is often the best advice. I'm happy to see that was the same for you!
Aw, thanks man! I don't know if that scrapped original version will ever resurface as a second chapter, but I'm sure you'd love if it did. I'll keep you posted! And while I don't know if I'll ever write for Silverstream or Gallus again, or at least in the short term, as my main love lies with the Mane 7, by and large, you never know! Hope my lengths reply and explanations entertained you - Happy Hearth's Warming!
This was pretty sweet
Mike Cartoon Pony,
I approve!
this is your debut, eh?
strange that it's better than about half the site
anyways, i need a sequel detailing the time spent during the festival
also, idk if the heavy GallStream undercurrent was intentional or nah, but it's nice imo
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Thanks for the compliments! Well, first Pony fanfic - I’ve written fanfiction before on and off since 2009. And various other writings, fiction and non-fiction. Me saying that it was my first published fic in 4.5 years was more for the giftee’s benefit.
Ha, as you might have seen mentioned in the Author’s Note blog or another comment here, the original plan was for the events here to be more of a prelude and the festival itself to be the story’s bulk. But in outlining it, I found myself more drawn to this events depicted here, and felt compelled to flesh that out instead. I couldn’t come up with what would actually happen at the festival in any case. Couple that with this fic being written as a Jinglemas gift, and eh… that sequel won’t ever happen. The events therein are left to your imagination!
Not intentional, though I can certainly see how someone would read it that way. The user who the fic was written for, Jack of a New Trades, they do ship them, so perhaps my knowledge of their preferences filtered in there a bit? Maybe!
Glad you enjoyed the fic! It was just a minor little writing exercise, as they go. Nice to write sometimes fuzzy and warm and uplifting around Christmas, but with realistic depth factored in too.
Silverstream has become a big fan of the Wonderbolts, and while Rainbow Dash had kick-started that fascination, Silverstream knew it endured because of her own interest. A group of ponies who made a career out of flying and doing cool stunts? No wonder Rainbow Dash had wanted to be one her whole life!
Yeah I remember silverstream has a dream about becoming a Wonderbolt which I think that is a pretty cool idea
Aww this is really a nice story and silverstream really wanted to help Gallus but but he didn't want to be a burden to every creatures which I guess that's makes sense but I did like the plan how silverstream did it and that is very sweet of her to do that for him this was a really nice story as I said before keep up the good work
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Continuity nods to future episodes for the win!
In any case, thank you for the kind words, and glad this fic felt nice and sweet, and made you feel all fuzzy and warm. Sometimes, that’s what it’s all about.
Congrats on the EqD feature!
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