Gut-check time: should I re-tag my Black Company crossover fic "Comedy"? I mean, I'm trying my best to not make it unleavened grimdark blood-and-mud-and-heretics-and-exterminatus-bleargh. I may be a terrible comedian, but at least a third of my chapters are attempts to tell jokes. Coal-black comedy, mind you, but jokes. And I use more stage-accents than a vaudeville revue practicing for a run in the Catskills.

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Nothing to do with my story, but I was just reading an otherwise inoffensive fic that dropped a 'Rarity Belle' on us. You see this time and again, Sparkle getting hung on Shining Armor, Belle on Rarity, Fluttershy getting a surname, hell, even Celestia getting Sol Invictus added as a cognomen as if she was a Romane imperatrix.

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So, you may or may not have noticed, but I'm not really a visual writer. It's a strain to keep the narrative from floating in a grey mist of intentions and actions; I hope I've kept down the weeds in that lot, but one of the victims has been pony description and (shudder) cutie marks. There's a number of problems with the mark - if I could rank them, they would be as follows: 1) tone, 2) fanon, and 3) inclination.

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That's great. My custom ads on fimfiction are now trying to sell me copies of the Black Company books, or, at least, the first book. I guess the algorithm hasn't figured out I have the omnibus edition, not to mention physical copies buried on my shelves somewhere... Wonder if it's just feeding ids to amazon, or if it's actually doing material keyword checks?

Faginism, like referring to loan sharks as "shylocks", is colorful, evocative, pungent, and anti-Semitic as all hell. (Check out Will Eisner's Fagin the Jew for a decent treatment of the history of Dickens' character.) But I honestly can not think of a modern slang equivalent to the concept - the idea of criminals recruiting guttersnipes to extend their petty criminal empires. If I'm to take The Wire as

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Sherp? What the hey is that?

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Damnit, I had forgotten that Sheep were sentient in canon. I really liked that mutton dressed as lamb gag, and the chapter needed some levity. I can pull the gag, but it made a point about the Delphi oracle Pythia is based on, the fact that they were originally young virgins but then shifted to elderly women in the classical period... stupid thinking hooves rule.

Yeah, I generally like the Ring of Fire series, but this 'un is fun even by the usual shaggy-dog-neo-colonial science fantasy standards of that project. The first half, which is basically a historical novel about an alchemist kicking around 17th century Europe, is more fun than the second half, which brings our much-older and now kinda fuddy-duddy alchemist into the "oops, God or Fate dun dropped half a county of West Virginia ridgerunners into the Thirty Years War" setting of the Ring of Fire

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I've tried writing fanfic before, now and again, but never anything published. A couple silly short stories for the occasional 'zine. This will be the first long-form thing I've done other than some non-fiction. So, In the Company of Night. Almost exactly what it says on the tin, a quadruped Black Company from dubious and occluded origins, wandering down a Glory Road through the horsier reaches of the multiverse, finding trouble and leaving heartache behind. They've mostly forgotten

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