.... and I'm two days late in announcing it, because my life is hectic and not very fimficcy nowadays.

Still, I want to make a note of this. I started Cold Light to see if I could actually write a genuine fantasy novel. Three bloody years, it took, but I did it. I finished it, and it's one of the three stories on here that I'm actually halfway proud of.

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Okay, I'll own up. That's a deliberately confrontational clickbait-y title. I couldn't help myself.

Really this blog is about language. Contrary to the bleating of the Average Internet Intellectual, the meaning of a word is not absolute. We, as a community, can choose how to use words and consequently the meanings we give to them. If we're sensible, we choose in a way that reflects the real world and enables discussion.

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Friendship Games is a middling sort of installment. Better than Equestria Girls, worse than Rainbow Rocks – but given the latter was so great, and the former so abysmal, that's no real surprise. How did it fare on its own terms? Again, middling: Better than it might've been, but still not quite as good as it could've been.

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It's characteristic of fiction writers that we tend to be good at bullshitting. Something of a necessary skill, really. And it's characteristic of everyone that we tend to be pretty bad at judging our own importance without some self-aggrandisement.

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(With any luck, this is about political as you'll ever see me get on here.)

And coming up next: Talking about the value of stories. Or another go at criticising critics. We'll see.

I've been wanting to jump on the reviewing bandwagon for a while now. Now I'm pretty much out of essays, it strikes me as a good way to have loud opinions about writing and get involved with fimfic bloggery again.

Thing is, I have to confess I don't really read ponyfic anymore. Most of my reading time nowadays is spent with actual published works.

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I don't know how many of my followers don't follow Bradel. But for those benighted few, I present a a Poe-esque horror -- a kitchen-stove gothic tale -- with some of the most gorgeously threatening prose I've seen on this site:

The Rose, by Bradel

Here's a quick caricature. A tale of human … well, not idiocy, but daftness.

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No, I've not been very active lately. Had pony burnout (plus general moping) during pretty much all of March. No ponyfic came out of me that time -- though I did write two attempts at a first chapter for a novel and rejected both. I went to a birthday party, got ... fairly ... drunk and spent the night discussing socialism with a lapsed Marxist.

Well, whatever. Now I'm feeling up to writing again. But first, a meme! Thanks, Bookplayer.

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