I very recently had the realisation that my regular style makes it unusually difficult to write non-fiction in without sounding pretentious.

I've known this in some way for a long time, but only recently have I put that feeling down in words. I suppose, in a sense, that's why I've always admired greentext: it can do something I can't naturally without adopting an entirely different style, and I suppose it's for that reason that I refer to it as the pinnacle of human literary achievement. In some way, I suppose, Getting Laid is an excuse for this very sort of thing.

(In retrospect: I'd probably be a far superior ratings-whore and gotten a great deal more 'yo this guy's innovative and experimental's if I'd just published every single story as its own little vignette.)

Now, I've just read a great deal of tumblr posts (holla, the-vashta-nerada) and I have thus been struck with the literary bug; feel free to bear witness to me sounding American.

so I was chilling down reading some books with my ass on some books and some bitch-ass hoe goes down like 'it's not allowed okay get off' like some testy poor-ass motherfucker who don't speak English and he's powertripping like crayyy and I'm like 'kay whatevs' and bump dat ass right off that stack and he just walks the fuck away like he knows what's good, right, and I'm just talking to myself like 'serviettes hygiéniques cause you know what the fuck is a serviette that isn't hygienic like what

anyway then some other bitch be like 'yo' and I be like 'holla' and she be like 'you know that shit ain't right right' but not really and I'm like 'yeah so I got my ass off that what you want' but not really and I look around and see that bitch-ass motherfucker hiding behind this lady crying his bitch ass off like I called him the bitch he is and this bitch be like 'what you said' but yeah really and I be like 'I said 'kay'' and bitch be like 'yeah but what did you say' and I be like 'I said kay' and she was like 'after that' and I'm like 'I was speaking French cause I'm reading French and I hold that shit up and title-point middle-of-the-sentence dynamic fluid movement like whoa and bitches be like 'whoa' and they peaced the fuck out like they know sonic the elegant french hedgehog ain't nothing to fuck with

and I went home and told my story and my mother said if I acted like that in another country I'd get raped

and that's why I'm racist and hate poor people

And let's not forget the hash tags: #sick burn #stupid poor people #I have more money than you #yolo #swag #gotta go fast #l'élégance du hérisson

What unconventional styles have you experimented with recently?

I've pinged all my fics because archonix did it. Feel free to direct all expressions of hatred to the appropriate authorities.

Also, check the Pony Fiction Vault interview for Solace if you're interested in more vague, authorial questions; I'll gladly elaborate on any point if you wish.

I never asked for answers when I was younger because they were so much easier to give than take.

This is the kind of sentence, of course, that people make up to be quoted. It never works, but what I'm saying right now is meta enough that it will be the thing I'm going to say people won't quote because the application of false modesty to oneself is a great way to make people think you're humble and in doing so ensure that you have a reason to suggest that you are in fact denigrating yourself with false accusations of conceitedness. I could continue this paragraph, but in truth I'm only doing so in a clever attempt to provide a soft segue into the next sentence - and what better goal could exist for a humble sentence but a seamless segue?

In any case, I love and have always loved being asked questions and always will; feel free to ask anything you wish.

Pictured: Me.

(Yes, Pashoo, I'm still looking for an answer.)

I wrote a huge amount of text on why knighty's average technical competence doesn't justify his overwhelmingly awful artistic taste, but fuck it. I could talk about bad authors being whiny, but fuck it. I might just talk about successful authors barely capable of speaking English being overrated and then criticising the same system and people that made them overrated, but fuck it. I could talk about repealing universal suffrage and moving to weighted voting, but fuck it.

If I were younger, I might be mad; as it is, all I can do is giggle at the sheer helplessness on display. "I'll bring the issue to knighty's attention"? It's like nobody knows how to learn things any more.

Next I'll be hearing about people asking carpenters to build IKEA furniture for them.

Jesus Christ.

I'll start.

Top of the morning, my name is Sir Amit Smithjohnwilliamhamsingkirktonthorpeworthsuponson.

I'm a 16 year old Anglophile (British fan for you Pakis). I draw Contemporary and Baroque on my tablet, and spend my days perfecting my art and watching superior British shows (Doctor Who, Monty Python, Winnie the Pooh and James Bond).

I train with my Independent every day, this superior newspaper can cut clean through government interference because it is researched over a thousand times, and is vastly superior to any weapon on earth. I earned my newspaper license two years ago, and I have been getting better every day.

I speak American fluently, both Latin and the Canterbury dialect, and I write fluently as well. I know everything about British history and their royal statutes, which I follow 100%.

When I get my right of abode, I am moving to London to attend a prestigious Secondary School to learn more about their magnificent culture. I hope I can become a writer for the Times or an investment banker.

I own several tophats, which I wear around town. I want to get used to wearing them before I move to Britain, so I can fit in easier. I shake hands with my elders and seniors and speak British as often as I can, but rarely does anyone manage to respond. God save the Queen!

Pictured: Me.

>tfw no personfriend

>tfw confused about sexuality

>tfw confused about gender

>meet person

>talk a little

>???

>mutually respectful dialogue

>now a pet

>genuinely fulfilled by this arrangement

>mfw still confused about gender

>mfw still confused about sexuality

>mfw still no personfriend

Pictured: The face I’ve kept throughout.

Sure, it’s an awkward teenage exploration, but I’m an awkward teenager; this is much unlike Fiddlebottoms, here, who has perfected the image of the old man grievously injured by the world so completely that I’m actually beginning to believe it.

Old Man Fiddlebottoms: A Very Special Episode

I like authors for their stories.

That’s not to say I wouldn’t like them if they didn’t write, of course; most of the authors I like are charming people in themselves. I like Chuckfinley for Pipsqueak’s Day Off, I like darf for rainbow/Dash, I like archonix for Xenophile’s Guide, I like HamGravy for Baby Horse Rape 3: Electronic Twerking¹ and I like most of them as people as well.

But the one writer I’ve most wanted to write a review of is utterly unreviewable, because they’re all just good enough that I write one line in my head and give up. You might be surprised, but I don’t just bullshit these for the sake of bullshit; I write what comes to mind, and so in the end I’m not writing a review of a story insofar as I am writing a story based on my impressions of something I’ve once read.

In other words, I’m bullshitting for art, a phrase I’m sure the man himself would appreciate.

Right, let’s glance over a small handful of the works I’ve thought of reviewing, regardless of merit:

—Muselpferde: It’s metaphorical, I’m sure. There’s something to do with police states. There’s horrific violence and gore. Something something communist nazis. Vulgar.

—Celestia’s Big Day: Hilarious.

—The River and The Ocean: Title’s inspiring. Story’s trying.

—Rarity Versus Bukkake Ninjas²: Kind of meta, but not really. Satirical, but of what? Kind of un-self-aware even in its self-awareness, but is that in itself a form of self-awareness?

No.

Dialogue tags are weird. Last sentence could use a paragraphing. Funny.

—Discord's Ant Farm: Holy shit.

—So, What Happens Now?: Beautiful depiction of ascetic royalty. Minimalist.

—Love and Roadkill: Godlike.

—O’Marelley’s Bar & Grill: Put the whole of it back up and publish a separate rewrite, you revisionist fuck. Bloody brilliant.

It’s as if each and every one is a victim of that insurmountable obstacle of being ‘good’, without fail, so unfocused that it can’t be challenged on any of the points it makes; each is easily summarisable by that lazy phrase ‘I like this’, and it’s utterly uncanny how a man can write twenty-nine stories and have so many of them be brilliant and yet impossible to review.

I’ve recently come to the epiphany, thus, that his stories are not so much works in themselves as they are works on him; his authorial character is so integral to his stories, so bitter and tryhard and yet effortless and well-I-won’t-ever-say-sweet, so heaped with so many layers of irony it’s turned into an awful metaphor as if I haven’t used that tired old cheap cop-out of an innovative metaphor a thousand times already and it hasn’t already gotten old but I’m still using it because I’m grasping for straws but am I really because my own acknowledgement of the fact is in itself a different joke that is unaware but might in fact be self-aware given that I’m using it to parallel Fiddlebottoms’ writing to a certain extent but now that I’ve pointed it out within the parallel itself is it still parallel and how long has this sentence gotten and is that in itself a sort of reference that he makes on occasion?

I’m not quite sure.

Indeed, this author’s character is the characterisation of not only his characters but his entire corpus. Almost every story he’s written is filled, intentionally or not, with an abiding attention to beauty, literary if not conceptual, but this intelligent beauty is directed offensively at nothing but itself: so edgy it turns about and cuts itself smooth and so horrifically aware of its own imagined impotence that in the end it doesn’t really say anything loudly enough to be heard; even in unreality it is ‘realistic’, but here I don’t mean that verisimilitude that honest writers convey, but that horrid, ugly cynicism presented as plain fact like some perverse Western rebellion against socialist realism that hasn’t quite forgotten it’s left the Cold War and no longer needs to prove the sanctity of its freedom to be depressed.

In the end, there is something deeply comfortable about his writing: it is an observer’s view, even in first-person, where every character—even the gods—are helpless against some eternal plight or are struggling against some inner demon or have already surrendered.

In other words, it’s comfortable because it’s easy, as is any other manifestation of absolute pessimism.

It just doesn’t make it any less brilliant³.

25th April 2013

Yishun, Singapore

¹ This is not a real fanfic.

² This is a real fanfic.

³ I won’t go so far as to write an extended critique of his blogs, but I suppose a blurb would be relevant:

In some way, his gloominess comes across so extreme that it seems almost crawling towards pandering—I came to him from DontWannaKnow before the poor bastard turned into the saddest of attention-whores in the history of man, and there appears to have been the slightest parallel⁴—but the sheer cynicism shining through every aspect of his little fandom is tempered by a pervadingly altruistic sense of humour, and I can’t imagine the edgy fellow would mind if I used a self-describing quote from Hitler to apply to him.

But I won’t.

Because I’m better than that.

In any case, they’re brilliant and you ought to read them too.

⁴ Fiddu-sama wa honto ni tsundere desu!~ “It’s—it’s not that I like you or anything, b—but you remind me of this song and I’m so old and bitter, follower-san! Leave if you want, baka follower-san, I won’t miss you, I hate you so much~!”

>mfw Sorren got into a hissyfight with him while I was writing this

You can’t ruse the rusemaster.

This post's title is the only piece of unsolicited direct advice I will ever intentionally give.

See, after last night's blaring success with my half-finished crossover, I dug recently through my Google Docs recently and searched for the very first one, the first pony-related thing I ever wrote; I was sure it was going to be the futa Derpy/Dinky rapefic that for some reason no one has yet written and I swear to god I may one day write just to spite all of you and be able to say to a reporter 'I write creepy fanfiction where cartoons fuck, got little Dinky Hooves sucking Derpy Hooves' nuts' like I always dreamed, but it turns out I wrote something much, much worse.

A Mass Effect 3 ending fix.

Pictured: Me and common sense having a short parlay.

TRIGGER WARNING: BAD PROSE, WISH FULFILMENT (YES MORDIN IS ALIVE FOR SOME REASON), WOODEN DIALOGUE, UNEDITED HORROR BEYOND THE IMAGINATION, THE ABYSS GAZING BACK INTO YOU, DOGS AND CATS LIVING TOGETHER, EVERYBODY, FORM, CONTENT, INTERRELATIONSHIPS, GOD, THE DEVIL, HELL, HEAVEN, THE CAKE IS A LIE AND OUTDATED MEMES

Concatenation

Lieutenant-Commander Jane Shepard lies dying.

Her armour burnt to cinders, her wounds cateurised, lying in the city of the dead; her charred bright red hair falling down over one of her eyes. The Catalyst exploding around her.

She looks around, taking in her surroundings as the place breaks into pieces around her. The mass effect generators are still working, of course: she can breathe, but she can see space without a filter. The solar radiation bursts into her eyes; it should kill a lesser person, but the implants quickly adjust for it as she stares down the sun.

She has one thought as she feels the fires getting closer, sees the central generator breaking apart and exploding, sending her fractured piece of metal into space:

Well, I’m fucked.

She looks at her gun, turning it around a little in her hand. Primitive heatsink model; low power, infinite shots. She always missed those. In these last moments, she thinks, perhaps she can afford to shoot off a few rounds. For old times’ sake.

Heh. Look at me. I’m getting nostalgic about guns. I have a crew loyal to me, a galaxy admiring me, and what I’m getting happy about’s the gun in my hand while I wait to die. Pew. Pew.

She shakes her head, closing her eyes as she fires towards the sun, the bullets passing through the malleable mass effect field. She’s just defeated the Reapers; maybe she’ll kill the sun along with them. The same oxygen feeding her feeds the fires raging close to her, on the spinning piece of metal once part of the greatest undertaking in galactic history.

But as she fires for the fourth time, she hears something other than her gun.

She hears a cyclonic barrier blocking one, and she opens her eyes.

The Normandy, its door open, hovering around a metre above the flaming hunk of metal. Its thrusters firing as it struggles to keep alignment with the wildly spinning piece of air-filled scrap. The door, opening. Garrus, holding out a hand. Liara, kneeling and beckoning for her to run.

Her, running like a motherfucker.

She jumps up to the ship, holding onto the bottom of the door as it begins to lift off; Garrus and Liara help her up, and as she is safe and the door closes, she promptly collapses onto the floor, hardly able to move.

“Shepard. You look horrible.”

She looks straight into his eyes. “Garrus.” She coughs out a clot of blood as she rolls over onto her back, smiling. “I forgot. Which side of your face got blown up, again?”

Before he can retort, she falls into slumber.

*

“Commander Shepard on-board! Suggest immediate take-off!” EDI’s voice speaks—her body left on Earth—as Joker taps hurriedly at the controls as he tries to make sure the burning debris doesn’t break his ship into pieces. He looks to the side to see an empty space.

“I am here, Jeff.” The ship lifts off ‘vertically’ and begins to fire its thrusters at full speed. “Literally.”

“The sexy robot body would really help right now, EDI.”

EDI seems to ignore his quip. “I’m picking up some activity from the Crucible’s core. It appears to be preparing to launch a third shot. The energy would disintegrate us as a side-effect.”

“Shit, shit. Okay, can we make it to a safe range before we get disintegrated?” He pushes ceaselessly at the tactile holograms, minimising and maximising windows to keep his hands twitchy in case of emergency.

“All sensors indicate that there is no possibility of getting to a Mass Relay in time.” A pause. “I have, however, computed a trajectory which might save us. This will, however, leave us with insufficient fuel.”

“Hmm. Okay, insufficient fuel or disintegration?” Joker’s sarcasm isn’t lost on her.

“Exactly. While we were speaking, I’ve taken the liberty to prepare the engines. Stand by.”

Just as the Crucible begins to fire its final shot, they no longer exist in the spot where they once stood.

Yet the heat of the faster-than-light wave pushes against them; Joker struggles to accelerate faster. He turns behind him and shouts. “Garrus! Calibrate the engines or something!”

“Very funny, Joker!” The ship begins to rock in the turbulence as the wave catches up with them, pushing and jostling; Garrus holds Shepard down in an attempt to stop her from breaking her neck or head on the corners as Liara grabs her legs. Shepard seems to go in and out of consciousness, mumbling something occasionally.

As if to say:

I knew you wouldn’t leave me there.

And then, as their power systems go into emergency mode, all is dark.

*

Apple Bloom is walking about along the edges of the Everfree Forest. She can quite well understand the problem with entering it, but she’s rather miffed that she hasn’t yet earnt her Cutie Mark. The other two Cutie Mark Crusaders are busy on various things, leaving her to spend this holiday alone trying to find her cutie mark by herself: she figures she might as well just look around.

And then quite suddenly, a miracle happens.

An extremely loud noise explodes through the atmosphere—though she wouldn’t know it, the sound of an object going faster-than-light coming to a complete halt. The brilliant Čerenkov radiation almost blinds her as she stumbles over something and falls on her back, smacking her head on something hard.

Ow. What in tarnation?

She rubs her head and opens her bedazzled eyes just in time to see the Normandy careening towards the ground, making her teeth rattle a bit.

Most fillies would turn and run screaming to their mothers.

“An alien!” She grins. “I’ll get my ‘alien ambassador’ Cutie Mark!”

Apple Bloom isn’t most fillies. She quickly begins to trot towards the scene of the incident, fearlessly rushing straight into the forest towards the scene of the crash.

*

“Joker. EDI.” Shepard coughs out, pushing herself to her feet as the lights turn on. The medigel has patched up just enough to walk. Being naked is an unfortunate side-effect, but she has more pressing concerns on her mind. “Where the hell are we?”

Joker’s too busy pressing on buttons to notice her, but EDI responds immediately. “Unknown. The Tantalus core appears to have suffered a very slight malfunction caused by the Crucible’s wave. Initial scans reveal an Earthlike atmosphere and similar life-forms. Garden world. Manmade structures resembling rural Earth architecture are located in the vicinity. Further scans are inconclusive; I believe that the sensors are malfunctioning.”

Joker lets his hands down and swivels around in his chair.

He immediately swivels back, blushing furiously. “Commander Shepard. You’re naked.”

“I have more important things to worry about, Joker.” Considering her state, it’s rather amazing that she can afford to joke. “Which reminds me. I’ve been meaning to tell you: would you mind getting rid some of your porn?”

“You know about that?”

“It’s clogging up the data-banks.”

Mordin runs up to her from behind, holding in his hand a syringe and putting it into Shepard’s. She grins and takes it. “Thanks, Mordin.”

“Don’t mention it, Shepard.” The salarian smiles. “Keeping you alive—thanks enough.” He looks her up and down. “Suggest putting some clothes on, unless you wish to be the Vitruvian Woman.”

“Mordin. We are going to undertake an initial survey of planetary conditions. Would you like to join us?”

Mordin gives the inevitable response. “Of course. When do we depart?”

Shepard sticks herself with the syringe, draining the plunger into her neck. Almost immediately, her more severe burns begin to heal. “Should I come along?”

“Would advise against it. Walking too much will kill you, Shepard.” Mordin taps on his omni-tool a bit, moving up and down her body with it. “Suggest you take a rest in the infirmary while Garrus fetches armor.”

Liara speaks. “I’ll go.”

The Commander laughs, her hands absentmindedly caressing the few glowing scars that trail over her face. “Liara? You do realize that this civilization isn’t dead yet, right?”

“Very funny, Shepard.”

“And you, Garrus? What’re you gonna do?”

He shrugs. “I’ll go calibrate the guns until you need me to blow a hole in something.” He walks off.

“Uh, Commander Shepard? I think you might want to see this.” Joker’s voice comes from the front compartment, and the Commander ambles over to look at the picture before them.

“What am I looking at here, Joker?”

EDI speaks. “It appears that the local dominant life-form—”

“—are pastel-colored, tiny ponies.” Shepard groans. “This is just great.”

Joker pushes himself up from his chair. “That’s it, I’ve got to see this.” He walks over to the airlock, stumbling a bit. “Mordin, Liara, you coming?”

“Joker...” Shepard trails off as she realises that there’s no real reason to stop him talking to the ponies, but notes the regulation. “Remember, these ‘ponies’ could be hostile. First contact guidelines are to assume hostility.”

“Clearly,” Joker says sarcastically, “That little pony is in league with the Reapers.”

Shepard puts her palm on her forehead. “Right. I think I’m still unconscious. These are my dying dreams. I’m going to my quarters and going to sleep until I wake up.” She walks away, mumbling something about pastel ponies.

*

Apple Bloom pokes curiously at the alien structure, creating some clanging sounds. “Oooh! I’ll get my Cutie Mark fer sure this time!” She looks up to see rainbow contrails.

“Rainbow Da—” She barely gets the name out before she’s pounced on, rolling a bit.

“Applejack told me you ran off into the forest after that—thing.” Dash says, looking nervously to the right. “What the heck were you thinking, Apple Bloom?”

She grins. “I’m gonna get my alien ambassador Cutie Mark!”

Before Rainbow Dash can reply, the door slides open.

Joker nearly breaks his jaw as it drops, his eyes confirming the sight that they’ve just beheld through the cameras.

“Flying biotic ponies,” says Mordin. “Excellent.”

I figure I might as well share the fruits of a short-lived EVE Online adventure crossover I tried to write several months ago but never did finish. I've polished it up a very little bit, but it's still unpublishable and unfinishable (by me, because I'm a lazy bitch) and you might well enjoy it as it is; feel free to carry on with it if you really wish.

Cutie Mark Crusader Capsuleers

In retrospect, it’s kind of obvious why the most successful of us were earth ponies.

The unicorns, you know, you’d think they’d be fine with it, already knowing how to move the very forces of nature themselves with a little thought, but it turns out a lot of them’re just fine with it as they are. And sure, you might think pegasus ponies want to see past the sky most of all, but it turns out they’re just pretty happy where they are, too.  Apparently it’s the easiest for us to stick with the whole thing. Too foreign to let go too easy.

I suppose you could say we have—heh—endurance. Sure need a lot of that up here; sometimes, I’ll have to admit, there’s a few years in a row where all I wanna do is jump into the biomasser and let whatever’s up there sort me up for good, but I never once went anywhere near one.

Well, except that one time.

Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me start from the beginning—but first, let me introduce myself.

My name’s Apple Bloom, and I’m the first pony capsuleer.

I’m sorry if I’ll ever have to kill you.

—

When the first few ships landed—well, they weren’t outright ships, but back then I didn’t know much about tritanium—we were, to put it kindly, scared out of our minds. I think Celestia herself went to go say hello. The details are fuzzy, of course. It was probably five hundred years ago, so excuse me if some of my clones weren’t up to date.

Yeah, I know it’s a stupid mistake to make, but at some point I was sure I’d never die.

Laugh it up.

Anyhow, the Jovians—some sorta two-legged, white-skinned aliens—gave us near everything they had. Some kind of disease made them all depressed or something—apparently we deserved to be their successors or something like that. Again, I’m not very clear on the details and maybe it’s better I’m not.

For all I know about it, after all, I might well catch it.

From what I do know, though, the capsule worked perfectly for ponies. Better than for the Jovians, even, which is kind of funny because the Jovians invented it. Maybe this place just happens to be made for us. When they started setting up schools for foals—foals because apparently adults just weren’t malleable enough, although they probably didn’t know how cutie marks work—Scoots, Sweetie Belle and I signed up together.

Applejack said I shouldn’t go, that ponies weren’t meant to go into space, but the Jovians had made it clear that no one could stop us. We figured we’d get into it, maybe get our cutie marks. Back then, of course, we felt like it was a game.

We still do.

—

The first few years were the hardest, learning to move without moving.

“Focus. Push the ball.”

The voice was perfect Equestrian. Back then I thought they’d learned it through hard work. That was before I woke up in the bay, of course, but that’s for later.

The stuff they put on my head, some kinda soft plastic connected to what I used to call a ‘fake horn’—I later found out that it’s apparently called a ‘devolved electromagnetic violation-inhibiting curatory emitter’, not that there’s much real difference—was getting really itchy, but I kept my concentration. Looking to the right gave me the sight of Sweetie Belle doing it real easy, her horn glowing through the tiny membrane they put over it. She was quickly pulled out of the room, giving me an encouraging kinda look as she went.

“Like your friend.”

I imagined the red, rubber ball moving, imagined my hoof reaching forth and bumping it off the edge of the metal. The tip of the fake horn shone a bit, but nothing moved.

He—was it a he? I never did get used to Jovian gender—spoke as if he had read my mind. “Do not imagine any analogue. Push as if you were calculating a sum. Use the strength of your mind.”

I stood there for about half an hour, trying to figure out exactly how to push the darned thing. Most of the other non-unicorn ponies were having problems, too, but the Jovians never once seemed to notice the difference between us. By the end of the lesson, the unicorns had been helped out of the room, leaving just the earth and pegasus ponies, three Jovians looking over us.

A very distinctive Trottingham-accented voice came from behind me. “This isn’t fair,” I heard, breaking my futile concentration. I was a mite frustrated when I turned around to see Pipsqueak. “Unicorns can just use their magic.”

“We’ve analysed unicorn ‘magic’ and found it to be primarily gravitic in nature. We have used energised fullerene membranes to nullify all gravitational manipulation.”

That explained what the horn-stuff was for, at least.

Pipsqueak gave the Jovian a look that was part questioning and part indignant. “Then why do their horns glow while they’re doing it?”

“Their minds focus on the task. They are already well-adapted to extending them.”

Nobody else raised a ruckus after that. Pipsqueak was the first one to succeed, and went out with the rest of them—they went pony by pony ‘til I was the only one left.

But I didn’t give up, and the invigilators didn’t seem to mind the wait.

“Student Apple Bloom,” one finally said, after five hours. “You may forfeit at any point. Your species, though well-suited to the capsule technology, is not universally competent.”

That gave me an idea. “Say,” I said, “I’m supposed to push this here ball off of this here table, right?”

“Using the device, yes.”

I reached up, pulled the fake horn from its little holster and poked the ball over the table.

It hit the ground with a mighty satisfying ‘fmp’.

—

I know it isn’t a really exciting story, but that’s how it happened. I didn’t pass, of course, but they let me go on anyhow. I got the hang of it in the end, and we spent the next few months going over the basics—learning how to use our heads, basically. None of us flunked out. Not even Diamond Tiara.

Thank goodness she didn’t.

—

I didn’t even know at first when I died for the first time.

“The process is painless and instantaneous.”

I nodded a bit. “So, I’ll wake up fine and dandy with some new bits on my back?”

He nodded back as I was laid onto the table, and I felt a little pricking sensation in my right hoof.

I woke up just in time to see my body pulled away on a gurney.

It wasn’t breathing, and as I fell out of the tank I ran towards it and I felt arms on me and they held me and I screamed for my body and one of the Jovians was shouting about withdrawal and trauma and stasis and I didn’t know what the buck and there was a little prick in my neck and I didn’t feel any more.

When I woke up they talked to me for a few hours about how I was just the same as I was before and that I was absolutely, perfectly fine and how I wasn’t anything but me and that I was fine and not dead and ground up and turned into goo they’re using to make more of me.

I held a little funeral for myself that night. Candles and everything, touching the bits down my spine as if they were anything but circuits and metal.

It’s real funny what little foals do when they’re scared.

It’s the sort of feeling I hurt for now.

It's been a month since one of the most pseudo-intellectual circlejerk wars of our time; while Nexus presumably still believes that I am an alternate form of his alternate personality named Blood come to torment him, the fine young man Sorren himself, who I am sure I would greatly like to fellate given the chance, has registered no objection to this comic in its presubmission stage and so I feel compelled to post it (though its author shall remain unnamed).

Pictured: 90% true fact

"Those also stand within the stroke of my penne, who were wont to Curtaine ouer their defects with knauish conueyances, and scum off the froth of all wanton vanity, to qualifie the eager appetite of their slapping Fauourites … these are they, who by their wontonizing Stage-gestures, can ingle and seduce men to heaue vp their heartes and affections." - This World’s Folly; or a Warning-Piece discharged upon the Wickedness thereof, I.H.

If you’re reading this, Pashoo, I swear to God I’m still working on an answer to your question.

If you’re all wondering where I’ve been the last week or two, in any case, I’ve been screwing around on Blacklight under the name Hashul on the US/AU servers; it’s not a perfect game (okay it’s super bad), but the voice chat is the funnest thing ever invented.

(yes I do in fact have an addiction to social interaction why didn't you ask)

I wrote the following in like thirty minutes, because fuck proofreading.

Holy contradictions, Batman: taking advice and being it

I once took advice from someone.

See, I was told that the story had too much banter. I was told that a person was too frivolous in the face of impending doom, and should instead be serious from the start. I was told that the action came too late and had no real lead-up, and that since he should spend all his time serious he should have a reason to be serious at every point.

So I fixed it.

This I did in thirty minutes; the entire transformation of the story’s character was complete, simply and utterly.

I took a look at it soon after.

It was good. The entire first bit was cut. There was nothing before the action: the entire thing was action. It read like an ending instead of a beginning or a middle, because in medias res is all the rage. There was emotion all throughout; not human emotion, of course, but deep, dramatic emotion, the horror of betrayal and the grudging acceptance and the bitter humour without its frivolous echoes.

One could go down a checklist of literary excellence and find acceptability at every step, and I vilified it.

It was to writing what knighty is to web design: it was the speech of a mediocre writer without a voice desperately trying to become as good as the people he’d read, making in the process something that might technically be defined as good but in the end turning into another arsehole with a fetish for Frank Miller’s narration and a giant pair of eagles taped to his arms.

In the shortest terms, for all its technical excellence it was a copy; there was no casual world-building, no enormous dialogues on the tribal norms of ancient pony society compacted into single words, nothing that I could have done that I would be satisfied few others could; there was everything good but nothing in it I wanted in it that might have made it brilliant, and for that I hated it more than anything else I’d ever written because I had from the very start made the simple promise that I should make an endeavour to make everything I’d ever write the best thing I’d ever written and that little mark of approval from the person who gave the advice—that ‘oh, this is better’ or ‘eh, it’s okay now’—was worse than any other unhelpful criticism because it was something that actively undermined that and turned it into another story, something to read and then not really care about further on and nothing to recommend it save its potential premise.

It turned something I liked, in other words, into something I didn’t.

And I know that that advice must have been given in the very best of intentions, no matter how horridly American it was. I know that that advice was given in the hope that I might improve as a writer and not in the hopes that I would think that I should find myself hated by myself for listening to it.

If bad advice can hurt you, good advice will ruin you, because if bad advice will make you memorably bad good advice will make you nothing but another good writer whose greatest award is the fact that someone’s bothered to read his story to the end.

That is why I will say ‘the spacing of a paragraph is its mood’ instead of ‘stick a space here’: you have to solve your own problems and make your own rules, and in doing so you will create something far more beautiful than anything anyone will ever make for you.

I may not be a professional quote-maker,

Pictured: not a professional quote-maker

but allow me to eschew poetic echoes and cute one-liners in favour of condensing my point into that sort of horrible platitude aspiring artists make up for themselves after having been rejected from die Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien for the second time:

Take everything you can.

Just never give any of yourself for it.

25th April 2013

Yishun, Singapore

(yes I know there are at least three phrases in this essay more quotable than that but motherfuck I’ll be right and yes I know this is advice in itself but only the Sith deal in absolutes and if Yoda can do it so can I)