Leaving for Korea now. I might have some intermittent access in airports/on planes and such, but by and large, don't expect me to be online for at least 24 hours. :-) Have fun in my absence!

So, remember how I said I likely wouldn't be able to keep up the chapter-a-day pace with Music of Ponyville? Yep, turns out I'm going to miss today's chapter. I am completely exhausted from a huge deadline we were pushing towards for the past three weeks plus an all-weekend thing at my job -- which was totally awesome and lots of fun; it just didn't leave me enough time to do the edits for the next chapter. Expect regular content to resume on Monday and Tuesday.

Wednesday, I spend about 24 consecutive hours in travel, so I likely won't be able to update then either. I'm away in Asia for about 10 days. I hope to be able to put in at least a few updates then too.

Other things:

RDD -- got your PM. I promise I'll write up a detailed reply before I leave for Asia, probably tomorrow. I want to give some fairly detailed feedback, and I want to make sure I don't botch transcribing my thoughts due to sleep deprivation. :-)

Mimicry -- thanks again for the awesome covert art for Music of Ponyville. I really like it.

Blackbelt, Lev, and RK -- thanks for your help beta-ing Music of Ponyville. I think it's much, much better for your efforts.

That's about all for now. I'll see you tomorrow with Music of Ponyville, Chapter 4: "Scratched Up".

Exactly what the title says. For those who want to see it early, a link is here.

Just a note -- I've drafted the whole story, but this one likely won't go up at my usual 'chapter a day' pace. A couple of the chapters do need rewrites, and I have fairly major work obligations in the next couple weeks (including taking a trip to present a paper abroad, which will involve a long, plane ride and about 24 consecutive hours of travel).

Now I can start text-editing the first couple chapters, get art, etc, and hopefully I should have the first bits up very soon! Yay!

So I have now finished Watchmen, all twelve issues of it. My thoughts!

* Overall, very well done. Everything worked well. The writing was excellent; Moore really nailed the voices of all the different characters. The sounded alive and realistic, even though they're largely larger-than-life lunatics. The art was great too; it really fit the story very nicely.

* Rorschach was probably the best developed character of the group. He's a great Byronic Hero (read: villain), an ostensible do-gooder who has been so corrupted by his own twisted psyche that he's scarcely better than the baddies he faces. (And there's all the little details too -- like, unless I'm misremembering, we never actually see him helping any civilians. Nite Owl II and Silver Spectre II save the civvies from the burning building, but I'm pretty sure Rorschach just kills folks.) Moore does a brilliant job of showing how he has his own sort of purity and honor, and the remnants of good within him (like when he lets Moloch keep his medication) without in any way making him admirable or a good guy. And in the end he dies exactly how his victims did -- killed by a being much more powerful person than he according to a moral code that, to him, is incomprehensible.

** I've seen people arguing online that he's heroic based on him being the only one not to cover up what Ozy did, but I disagree. He wasn't doing it for the sake of the innocents in the city; at that point, I'm not sure he even believes that anyone, in Manhattan or elsewhere, is innocent. He would have been perfectly happy to kill or maim all those people that got killed by Ozy as long as it was on his terms. I think Moore made this fairly clear; Rorschach isn't a good guy there... just a bad guy who is, in this case, opposed to the other bad guy and -- almost coincidentally -- on the right side.

* Nite Owl II was wonderful as a sort of washed-up superhero who realized how silly the whole thing was, but found himself drawn back into the lure of saving people. Silver Spectre II was the same. Her family dynamics were great, as was NO's dynamic with the first NO, Hollis. It was nice to have scenes of just people liking and loving each other in between all the carnage. They were also nicely portrayed as flawed, from SS's messed up relationship with Dr. Manhattan (that issue on Mars was beautiful) to their giving in to Ozy at the end. But at the end, despite all that had happened, they put the capes back on and went out to fight crime. Because, as bad as the world could be, with WW III and Ozy and all that... there are still people worth fighting for, and those two, out of all the heroes, understood that.

* If there was one thing I didn't like, it was the Black Freighter. I tend to find it annoying to have a mini-story going on within the first story and mimicking it, and I found the actual text excerpts very boring to read. The art was... nicely stylized, but I don't like the style. Honestly, I would have been happy if that had been cut.

** I think things like this can be done well, but they need to tie in to the main story in some way (and in more of a direct way than "the writer for the one story is taken to an island paradise to invent a magic squid dude").

* All the minor characters, especially Bernard at the news stand and Bernie the comic reader, were really nice. The cops, the shrink (especially the shrink), even the watch guy, all nicely done.

* I also was pleasantly surprised by the ending, which was a thorough rebuttal of Ozy and his messed up ways. Yes, this time he won. He killed a few million people to avert a possible WW III. But the scenes we just saw -- of humans coming together and helping each other, even if just to break up a fight (including pretty much every side character we saw in the story), hinted at the needlessness of his murder, that humans can and will come together to avert destruction. And there was also Manhattan's great rejoinder to Ozy, how nothing lasts forever. Yeah, he killed a mess of people and averted war... for now... but how long will that last? Did it make sense in the long run? The story implies no, and I think that's just about right.

* Manhattan was a little weak, but I don't really go for "unstuck in time" plots anyway, and writing a character with literal omniscience is taxing anyway. Honestly, I kind of wish that part of his character had been dropped. It made him more alien, sure, but I think he was alien enough for his scenes with SS to work anyway, and I don't see the story gaining much from his occasional confusion as to what time it is.

** I did like the irony of him stopping Rorschach at the end based on his newly discovered concern for human life. Which is shown by him... killing a guy, and covering up one of the worst mass murderers in history. It's a nice touch to show that, smart as he is, he's not recognizably human anymore. "God is American" indeed, and if you're scared, that's how you know you're sane.

* Ozy was... well, I can't really see him as anything but a homage to bwa-ha-ha villains who have needlessly complicated plans ("let's put all these great writers, artists, and scientists on an island and have them dream up a giant alien monstrosity!"), kill henchmen at the drop of a hat, monologue to the heroes, and so forth. Fun to read, fun to watch, and fun to see get his comeuppance at the end. "Nothing ever ends" indeed.

So yes, very nicely done. My first foray into American comics went well!

I dunno what I'll read next. Watchmen supposedly started the Dark Age of comics, so maybe I'll pick up Kingdom Come, the book that supposedly ended it and is also supposed to be pretty good.

My copy of Watchmen arrived today. Writing may be slightly delayed.

Then again, I've only one chapter to go for drafting, after which is just edits/revising and maybe starting my next story -- but I can probably take a couple days for that to get off the ground. So I don't have too much on the plate.

Just finished a big thing at work. We were all doing a big event, which just went off very well, but required staying until about 10-11 at night for the past few days. So I haven't had much energy for writing fic lately. Totally worth it, though. :-) The event was awesome.

Anyway, I do plan to write more soon and wrap up the draft of Cadanceverse. No other big new ideas, though I did work on a plot for the requisite Boast Busters homage in Cadanceverse with one of my betas. :-) So that's on the table if and when I finish the first draft of 'Musicians of Ponyville,' edit it, and begin to publish it.

The other thought I had was based on reading the 'Fluttershy is in Hell' story that just got recced by Seattle's Angels (as compared to the 'Fluttershy wants to commit suicide' fic that got recced by Seattle's Angels last time. It wasn't a good set of reviews for Fluttershy, basically). I came up with an idea and a basic outline for a 'Carrot Top is in Hell' story that could probably sustain a 3-5k word fic. I probably won't write it, though, since I like Carrot Top and I don't want to write her being damned for all eternity. :-D

So I finally got chapter 14 drafted. I don't know why this one was so hard to write. I've been wanting to write it since I began the story; it features a great song, a great enemy, and a certain pony being totally awesome. (And this pony is very good at being awesome. It's kind of her thing).

But it's written. 2 more chapters to draft! And maybe an epilogue or something. Then I can start revising and preparing to post.

Drafted chapters 12 and 13 of the new story... now all that remains is three songs, two epic battles, and a few odds and ends.

Haven't really thought about what I'll do after this. The two really big things I was looking at were the rewrite of Duke Abides (which would need to be delayed in any event, due to the ban on political stuff in the Lunaverse) and a story starring Carrot Top trapped in a city besieged by the Tyrant Sun. (For various reasons, that one would likely be noncanon, or semicanon/movie at most). There's also the Ditzy story I talked about on the boards a while ago (Ditzy makes a mistake with Dinky, and subsequently becomes overprotective) and maybe something featuring Lyra or Carrot Top (I posted a few ideas on the Lunaverse boards, including Lyra getting stuck preparing for a difficult concert and AJ vs. CT round two: the apple-ing). And of course I do want to do a Busting Boasts, or whatever I'll call it, the Cadance-verse equivalent of Boast Busters. I think we all want to see how Vinyl and her friends deal with an Ursa. :-)

Yesterday, I did the second drafts of the first three chapters. Which was probably not a great idea, since they didn't need too much revision so I mostly wasted that day, writing wise. Today, I got one chapter written of about 4.5 k words, which included a song. I'm thinking two songs to go; there needs to be the awesome ensemble at the end, of course, and it wouldn't be right to do this story without giving a certain awesome pony an epic solo of her own.

Not exactly what I wanted for this weekend (I was honestly hoping I might be able to get done, or at least up to the final battle sequences), but hey. It's progress.

So that's 12/16 chapters drafted, three of them more or less complete. Drawing close to the end...

...anyone want to be real nice and help me with some cover art? :-) I'll credit you. And be very grateful.