I started watching MLP with my 7 year old son so that I could talk to him about the things he loves. I never really expected to love the show myself, but I was definitely pleasantly surprised to find that I loved just about everything about the show. My favorite part of the series is the wonderful cast of characters. The characters are perfectly realized, with complex personalities that should be too disparate to work as friends, but in the end, the spectacular writing of the show makes their close friendship just work.

After getting a good working knowledge of the TV series, I began doing some research so that I could work on writing a simple set of rules for a tabletop RPG that I could teach my son which would allow him to create his own pony (along with that DeviantArt pony creation tool) and put him/her into Ponyville. Still working on it, but I'll let y'all know how it goes. As my research progressed, I read through most of the MLP wiki, but I had some more questions about characters, places, and motivations that just weren't answered by the show or by the wiki. That's when I found FimFiction.net.

Now normally, I'm quite leery of fan fiction. It feels (felt) like cheating. And I'm sure that there are stories which would bear that assumption up, but the stories I've read on FIMFiction.net have been fantastic. I read my son the Old Stories and he loved it. Then I began reading the Fallout crossover stories and thought they were a really interesting take on a very dark theme. Then I got into the romances...

Hooboy. I never thought I'd love reading romance stories so much! I'm a straight fantasy/sci fi reader normally. Romance never really did anything for me, but I think I discovered why: none of them created characters that I actually care about. The Mane 6 are characters I care about! And I suddenly found myself shipping (for the first time in my life) and with a list of my favorite ships (my absolute favorite is Rainbow Dash and Twilight Sparkle).

Now I sit at my computer, word processor open with five pages of notes for an outline of a TwiDash romance, getting ready to write a chapter outline with my head in a daze of ponies and happy feelings. I've joined a bunch of groups on FIMFiction now, including the Proofreaders group, so if you need proofreading done, take a look at the proofreaders' group doc and search out junebud.

Oh yeah, if you were wondering why I chose 'junebud' as my username, the reason is simple: Junebud (my account name) is the name my son gave for his OC that he created for his online pony on the Hub's MLP game and I think he'd like me to use it.

Want to get a hold of me? Email me at junebud42@gmail.com

I also have Google Talk through that account, so feel free to chat with me if you ever want.