Contests, Comics, Coffees, Commissions, and Crossovers

I knew I would overextend myself eventually.

When you're used to doing your best work at the last minute, you eventually come to a situation where you run out of minutes. A Moonlit Storm had me working well into the small hours of the morning, and Every Dog Has Her Day was not much better as I was just short of my local midnight which, thanks to timezones, was actually far beyond contest-midnight. Dawn of the Chiroptera had some breathing room between story publish and deadline, but given that it was the same day that EDHHD had been working with, you could say that the combined effort of the two entries had still run down to the wire.

I like contests. Contests make spectacular story prompts and I've enjoyed creating stories I probably wouldn't have otherwise. The three stories mentioned above will likely find themselves with sequels to further expand on what they've established, though I hesitate to say that concretely since it may take a while to get there.

Deadlines, however, I can stress myself about to the point of triggering my insomnia and wow is writing while sleep deprived something I would rather not make a habit of. It's the main reason I didn't try my hand at joining Jinglemas for the first time despite starting my forays into shorter stories this year, because there's something different between not making a contest deadline and not having someone's secret santa present ready. As much fun as I may have had with whatever prompt I was given, that wouldn't be fair to the person on the other end if I bungled the delivery.

I thought that skipping Jinglemas would be enough, but it looks like I should have cut my attempts within the recent timeframe by one.

The Apple family story that I'd been teasing was for the M/M contest this year. It currently exists as a(n extremely) rough draft that's going to need several editing passes before I'm willing to let it see the light of day, and entries are long closed. I still like the story itself, and I may extend it a bit during that editing process, so it's not a loss, and I mostly just feel guilty because there were charity donations involved, but I suppose I can always make a personal donation instead.

However, when I looked back on it after the initial burst of self-frustration, it might be a blessing in disguise from a wider perspective on my writing. AMS, DOTC, and EDHHD are all relatively stand-alone. One a pre-series story, one a post-series one, and another in separate AU simply due to its premise. The story I was working on (current working title is Apple Of His Eye, and you are free to groan both from that and anticipating the apple puns destined to be the chapter titles) is intertwined with The Long Eventide.

Still a story that I think could be enjoyed with no familiarity, so long as the reader rolls with the fact that Eventide is the name of a place that exists in this Equestria and there are Apple family members living there, but still a tie-in nevertheless. And I kept thinking, as I looked at what I'd done, that maybe it would make more sense to release this story after we've had a glimpse of the characters involved in it in TLE itself. Again, it's its own story, but someone following my work in general might get a bit more out of meeting them in that order instead of the opposite.

That's also the reason the "sweet little slice of life Halloween story" didn't materialize. The idea found itself expanding, the scene I had in mind beginning to make more sense as the lead-in to a longer tale, one that I don't think I can tell until TLE concludes and lays the groundwork for it.

At this point I don't think I can deny that I have a fledgling verse in the works. AMS and DOTC exist in the same continuity in my head, and EDHHD has worldbuilding that I've decided that the "mainline" shares, but those were more self-contained. Now the threads are starting to tie together in the background.

"The Eventide Verse" does have kind of a nice ring to it.

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So, to cut through some the vaugeness I've used before in blogs: I am currently without a job. It's not a new state for me, but I'd had some actual optismism about the last place that has been dashed and given me another slap with the fact that I might not have the capability to do a "normal" job, or at least not do so without a conga line of accompanying mental breakdowns, which works out to the same thing. I've been living off savings as I try to sort my health out, and so my mind naturally went where it often goes to for People Who Do Things On The Internet: Is this monetizable?

I'm not talking Patreon or similar services. My work is far, far too sporadic and fickle for me to feel comfortable asking for a monthly contribution from anyone. But I do have a Ko-Fi. I set it up when I initially thought I was onto something with game modding (it's not an entirely abandoned hobby, and in fact I'll link in another blog if I ever get something off the ground that is appropriately pony) and so I've rebranded and repurposed it. If any of you have read my work, enjoyed it, have a few bucks to spare (hah, does anyone these days?) and think it's worth it, your tips are always appreciated.

As for my first goal on the Ko-Fi, anyone who's read A Moonlit Storm in particular can see that I have a fondness for incorporating aspects of the comics in my worldbuilding. Unfortunately, my current avenue for accessing said comics is Kindle Unlimited, which has its issues. There are volumes available on it, but not all of them, and it's still essentially borrowing said comics. Not even properly "owning" the digital copy, so much as you can own anything digital, and there's a limit to how many I can have out at once. Also the monthly fee attached, which is a bargain in some ways but may start to add up.

Tracking down physical copies? Involves space to put them that I do not have in my living situation, plus I imagine with MLP onto Generation 5 there's going to be some issues with supply. So I'd like to build a digital Kindle library of the comics so I can cut the Unlimited subscription and just have them. The current goal is what the mainline IDW comics, the Season 10 comics, FIENDship is Magic, Legends of Magic, and a few of the one-offs would cost me. Not everything, but plenty of material, and I can probably manage the rest on my own if I decide I need a particular issue.

I have also, with no small amount of fear, considered commissions. Now that I have written a few shorter stories, there's a clearer indication of what I can do, and so possibly a chance that there's something someone would pay me to tackle. There will be rules, not the least of which being the lines I won't cross even for money, and I'd limit myself to a few at a time, but I won't know who will bite if I don't put a hook out.

There'll be another blog post once I'm ready for that, mentally and otherwise. For now, a tip jar, going toward research material.

If this is what I'm good at, I might as well commit.

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I have something of a soft spot for crossovers.

One of the first ponyfics I ever read was a crossover between My Little Pony and Stargate. It was a bit tongue-and-cheek, and tried to sell the ponies as an experiment of a Goa'uld who was using the persona of the deity Epona, with Celestia as Epona's former First Prime. As someone who wasn't a massive fan but who had still watched enough SG-1 to recognize the characters and get most of the jokes made, I was entertained, and ended up looking for more.

The first fic that got me onto FimFiction was Mass Effect 2 - DLC: The Equestrian Equation. The first two seasons of the show colliding with the first two games in the trilogy, and comment driven at that, is an ambitious project to make work. But I was a Mass Effect fanatic at the time, and found the result to be a shockingly believable and compelling blending of the two worlds that convinced me to stick around the site as a reader.

More recently? I count myself a fan of the story Daily Equestria Life With Monster Girl. Unlike those early fics, it's not a blending of the canons, trying to reconcile them into a singular world. It's a more "classic" crossover, dropping a character from one media into the other and watching their journey. And what a journey, as Cerea works against the bigotry and collective trauma of a society that has only ever seen one other centaur: Tirek. And unlike the other ones, I had no real familiarity with Cerea's source material going in, only having been vaguely aware of the property through images of an entirely different girl floating around online.

(The girl in question is Rachnera, and being an arachnophobe, that had put me off from exploring further. Ironic, since it's clear that that kneejerk response from humans is something she's had to face in-universe. I felt a twinge of guilt when that occurred to me, though I'm still not going to read the manga; my tolerance for ecchi content can be extremely low and Estee has made clear that you have to wade through a lot of it to reach the nuggets of character potential.)

You see crossover stories pop up regularly on the front page. Something about ponies makes it attractive to combine them with all manner of things, and sometimes the results are masterful. And I've had a few ideas for crossovers myself that I might put to keyboard.

But I have a rule for myself: The story is a story first, and a crossover second.

There's one idea that I've been batting around for a while. I have a protagonist in mind, intending it to be my first Daring Do tale. I have the components together for a supporting cast and an antagonist, and A Moonlit Storm has taught me that I'm apparently pretty good at adventure tales in exotic locales.

It's also a crossover. One that I will tag as such because I try to use accurate tagging, but that I hesitate to tag with the series. It's a series that does have a tag, too. I've seen fics utilizing it quite often in fact, but the fic would play things from the ponies' point of view, looking at the crossover elements as an outsider, and it almost works better, in my mind, if the reader is just as in the dark.

I don't know how long the cat would remain in the bag--the property is so recognizable that it may escape the moment I describe the first member of the supporting cast I pull from it--but I'm very tempted to leave off the series tag until either the story wraps up, or someone in the comments guesses correctly what I'm using. And that's simply because I'm looking for those who want to read a Daring Do story, not necessarily a story with that crossover property. In fact, if you went in wanting to read a story about that series first, you might be disappointed by my askew angle of viewing it.

But there's a perfect moment in that media's canon that could facilitate the crossover, and I want to explore that askew angle, the way ponies would look at who and what crosses the barrier into their world. And Daring Do feels like a good vehicle for it.

I'm not going to guarantee when it'll come out. There's so much in my mental queue and only so much time and energy to devote. But, it will come.

There's already been a hint of foreshadowing of it, in fact.

Onward to a most mysterious isle...