Story Notes -- 'The Haunting at Buckwheat Manor' · 11:04pm Dec 14th, 2022
Hey there. It’s been awhile since I’ve blogged, or been active here in general, besides commenting.
That hasn’t been because I haven’t been writing. There's some of my stories out there, floating around on an alt account. If you know, you know.
Here, though, I’ve been plugging away at a few longer projects that should be coming out sometime in the new year. My goal is to have them finished when I start publishing, and have them come out episodically, probably on a weekly basis. They're all novella length--30,000 to 50,000 is my goal, so it might still be some time before you see them. Just know that I'm working on a few projects I'm pretty excited about sharing.
Anyways, that’s not what this blog’s about.
The Haunting at Buckwheat Manor was somewhat of an experiment of mine. I wanted to tell what was, in essence, a pretty generic and trope-y ghost story, only to sort of pull the rug out in an unexpected way. I wanted the story to follow the conventions of the traditional gothic ghost story at the start, but not the tone or the resolution of one.
Like most of the things I write here, the idea occurred initially, and I added pony elements to it after. I think the idea came while I was playing Phasmophobia, actually. If you don't know, it's a four-person co-operative ghost hunting game that features heavy usage of an in-game voice recognition where in the player uses their microphone to interact with the ghost that they are currently hunting. I was thinking about how it would be interesting if the game did a better job of gauging how hostile the ghost enemies in the game acted depending on how hostile/approachable you were. If you wanted to agro them and get a hunt going then screaming profanities would be your go-to method. But it would be neat if more patient, methodical, and sympathetic ghost hunters might be able to get different, more co-operative results out of essentially the same questions. The game does this at least to some extent, but only really for a limited period of time before the ghost just grows impatient and starts hunting you--it is a horror game, after all, not Undertale.
With this idea in mind; of ghost-hunting as a sympathetic endeavour instead of a horrific one, I ran through how the sequence of events of a standard ghost story would be altered if they took place within a Pony context. Ponies are more inclined to acting friendlier, so I thought it would be interesting if the story became less scary, not more scary, as Shady came to understand the ghostly happenings.
That's why I didn't tag it as a 'Horror', because, well. I don't consider it one. Horror-adjacent, perhaps. Despite dealing with grim, supernatural topics, and having a bit of the tone of one at the beginning, the story progresses in a way that I consider more or less the opposite to that of horror stories. There's no escalation, but rather, a de-escalation.
I hope you enjoy it.
Gonna read it tomorrow~
Gotta profess my love for this story again. I love it.
Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.
You write good stuff!
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Aw, thank you!
Came for the cute pony ghost story, got the feels in the end. It was so heartwarming. If I was Shady I would've told her I would write a book and tell the story and make sure everyone knew about it and turn that place into a tematic rural hotel/museum and live so angrily happy in that place and have foals and make sure they knew the story and make them play in that hill, and enjoy the sun and breeze and... and...