To Soothe the Neurotic Beast post-mortem · 7:36pm Feb 16th, 2023
A story post-mortem is something I've done for all my other stories, and it appears that this one demands its due as well--it won't leave my head until I've poured out all my extant thoughts about it. Fair enough, story. You win. Let's talk about it, shall we?
Excepting Lingua Phallum, (which was always more an experiment that I didn't write, so much as touch up and carve the awkward bits off of) To Soothe was my first piece of lewd fiction. Not my first piece of erotic writing certainly, but the first I've written in a prose style with the intent to publish from the start.
In the process of writing it, I realized that I had unconsciously given myself a few rules:
- No sex without intimacy. I probably could write "wham-bam-thank-you-ma'am", but I don't really want to.
- No (overly) contrived excuses to arrive at the eventual sex. There's obviously going to be some degree of contrivance when you glue a dick to a character, but let's at least let all the characters acknowledge how weird the situation is.
- No simultaneous orgasms. Seriously. That just doesn't really happen all that often.
- Cuddling is a hard requirement. That's like, the best part.
...which then proved increasingly less useful as I continued writing. Why? Because it took so goddamn long to get to the actual sex! Largely for my "no contrived excuses" reason--I had to set up the scenario, find a way to justify Fluttershy (of all ponies!) being the one to take initiative, and establish enough emotional context that everything lands correctly.
I originally envisioned this as an approximately 10k-15k word idea. My outline was about six one-sentence bullet points. Nope!
In fact, this was the fastest I've written anything... ever. The longest story I've published is on my main, SFW account, and is just shy of 32k words. That took me about six months of slowly grinding out.
This? I wrote this in two weeks, from blank page to publishing.
In fact, I was hitting a pace such that, had this been a 50k word idea instead of an (apparently) 30k word idea, I think I could have managed a spontaneous NaNoWriMo. That's crazy! I've always held that goal of "50k words in a month" as this unattainable, impossible goal, and here I manage to smash out something at that same pace without intentional effort.
I don't really know what to conclude from this. Simple ideas are easy to write? It's easy to balloon your word count with sex scenes? Writing dialogue is my happy place? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Why Fluttershy? Not for any particularly shippy reason. I think pretty much any pairing between the Mane 6 can work. They all already love each other, and friendship and love aren't so far apart from one another.
I honestly can't remember. Maybe it was as simple as the idea of gentle, quiet Fluttershy being the one to guide anxious Twilight through an abrupt, all-consuming sexual awakening being hot.
Fluttershy being the main character did present some problems, though. I'd never written her as a PoV character--in fact , now that I think about it, I've never written her at all. Her dialogue is odd, because she's so timid. Half the time, I'd write a line for her, then stop and ask, "Wait. Would she even have spoken at all?" And it's tough to get her level of diction right. She's reasonably well-spoken, but without Rarity's affectations, or Twilight's loggorhea.
But more than mechanical issues, were emotional ones. Chapter 3 was supposed to focus on her trip to Canterlot to consult with Luna, but as I began writing the scene, Fluttershy's guilt just bled onto the page. I was two pages deep into before I realized I'd written myself into a hole. How does poor, anxious, guilty Fluttershy find the courage to move forward?
Enter Rarity.
Goodness. Rarity. What a ham. She owns every scene she's in, and loves it the entire time. She also gave the narrative the necessary push to get out of Fluttershy's head on two occasions.
The sex scene--and make no mistake, it may take up three chapters, but it is all one scene--was something that was difficult to start writing and then, once it begun, difficult to stop. At one point, my in-progress notes included two more subscenes I could have included. In one, Fluttershy's admission of her bat pony transformation would have led to another round. In another, her teasing of Twilight re: the alicorn sandwich would have led to yet another.
Ultimately, when I looked at it and saw that it was nine thousand words, I decided that that was probably plenty. I then carved it up into three chapters, to try to avoid reader fatigue.
One bit of trivia that I never really addressed in the story proper--Luna's apothecary gave Fluttershy three potions--the contraceptive, which she drinks. An mild anti-anxiety potion, which is one of the two that she drinks before Twilight arrives, but which goes unnamed in the narrative. And a third, which Fluttershy does not take, which the narrative never mentions. That was going to be a potion intended to heal and restore stamina--the apothecary is, shall we say, familiar with alicorn libido, and wanted to ensure that the poor, trembling mare would survive her coming trial.
Fluttershy's made of sterner stuff though--she didn't even need it.
I hate writing endings. When I finished the rough draft, the ending was basically a placeholder. It wasn't until my second editing pass that I wrote the final 200 words or so of what is now that ending, with the silly pun and everything.
I hate coming up with titles and descriptions even more. It wasn't until I was literally posting it that I finally came up with a title I was happy with.
I didn't come up with the story's short description until after I'd posted it! The original was much worse, and I don't even remember it anymore. This one is much better.
As ever, I owe thanks to my dedicated editor. It was only thanks to their input that I foreshadowed Fluttershy's own attraction to Twilight, rather than having Luna's suggestion be the reason that she decided to help with Twilight's "little" problem.
My editor, quite rightly, pointed out that in this scenario, Fluttershy sleeping with Twilight was pity sex. And they were right! And I didn't want that to be the case. Pity sex is sad, not hot!
At first I despaired. How could I possibly correct this problem?
Turned out to be easy. As I mentioned up above, any one of the Mane 6 pairings is a workable ship. They're all friends, because they all like each other! And part of that is the fact that they all respect each other. So, all I had to do is dig into that a little bit. Why does Fluttershy like Twilight specifically? And from there, it was easy.
Sprinkle in a little bit of physical attraction--because this is fan fiction, and you can just do that--and you're golden.
I have zero clue if I'll be writing again anytime soon. This was kind of capturing lightning in a bottle, inspiration-wise. It's the end of a long, frustrating creative dry spell for me, but I don't know if it heralds more, or it's just a nice bright spot.
I guess we'll see.
Either way, thanks for reading the story, and if you've made it this far, this blog post.
An interesting behind the scenes. Hope to see more like To Soothe the Neurotic Beast, you wrote the characters very well.
You're really talented when putting feelings into smut, makes me curious about their future relationship.