Coltistrano Signal Boost, Swooped Review and Reading, and a bit of Cypress talk · 2:49pm Mar 21st, 2023
The Ghost of Coltistrano trilogy is now complete, and definitely worth your time. Clark is an extremely underrated author, and these fics scratch an itch I didn’t know I had. It’s something I absolutely wish I had on a bookshelf. So, do yourself a favor and read a whole slew of good fics over there.
On my own side of things, I have a reading that I didn’t get messaged about. Not only that, but it’s one of two existing readings for the same fic: Swooped. Oh, and it only came into my sphere of awareness because PresentPerfect did a review that you can find in her roundup, here.
Swooped was a little bit of an exercise, experiment, and definitely a shitpost. I didn’t expect it to be taken so seriously, especially since it’s pretty clear by the way the plot works out that it’s not exactly a reflection of the drama it implies. But the dramatic reading by Lotus Moon recontextualized a lot of that for me: it’s made me understand that there’s still a lot of gravitas to it in spite of the fact that I made it as essentially a joke-gone-prose.
It was fun. The reading is fun. And I appreciate the recommend from PresentPerfect.
Swooped by Odd_Sarge
Reading by VisualPony
Reading by Lotus Moon
Genre: Historical Thriller
I find it very fitting that the first entry in this blog is read by both of my current extremely active fic readers. This is also a really weird one, and I had to go back and read it myself to make sure I understood it. It really all comes down to a single line about listening to the mares of her tribe (as this, quite obviously, takes place pre-Equestria). With that firmly in mind, I had a completely new impression of the ending. I will say that the final line was maybe a mistake, as this sort of exists to define its own main topic, and intent is a really important part of it. But, well, it's ultimately kind of fun, so I can't complain too much.
Recommended If You Enjoy Historical World-Building
After all that, I’ve got a tiny bit of housekeeping: Cypress Zero is a few updates away from completion. I’ve added +2000 words during the last 2 months of edits, so the story sits pretty close to 114k at this point. If you’ve been reading it, I well and truly hope you’ve been enjoying it. It’s been hard to stay silent in the comments section—doubly so given the positive responses so far—but ultimately it keeps me on track and more likely to leave the story as close to the original vision as possible. Really hoping the conclusion delivers. I’ll certainly make another post when I’m done publishing.
More plans soon to come. For now, thank you for reading, and I hope to see more comments in familiar places, from familiar faces.
That trilogy looks really neat, and I'm on the market for a nice longfic to burn through anyways. Thanks for the recommendation!
Congrats on the reading and on being soooo close to finishing Cypress!