Monophobia Postmortem (Or: I Have Now Released My New Shit and My Fell-Off-Ness Is In a State of Constant Flux) · 8:18pm Aug 6th, 2023
"You used to be big."
"I am big. It's the [website] that got small."
(Come on, I've been living literally on Sunset Boulevard for a year and a half now. Gimme just this one bit of referential self-aggrandizement.)
As is the case with virtually everything I write, some form of what ultimately became Monophobia has existed in my head for several years, going all the way back to when I was fresh out of college myself. I could be professional and say that I didn't have a second act to go with the first and last scenes until the end of last year, and to be fair, that's more or less true. I could be empathetic and admit that I just wasn't technically or emotionally ready to write a long-form story of any kind around 2016 (RIP Celestia's Angels, you were a very fun idea that I had no shot of doing justice when I tried to write you), and to be fair, that's more or less true too.
But honestly? The single biggest reason why this story took so long to get out, and also the exact same reason it's now my first completed and published novel, is because I've spent years refusing to let myself really enjoy writing, and also being quietly embarrassed by stuff I did enjoy. In this fandom, of all places. Go fuckin' figure, right?
I mean, let's be real for a second, though: Button Mash is effectively a fan OC, and usually one portrayed as an incel capital-G Gamer at that. Putting all my first-novel chips into a slow-burn romance between my version of him and my pretty-much-an-OC version of an aged-up canon character was... all right, "bold" is probably an overwrought way to phrase it, but "inconsistent with my brand" might not be. Because lemme be real again for a second: I do have a brand around here. Specifically, the "oh shit, Aquaman's entering this contest, he's probably gonna win" type of brand that's absurd to even think of complaining about.
I want to stress, of course, that complaining is the farthest thing from what I'm trying to do here. I've been extremely privileged to find a receptive audience here and to improve my craft immensely through the reception I've gotten over the years, and I don't ever want to take that for granted. But at the same time, not taking it for granted has meant in practice that I've left a lot of fun ideas in my mind palace's version of developmental hell over the years (with proto-Monophobia being just one of many), because more than just enjoying writing for its own sake, I wanted to keep entertaining, impressing, and avoid wasting the time of people who'd liked my work in the past.
So if I was going to enter a contest, put the work into drafting and editing and all that junk, it had to be a concept that I genuinely thought could win -- and if I was gonna write a novel, it had to be high-concept and high-octane and be a banger from start to finish, because that's what people expect from me. Because I've always had aspirations of going pro one way or another, and as any other sports person could tell you, the way you practice is the way you play in a real game. Because I have a brand -- and slow-burn romance, quasi-autobiographical low-stakes drama, and ButtonBelle weren't part of it.
... is what I thought, for years. And finally, kind of embarrassingly recently, I thought better of it, and this was the result.
I'm not gonna wax poetic about Monophobia. I'm not gonna call it profound, or inspirational, or "some of my best work" or what have you. What Monophobia is to me, and the only thing I feel any need to call it, is personal. For the first time in a long while, I wrote something completely and entirely for myself: to put into words some half-forgotten memories of a really impactful period of my young life, to record indelibly what "freshman year of college" was to me, to tell a small part of my own life story in a way I felt comfortable telling it and explain some things I deeply believe about the world and life in general.
And Button Mash is part of that, because more than I would've been comfortable admitting even a couple years ago, Button Mash is me. At least, the version of him in my head is, the one which reminds me painfully of myself as an eight-year-old who was loud and excitable and overly emotional and a dork. He's been me ever since that first fan episode about him released a full decade ago, because I know exactly how that excitable, kind-hearted, dorky little kid's story goes after that: how much it's going to confuse him the first time another kid is mean to him, how much of himself he'll try to bend into a shape that might make those kids be nice instead, how he'll surround his sensitive heart with self-deprecating thorns because all those other kids must know something about being normal that he doesn't and probably never will.
And finally, when he gets to college, I know he'll start out still being unsure of himself and convinced that he's lagging behind other people his age, and then he'll nut up and go to parties and find a group of friends to spend the rest of college with, and he'll learn so much about himself that he never knew before -- including, as it's said in the story, that he's just about the only person he's met who doesn't like him. I know he will, because I did. And he was a way for me to talk about how it happened.
I mean, how eventually it happened. It took a lot longer for that proverbial character arc to conclude in real life than the week it did in Monophobia -- but hey, it's fiction, right? Everything is clean and metaphorically consistent here, and it all happens quickly enough that I didn't need to cram five-plus years of back-and-forth interpersonal development into 84,000 words of prose. That said, there are still plenty of little bits and pieces of Monophobia that were based on my real college-freshman experience -- for example, I really did follow a friend up onto the roof of the campus theater one late semi-drunken night, and I personally witnessed someone stumble into a dorm lounge hammered, watch someone else play Super NES games for a little bit, and then sprint to the bathroom to puke right as the player asked if they were feeling okay.
At the same time, though, all the people and contexts within those little moments have been changed to make a completely original story -- for example, I witnessed that drunk-puking scene because I was the hammered one who had just spent three hours drinking fortified wine with rugby players, and there were actually several people in my dorm lounge playing games together who were very nice and helpful about me being a fucking mess. And I really don't see that as a cynical change to make, because at the end of the day, Monophobia is really about everyone who was and is like me. Button needed to be painfully alone at the story's start in a way that I wasn't literally in real life but certainly was in spirit, because he needed to realize the same way I did -- the same way I know a lot of people still can -- that solitude is something you impose on yourself, and that you really can find yourself and your people if you just grit your teeth through the anxiety, fight past the overcautious and overconfident voice in your head, and give yourself the grace you instinctively give everyone else.
So, is Monophobia some of my best work? I don't fuckin' know. That's not really for me to decide -- kinda like calling yourself a "philosopher," rather than just saying a bunch of philosophical shit and having someone else add the term to your Wikipedia page after you croak, y'know? But because of how it began and what it became, and what I was able to prove to myself by doing it, I can safely say I've never been prouder of anything I've written before. That's worth a lot, I think. And, more importantly, I enjoyed the hell out of it, and I want to do it again sometime.
Maybe a bit of a break first, though. Or some stuff to put on the alt-account. If I had one, of course. Which I allegedly don't.
Delighted to see you back and hear you're writing for *yourself* n_n
Fuck having a personal brand that weighs you down.
Monsters Of Our Own is better by default because Monophobia has no giant robots in it.
duuude, you are a big guy, you should be living big! :O if anyone, yourself included, tries to put you in a box, you punch your way the fuck out of that box, you got the muscles for it!
5741041
I mean, yeah. Obviously. That's fair.
Does the title Monophobia refer to acclaimed author Monochromatic, author of the democratically elected greatest MLP fic of all time, “My Girlfriend Is A Ghost And I Am Compelled To Discover If Ghosts Cannot, In Fact, Do It,” or to the debilitating illness known as mononucleosis?
I could read it, and discover for myself, but I’m illiterate.
5741052
It’s actually in reference to the creeping dread I feel now that I have nothing really left to do with this project and therefore will have to start a new one at some point, because I can’t just write one book and quit forever.
Being human is hard. We're all learning and (hopefully!) improving upon that one day at a time. It's always nice to hear someone say "I wrote this for myself because I wanted to." It's certainly not something I'm capable of just yet, so good on your for being further down that road than I am. Maybe I'll catch up some day.
I'll be frank here - I haven't read this story, just more of just passing through say hello - but I will say this blog was a fascinating bit of insight/history of yourself and your inspiration for writing it. As wonderful as the imagination is, it's always cool to see authors pull snippets of their real-life out and adapt them as a story piece, because there's no real substitute for lived experience.
5741052
... There does not appear to be a fic by that name. Unless you are summarizing the premise of a fic with a different name?
5741103
Posh is referring to "The Enchanted Library", Monochromatic's magnum opus and one of the most well-known, classic Ponyfics of all time (it was voted best at the last Bronycon).
You should know, Posh is the kind of person who never makes straight, sincere, comments, always injecting them with irony, sideswipes, and all other manner of cynical-yet-sincere jokes. Even when I reviewed and heavily liked a fic of theirs, the response was like this. It's clearly all in good fun for them (and, I'm sure, if they respond to this, it will be in a similar tone, probably denying it's something they're putting on or a joke at all
).
Just know to parse the actual meaning of their comments. Which isn't much here, as they're basically quipping "it's obviously not like that story or that topic, but I'll joke ask if it is just for something to say here".
Nice! Congratulations on the story! The best kind of art originates from the artists' lives themselves~
But it's worth mentioning that they are also completely able to make a thoughtful comment if they think it's necessary. After all, that's what a convincing argument requires~
5741134
Yes, indeed, Posh be like that most of the time, and even when they try to convince silly people from doing stuff or just expressing themselves, they tend to make it strange.
Not having fun while writing is what's kept me from doing it for the past 11 years. Of course, you want to have standards, to take your craft seriously, to constantly be improving, but if it comes at the expense of personal fulfillment, then what's the point? Kudos to you for being able to step out of your own head and writing something that you actually enjoying writing.