I'm Just an Old Chunk of Rock – Author's Notes · 5:05pm Dec 27th, 2023
But I'm gonna be a geode someday, as soon as I get over myself.
Happy Hearth’s Warming, everybody! Whatever holiday you celebrate, I hope it’s going well and you’re having a jolly old time. As is customary for your favourite ghost, here’s a behind-the-scenes on the gestation and direction taken for my entry to Jinglemas this year. Spoilers follow, so read at your own discretion.
The above screenshot was one of several I had as a backup option if I couldn’t find suitable fanart. I still considered using it or another one even after I found the fanart by soranogawasekai, as I couldn’t decide which read best. In the end, I felt the fanart made it more unique, and will probably (?) help it stand out better during this release period to people browsing the home page. Let’s hope so – nothing like your first story not using show screenshots as cover art! 
Surprisingly, despite being the 4th year running where I got character(s) I’d almost never write for of my own volition, a lot of this scenario came to mind on the day I got the prompt. Quite a contrast to the difficulty Spike and Berry Punch caused me last year! But when I got Starlight and Maud, I settled pretty quickly on the two meeting as fillies decades before the show, on the Pie farm, when Pinkie and Marble weren’t even born yet, and with Starlight having run away from home sometime after losing Sunburst. Canon doesn’t confirm that Starlight did so (TV-Y show, can’t give kids a bad message!), and I’ve actually seen more fics where she just studied magic sullenly in Sire’s Hollow until she came of age, then left to form her village. But it’s a perfectly logical extrapolation.
Why’d I go this way? Well, I’ve been on record that I often find characters can offer more possibilities early in their stories/lives, especially in their earlier interactions with someone else. Whereas the longer a story goes on, the harder it is to surprise while remaining consistent (something the show certainly ran into!). Only harder, of course, not impossible, and as Starlight and Maud only met in the show in Season Seven, it’s early enough for them still. Likely, the bigger deciding factor was, off my wanting to do something new and different with each Jinglemas story (every story I write period, frankly), I knew I wanted to do a proper Drama this time (my prior attempts to do comedies having softened into Slice of Life pieces). And thinking of drama as regards to Starlight led me to her cutie mark, the getting of which I’ve hardly ever seen in fanfic, despite how much cutie marks would drive her actions for much of her life.
Once the notion of her getting her mark in the fic hit, there was no letting go of this scenario. I decided then and there that Maud had to be the perspective character, as otherwise the story would be all about Starlight, so this would force me to keep it even. By the evening of the day I received the prompt, I had much of the scenario. The Pie parents being off the farm and Limestone working, telling Maud to wait inside. Maud finding Starlight hungry and looking for food. Maud giving Starlight food in exchange for supervising her looking at rocks, which Limestone wouldn’t. An accident almost hurting Maud, but Starlight saving her, yet accidentally getting her mark in the process. Heck, the last two scenes basically came nearly fully-outlined.
The decision to make Maud the lead was probably the main reason I did still struggle to actually write this, at least at first. How to capture her voice as a filly? She can be aware that she’s strange as an adult and read other ponies then, sure, even if given her personality she’ll default to surface-level blunt things. But as the equivalent of a kindergartner… kids with learning disabilities or other unusual brain developmental afflictions don’t realise they’re strange. Much less know how to work around it when with others that don’t know the right way to approach them. It was quite the puzzle, both to voice Maud and to not let this become a detriment to the story or its execution.
Like many writing puzzles, though, it was itself the solution. Those kinds of kids laser-focus on the things that interest them, as they provide comfort and familiarity. Hence, if it concerns rocks, Maud is active and open (if still monotone). And that would balance with her not being able to read Starlight’s expressions and tone, only noting what she’s doing and how her face looks, not what it means. At some point, I connected that back to what bonded Starlight and Maud in the present: they don’t have much in common, but get along well due to not pressuring the other into talking about their problems or difficulty bonding with others. So Starlight, who has endured adults trying to find out why a filly was far away from home and asked about that and tried to bring her home, would feel that much more comfortable around Maud, who didn’t do that, though not out of the politeness Starlight assumed.
Writing Maud like this meant quite a balance between tell and show; kids that age can mostly just tell, but there’s a lot of things Maud doesn’t know the meaning of, and thus glosses over, but the adult reader will infer. As the story took me close enough to the deadline that I didn’t have time to ask for any pre-readers, it’s altogether possible there is the odd slip in what Maud does and doesn’t perceive.
There was also the internal timing. Originally, the Pie parents were off because Cloudy Quartz had gone into labour (with the threaded implication that their Amish-esque hesitance against modern medicine would have given way to Cloudy being at a rough age for giving birth to twins), the main story itself was on Hearth’s Warming Eve, and they would have returned with the two. And the final scene with Igneous would have been him showing Maud some rock farming techniques just after the holiday. Alas, this ran into the brick wall of Pinkie’s birthday in “Party of One” being well away from winter, and while that itself poses problems with later canon (Pinkie forgetting her twin sister’s birthday?!?), it felt too key to ignore. So I did feel a little impact was lost from ditching Maud having lost a friend right as she gained two sisters, and Starlight getting her cutie mark on Hearth’s Warming Eve itself. But ultimately, the news of a new sibling, and Starlight’s mark being close to Hearth’s Warming, still served their purpose. Especially the latter, being a possible reason for Starlight’s aversion to the holiday in “A Hearth’s Warming Tail”.
Some research into rocks and geology later, and I was mostly ready to write.
Other story elements didn’t fully solidify until I was writing it, like Starlight deliberately not using magic to avoid getting her cutie mark, and her reluctance in doing so being what lands Maud in danger and causes her to get the mark. Still, the actual writing of the story took six days, not super quick, but considering most of the outline was more a list of things to happen rather than the actual play-by-play, it was one of my quicker writings when I got down to it. Hitting a strong sisterly dynamic between Limestone and Maud in the opening scene gave me momentum that only slowed at the quarry setpiece. Which was where I also started to notice the story was getting long, and my 6-7K projected length wasn’t happening.
It, eh… was certainly a good thing the old Jinglemas hard word count limit of 8.5K wasn’t a thing anymore! 
But, as I really wanted to keep the story’s pace brisk, I shortened this scene heavily in the writing process. Which actually benefited it – the original version, on top of showing Starlight covering her tracks in real-time, had Maud proposing Starlight just lift the syenite up, which led to Starlight proposing using the branch to pull her up if Maud dropped down. And Maud agreed to this. Forcing myself to get to the fall quicker led to Maud dropping down on assumption of her plan being clear, something she would do as rocks are a blind spot when it comes to not pegging others getting them as she does. Further developing character out of it! Wanting to keep the pace from lagging also made me cut outline material from both the letter and the epilogue scenes, and tighten up the transitions – all told, this probably shortened the story by 1K, all before actual editing. So hopefully, despite being a 9.5K story, that it’s split across six scenes, and all but one are under 1.8K, and it has less description than I’ve defaulted to in past stories, keeps it from lagging.
Both before and during the writing, I also considered an extra epilogue, either at Starlight’s next Hearth’s Warming after “A Hearth’s Warming Tail” or right after the events of “Rock Solid Friendship”, where Maud would privately gift/give Starlight the note she left behind all those years ago, reveal she knew who it was when Pinkie introduced them, and she remembered her promise and thus didn’t say anything. Thus giving Starlight closure from how she got her mark, a story she’s never told anypony the full deal off. But a third of the story already took place after Starlight got her cutie mark, and I could feel pushing the ending any longer would make it structurally lopsided. Plus, such an epilogue felt like it would diffuse the drama and rob it of impact, while also make it all about Starlight and make many of the story’s key points not be present at the ending. So I kept it to just the epilogue with Igneous, with some slight retooling to have the points be about Maud but also about Starlight. And plant the seeds for Maud’s further relationship with a pony rather different from herself in Pinkie, something I already had in mind but doubled down on. The aborted epilogue still comes across in spirit from Maud’s closing thoughts, without disrupting the fic.
There’s so many little things I worry don’t come across as well or as impactfully as I’d intended, especially off writing a kid like Maud with a learning disability (I especially fear the length diluted the final scene’s potency). Right now, though, it feels quite successful, and while I can certainly think of many other authors around here who could write this better, this still feels unexpected and powerful – I knew if I could keep readers to Starlight getting her cutie mark like this, the rest would fall into place. And like past works, I was surprised by how the characterisation came out: Maud’s character voicing, and then her dynamic with Limestone and then Starlight (and also her Pa). The former especially matters, after two Jinglemas stories from the perspective of kids that sometimes lapse into vocabulary and thinking too advanced for their age. But except where it concerns rocks, Maud does feel like a young filly here.
So while I only published one fic all year, right now, it’s probably my second-favourite of the six I’ve published. 
Hopefully darkcyan likes it!
And yeah, that’ll probably do. A good writer knows not to over-analyse and gush about all the layers of his work in public. Even if I’m kicking myself about all the things I didn’t go over here, it’s for the best, to keep this blog under 2,000 words.
That is a really good point, and I can only imagine the psychological torment of a mare who's convinced that cutie marks are the worst things in the world whilst simultaneously relying on one to get rid of the rest.
That's the "Maud is autistic" fan theory at work, I'm guessing? Or did you write it more as an ambiguous case of "she's atypical, but how specifically atypical is a mystery"?
You're in my territory now, boy!
That's about my typical length. Join the club, we got jackets.
Not having read the fic, I can't comment contextually, but that does seem a bit needless and risks erring towards the hokey. I prefer the idea of keeping it as dramatic irony in this scenario: the audience knows, but the characters don't, so we get a meta-level appreciation all to ourselves.
That too.
That feeling when you realize one of your blog posts could count as a story in its own right.
Or...
That feeling when a blog post about a story ends up being longer than the story itself.
5761084
What few fics I've read that really touch on this were largely written when Season Five was ongoing, and we didn't know her past. So they focused more on the mental insanity of such a pony (still fully a villain, after all), but did get into her inner turmoil.
This fic was never going to be that – both for the recipient's request, what I felt comfortable handling, and this being at a point when Starlight has not yet settled on action. She's still a filly, afraid and scared, and just trying to not get a cutie mark period. Trying to stop cutie marks hasn't even crossed her mind yet. The ending implies this leads to her soon starting to find a way to get her own mark off, and, well, over the years, you can see where that would eventually lead. To the fact she can't for herself, as she needs her mark to do the spell, but can for others. And later, to her village.
But that's all just in the subtext for the reader, knowing the future events of the show and all. And across basically the age of Pinkie Pie in the show, what with her being half-a-year off being born here.
More the second. I certainly have my own ideas about what she's got, but not only do I feel it plays stronger with us not learning how she's atypical, but from her perspective at this age, short of something clunky like overhearing Igneous and Cloudy talking about it, there wouldn't be a way to really get it in the fic. I did a decent bit of research into how atypical kids' minds work, and how to get that across in the fic, but tried to not make it too specific. I didn't touch on this above because, well, saying one did research is a bit boastful, an the blog was getting long as it was.
I mean, if we don't count my entry for the first Thousand Words contest, my published stories range from 5.2K to 9.5K, and average 7.2K. My first published draft of The Endeavor Within was 8.9K before I did a major revision and cut needless padding. So while this is my longest published story, it's still in the same wheelhouse of past ones, more or less.
I was always leaning towards not doing it for this effect for exactly this reason. I only hung onto it as a "maybe" during writing, largely because there's often an obligation for Jinglemas fics to be purely happy, sunny and upbeat. But even apart from length, I realised this would rob the fic of a lot of impact. Pulling the punches, you know. All that which would make it work no matter when one read it.
I'm notable for having rambly Author's Notes on my stories (
), to the point it's no wonder, despite them being linked from the story, not a single one has ever gotten a comment before today. My first two fics especially had several thousand words. I kept it under 1.4K words for my Jinglemas 2021 fic, but ballooned up to 2.6K words for Jinglemas last year off the trouble I had settling on a story, and thus a longer "pre-production", as it were. So this one here rambles a bit, but it is reasonably structured compared to what I used to fall prey to.
I kinda know that an author talking about why and how things work in their story can often come across as clunky and, if it doesn't make them seem egotistical, will possibly rob the story of impact. So I am trying to keep the focus more on how it came to be, and roads not taken. Probably didn't fully succeed, but hey, baby steps.