Story Notes: Wayward Mail · 3:30am February 26th
Source: https://derpibooru.org/images/3301935
While Air Supremacy has the lowest story number of any I wrote, Wayward Mail was actually the first of the CYOA shorts I wrote for PVCF (and 'short' is right). If it was any shorter Pipp Petals would be calling it smol. I had to expand it just to fit the mimimum word count here on FimFiction, which I've done by including a new, never-before-seen ending (chaos!).
Started on July 20th, I was still trying to figure out exactly what PVCF was looking for with the app stories. Originally called The Letter, after the famous Boxtops song of the same name, it was Admiral Biscuit who suggested the name change to Wayward Mail which I agree has more pizzazz than my original title.
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I'm just going to mention that I absolutely despise second person narratives. To date the only time I've written second person prior to PVCF was for Fimfic Writers Are In Your Bed. Speaking of which, it's about time that story got another bump. Someone out there reading this should write a chapter. I've already done two and any more would be overkill.
But second person was one of the preferences of the PVCF staff (that or third person; no first person), so I adapted accordingly. Now that I've seen how everything interconnected I would've done things differently.
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One of the reasons I signed up was this event was open to all generations of MLP and I wanted to focus my efforts on writing G1 and G3 characters. Star Catcher and Skywishes are from G3 (Skywishes also got some toys in G4), and amazingly there was all-new official Hasbro merchandise for them in 2023. G3-style, at that.
Hasbro's pride shirt (above) for last year features one of my favorite pairings. I'm not known for shipping, but... this is one of my rare exceptions. This isn't the first time I've written a romance for these two, and I keep their G3 figures on my desk perpetually kissing.
This is now canonical? Win.
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Also, apparently all second-person stories were supposed to imply that the second-person was human. I didn't find this out until it was too late to do anything about it. Several of my stories imply the reader is a pony, not a human.
This is one of them.
Your route contains a lot of entitled nobles who not only couldn’t care less about a hardworking pony like yourself
This one even blatantly proclaims it. 
My apologies to the editing team for bungling this.
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The trickiest part of writing this was reworking the original words of the proposal for the hero & chaos endings. I could've cheated and tweaked the original letter, but I wanted to make this realistic. Where full words aren't available, letters have carried over [all letters (including capitalizations) in the chaos & villain endings are in Star Catcher's original letter].
Which makes for a very awkward 'Come here now' instead of 'Join me here' in the chaos ending. Our second person protagonist is already running the risk that the phrasing of the rewritten letter will alert Skywishes that something's off with it, so the writing has to match.
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With the benefit of hindsight, I think one of the requirements for this project should've been all three faction (hero, chaos, villain) options available for every single story. It would've made things easier for everyone in the end. But I think this is the first time anything like this has ever been attempted, so this is a note for next time.
I don't know if there will be a next time, but I sincerely hope there is. This was a lot of work, but it was also incredibly fun and rewarding. So if PVCF (or another con) does this again in the future, count me in!
Source: https://derpibooru.org/images/1447016
The below was my desktop background for a long time.
