One Knight Stand: New story sneak preview! · 10:48pm Jan 31st, 2013

Well. This has been a week.

I spent Monday recovering our car from police impound (for an incident that we didn't even have anything to do with). As I was at the impound lot, my phone lit up with text messages from work's server monitoring. Came back to the office to find a hard drive crash. Worked two 12-hour days, scrambling to shift services temporarily onto backup servers and then restoring the drive from backup.

Last night, as I got home before 7 pm and thought I was going to have a quiet night finally … my wife's phone and computer got stolen.

Things are calming down. (*glares at universe*) This too shall pass. I endure.

On the bright side, somewhere in that madness I found the time to post a new story. It's publication-ready; I'm just waiting for EqAD to post it (or reject it) before I click Submit, so I can try to coordinate the frontpage boost with the external-traffic boost in a vain bid for the featurebox. Should be live by the weekend.

"Horizon, wait!" you cry. "You, um, mis-abbreviated Equestria Daily there."

I give you a Look.

"Oh," you say. "Oh."

Lo! Yes! I have written pony porn. Indeed, I have written second-person pony —

— No! Wait! Hear me out!

The thing is, basically everything I write is because something gets stuck in my head that I need to exorcise. Often, this comes in the form of "It's a shame this isn't done well." Yeah. Some authors see a crack crossover like Highlander x MLP[1], or an irredeemable wasteland like second-person you-in-equestria porn, and sensibly run screaming. I take it as a personal challenge. There is honor in being the exception that proves the rule[2].

Charles Stross notwithstanding, second-person narration is a derided and unused literary device. Justifiably so. To address the reader directly, to narrate their thoughts and actions as if it was them in the story, is blind arrogance. Your readers are diverse in every regard. When you tell them about themselves, you will be wrong. You will have them do things they wouldn't do. You will break their suspension of disbelief. The typical thinking of the second-person porn author is that the benefits of immersion outweigh those costs.

Stross (whose story is almost completely free of sex, despite its title) solved that by having the person addressed by the narrator be a character rather than the reader themselves. (At which point second person is more a literary affectation than a framing device.) To me, that felt like cheating — so I cheated in an entirely different way. I justify my second-person through a subtle literary elision: the narrator himself is a character.

Alright, let's start here: Equestria has broken almost all of your expectations.
You thought you would —
I see your look of disbelief already. "How can he presume to tell me the thoughts in my head," right? Listen — the princess did send you here for a reason. Will you trust me for just 30 seconds?
Want a drink? I just brewed a fresh batch of dandelion coffee. … No, no, it'll taste good, I promise. Just sit down and make yourself comfortable. We're alone for the moment, so — oh, sure, the sofa's fine.
Be right back — I'll go grab that pot from the kitchen.
Okay. So. Point one, remember what she told you: you're not the first. There are plenty of things I can tell you about yourself based on prior experience. You were a human, from a world you call Earth. You learned about Equestria from a television show called "My Little Pony," about my sister and the friends she made in Ponyville. Your heart burned to visit us — you couldn't have gotten here if it didn't.
And you expected your coffee to be bitter.
You don't need to hide your surprise — that happens every single time. Your taste buds react to some flavors differently than they did as a human. See? Trust me. I know what I'm doing.

Fillies and gentlecolts: One Knight Stand[3], coming soon to a notification list near you.

One last thing: if you're curious but dislike Teh Equine Sexx0rs, there's also a mostly-declopped version that preserves the flavor of the original — about 3k words of worldbuilding, Shining Armor character study, and a bittersweet equinized-HiE premise. If there's demand, I can post a link.

--
[1] Yes, I'm still actively working on that one. Actually, it's metastasized. There's now the original story (the historical prequel), as well as a modern-day Mane Six story, with about 30k words written between them. I want to build up some momentum and finish editing some completed stories before I start posting Haylander, though.
[2] "To prove" meant to test at the time that phrase was coined: see also "proving grounds". The meaning of the word has drifted since. "The exception that proves the rule" isn't a contradiction. It's an outlier — an edge case. It's the interesting data point that leads to you discovering how far the rule extends.
[3] I originally had some more descriptive and clever titles in mind, until I realized that somehow, against all logic, nobody on FIMFiction had used that as a story title yet. Dear clop writers: WHAT