CD: Obviously, She Jumped Out Of The Bat-Jet At The Last Second · 10:13pm May 10th, 2013
A while ago, I came across a great piece of art, with Twilight exploring some old ruins. (Unfortunately, I'm having some difficulty finding it again...) While the picture was probably meant to be more creepy, I personally found it very somber. What had once been here? What had happened that it was now long-abandoned and in disrepair? And more importantly, what about the ponies who'd used to live there? I kept staring at the picture, my sleep-deprived (as they so often are, with me) thoughts growing gradually more existential.
Well, I tried to write a companion story to the picture, and guess what? It wasn't Clover's Disappearance. Not yet, anyway. No, what I ended up with was a long existential ramble that stopped pretending to be a story about Twilight exploring some ruins pretty much immediately after the first paragraph. The problem was that it wasn't really a story. It was an essay (pretty messily handled, too; the logical flow was atrocious.) that I had tried to turn into a story. And unfortunately, as I hadn't yet come up with the idea of having a scrapbook (This) when I'd written this, I regrettably deleted it. 
But the overall idea sparked by the picture remained; while we now have things like Facebook and Twitter that serve as unintentional records of people's day-to-day lives, (and all too often, stupidity as well) what about all the unrecorded history that's disappeared thanks to time and faulty memory? And for some reason, the association of this thought with Ponies persisted, though I'm still not sure why.
Anyway, I was in kind of a funk for unrelated reasons the other day, and wanted to write something. OR and TAS refused to cooperate as always, but I finally was able to take this piece of depression and turn it into Clover's Disappearance, which is marginally less pointless than the original version.
I don't know how I came up with the founding ponies as the new frame for this concept, and I don't think it was a conscious decision; I just started writing about ten years after the events of the play, and then somehow that old idea with the ruins came along and wormed it's way in. And so now I've killed two birds with one stone, and done so at least competently (I'm not so presumtious as to assume this is anywhere approaching "brilliant") if the reception thus far has been a good gauge.
Also, I'd like to thank HiveLordLusa and especially Emeral Bookwise for taking a look at this before I put it out; Emeral came up with the idea of advancing Pansie and Platinum to higher ranks, given that time has passed, and to drive home the thematic point.
(Tangent - I just realized next month is going to be the one-year anniversary of OR. And after all this time, I still have only written one chapter. This is getting pathetic, and I'm sorry.)
Completely unrelated to your little existential rambling, not that they are bad or anything... but I finally figured out why I've been having trouble following the links you sent me to your last two story concepts (had to do some awkward workarounds to pre-read the clover one for you).
I was able to figure it out because none of the links in this blog post work for me either, but they are all pages I can get to easily otherwise (notably my own profile). So I compared your links to my link to see what the problem is, and low an behold, I found it; all of your links (including the ones from the earlier PMs) start off with "https", and that extra letter seems to throw my standard browser into a conniption fit.
1068734 Ah, okay. Not sure when (or more worryingly, why) that started, but I'll keep an eye out for it when posting links in the future. Denke!
1068734 1068737 Ah, that may explain what happened with me as well. Hopefully now I won't have Firefox or Safari scream at me for some kind of connection lock error or some crazy stuff like that.
So what kind of browser are you using that you always get secure links instead of standard HTTP ones?
1072284 Indeed, and hopefully!
Just Firefox...
hmm.
1072518
I wonder why...
Hmmmmmm...
1073219 *shrug* Ah, well.