Aftermath of a Heatwave · 3:24am Jul 9th, 2013
The heatwave ended some time ago, but I have only just returned to Gleaming Chains. I was afraid to return. Last time I worked on it, I was so delirious with heat and insomnia that I thought my name was Princess Celestia, and I had to spend a sleep period knitting together my thoughts from the chaos that overtook them. It was an oddly conscious and rather effortful process. There was a lot of detritus.
The best part was that I dreamed even while I was doing it. The dream took place at ninety degrees to my actual focus, I swear it did. It was like being in a theater and looking away from the screen. Sound and light blared over my right shoulder, but I was paying more attention to a web of garbage associations that had developed while I was writing. No clue what the actual dream was. The light from it was brown and white, the sound was generically urban, and the two times I glanced at it, I came away with images of a road seen from a sidewalk.
I'm not sure what lesson this taught me about creative work while sleep-deprived. I think the lesson it taught me is that such works are scary. On which note... I just returned to Gleaming Chains. I have a text file full of crazy here. It's clean, coherent, readable, and it may even be good. I mean, I'm not sure. It doesn't quite read like something that belongs to me.
Oh! New lesson! Apparently, I write good Pinkie dialogue while sleep deprived. She only has two lines in Chains so far, but I'm pleased with them, and sad that I'm no longer in the state of mind that produced them. Maybe if I take a whole bunch of melatonin and caffeine together...
EDIT: Oh, and just to put this on record in case anyone was wondering, the comics aren't part of the canon that I use. I read the first. I didn't like it. I've glanced at others. They didn't look good. I don't feel compelled to incorporate elements from the comics into my writing. They're like fanfics to me, and I've read better.
Nice to see that you are back. When you get the first chapter done, I would happily act as a third editor in addition to acting as a sounding board during our chats over the PM system.
Have a good day.
1197720
That reminds me of something I should probably tell you. One of my inspirations with Whispering Stars is thinking that Nightmare Moon was not a very competent villain. She's ancient and theoretically powerful, but if she'd just struck Twilight Sparkle with a lightning bolt, she would've won. Instead she used tools such as scary trees and temptations in the mist.
I do not think the manticore was very likely to win the fight she pushed it into. The most genuinely threatening thing she did was breaking a cliff - and I can fit it into this rubric by pointing to the setup that Rainbow Dash gave her by playing on the fears of the others. What if Nightmare needs dramatic timing as an actual aspect of her powers? Well, interestingly enough, the things she set as obstacles were kind of like... nightmares.
1197801 I sent you a couple of messages while you were under the heat wave. There are a few ideas for you there.
Also, like you said, she lives in the dream world. She has almost no real experience with the material plane. (Possessing Luna does not count because that was an exceptionally hectic time.) It figures that she would make the mistake of thinking and acting like it was a dream.
1197801>>1197855
That makes crazy amounts of sense.