TLaToCM · 4:28pm Sep 3rd, 2013
Or Tla-toe-cum, as I've come to know it in my mind over the years.
The Life and Times of Caughlin Mare is my first serious ponyfic. Written in 2011 and published on EqD in the same, it is pretty much what it says on the tin - Derpy origins story which has her being there Before It All Began. It features a rather dark interpretation for pre-alicorn history involving copious amounts of Discord, how that came to end, and how canon came to be. There's conspiracy! There's mind games! There's Fighting Against the System!
In short, kinda like Pipsqueak, except with less kuyt and more... science. Among other things.
When I first started, I wanted, very simply, to make the best Derpy origins story ever. It was amidst all the Derpy pity which featured her almost solely being an absolute klutz, a device rather than a character. It was during the big bubbly fiasco over her naming, rah rah rah, and it says enough of the incident that, two years later, most have a fuzzy memory of it at best (any further is petty digression). I wanted to, well, write something unique for this unique character that people were shoehorning the idiot ball into.
It went on rather nicely, until I stopped, partly because of time management, partly because of disinterest. Partly because of this little ball of d'aww. I think it was last year that I wrote and published the chapter that ended the final arc, and left it hanging on a painful cliffhanger, because we all gotta be evil one way or another.
But, yes - now here it is, and here I am, editing chapters to be published every Tuesday, thanks to presentperfect finally getting through to me. The difference between then and now is, eh, 100,000 words of practice, more or less. Pipsqueak, some Skyrim thing, the original novel and a buncha oneshots later, I am poking at the chapters I wrote when my mind was the freshest, my plotting was the deepest, and when my style was what dirty alley Chinese takeaway is to Heston Blumenthal's triple-cooked fries. I used to cringe. But it's been so long that I don't even wince any more. It is what it is - it was the piece I grew as a writer through, and, barring that Touhou crossover and Pipsqueak's sequel that I'm very slowly writing, the most ambitious piece I've written.
So, yes, this is a self-plug, to those of you who favourited all of my other work. I'm stoked that I've got quite a handful of you, and I'd love to point you to this - if it sounds like something you'd like, give it a spin. There's 16 chapters of cliffhanger-y fix in store, and most likely the rest of it in due time - it's all plotted, actually, and S3 doesn't hurt me at all - because really, I've put it off long enough. Thank you all in advance; stay tuned, and stay awesome.
-Casca
IT IS A VERY GOOD STORY TRUST ME