About the Author: Fiction · 6:30am May 16th, 2012

I am an introvert. The history of my thoughts does far more to explain who I am than the history of my actions.

More precisely, I am an egoist.

I must be clear: I am not an egotist (note the “t”). An egotist thinks he is the greatest, most wonderful person in the whole world.

An egoist merely is obsessed with himself. I am strongly interested in myself, especially my failings. I know full well how annoying an egoist can be, so I will attempt to keep that part of me in check.

Nevertheless, I think my egoism is why I’m so happy writing about flawed characters. They are all reflections of myself, seeing what would happen if I let this or that facet of my personality run completely out of control.

In my reading and in my watching of television and movies, on the other hand, I am far more interested in perfection, in simplicity, at those things that are so very hard for me to attain in my own work.

I search the world of fiction for these things, but when I look around me at the sort of stories that adults are supposed to spend their time enjoying, I am more often than not appalled.

Senseless violence, meaningless sex, and grotesque combinations of those two dominate, along with a twisted morality that allows might to make right once the author has set up a five-minute scene establishing that the hero is ever-so-slightly more sympathetic than the villain.

What I seek, I find far more often in the realm of children’s entertainment.

This is not to say that the adult world doesn’t have gems (Inception pops to mind), or that children’s entertainment is not inundated with sloppy work that nobody would dare to pass off to a grown-up.

I’m just saying that some of the best and most moving works I have ever encountered were ostensibly written for children. I learned far more about what it means to be a man from A Mouse and His Child than from any other fictional source. And when I saw Where the Wild Things Are for the first time, I finally had an insight into the raging temper that nearly destroyed my own childhood.

This brings me to My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. What draws me to the series is the fabulously inventive world that Lauren Faust and her colleagues have invented, and how the great characters fit so well into that world.

And so I, a humble fanfiction writer, come to this fandom to write. This is by far the largest fandom I have ever attempted to write for.

It is the right of every reader to interpret a work of fiction however they please. I myself have come up with several interesting stories through willful misinterpretation of somebody else’s work.

But I also believe that you can never truly appreciate a work of art until you know something about the artist. So in a prior post I have told you a little about the life that takes place away from my computer. And I will now tell you about what goes on here, in this world where I go by the name of McPoodle.

I got the name from my love of classic theatrical animation. In the fourth of the Droopy cartoons by Tex Avery, “Northwest Hounded Police” (1946), the character was known as “Sgt. McPoodle of the Mounted”. As far as cartoon characters go, Droopy is a personal hero of mine. But the Internet being the way it is, I couldn’t very well go around with a user name of “Droopy”, so “McPoodle” will have to do.

Besides children’s literature, I am an avid reader of non-fiction and science fiction. In my childhood, my favorite author was Isaac Asimov, because his non-fiction was so lucid and his fiction made sense. In college, my favorite author was Philip K. Dick, because his fiction made an even deeper kind of sense. I love H. P. Lovecraft, not for his horror but for his imagination. I suffer from a near complete lack of instinctive empathy, which I have attempted to compensate for through reading lots of biography but also history. You wouldn’t believe how much psychology you can pick up from a close reading of history. The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler is the most significant book I have ever read, and Cosmos by Carl Sagan is the most-significant piece of television I have ever watched.

My first work of fanfiction was composed at the tender age of 10. Lucky for me, the commercialization of the Internet was still twelve years in the future at that point. (By “compose” I mean to say that I wrote it in my head--the number of “composed” fanfics that never got good enough to be written down probably numbers in the hundreds). It was based on the complete Oz series by L. Frank Baum, which I had only recently finished reading. My second fanfiction was based on the Mushroom Planet series by Eleanor Cameron, which happened to be my personal introduction to science fiction (I bet I’m the only person in the world who remembers that series). You would not have wanted to read either one of them, or any of the others which followed in the decade that followed. Not only were they Marty Stu stories, they were introverted Marty Stu’s, which means that my author avatar didn’t even have the decency to save the main characters and romance the girl via giant action sequences. No, I just explained stuff. What can I say; I’m good at explaining stuff in real life, so I was foolish enough to think that would make for good fiction. I’ve gotten better since then, I promise.

As far as the Internet goes, I’ve got fanfiction reaching all the way back to 2001. Almost all of them up to now were for shows from my childhood, meaning the fandoms were relatively small. Last year I finished my magnum opus, a gargantuan monstrosity for the Chip ‘n’ Dale Rescue Rangers fandom that took three years to write. I mention this only to serve as the reason for my approach to the MLP:FIM fandom.

I don’t take it seriously. Not because it doesn’t have merit, and certainly not because there haven’t already been incredible works of fiction composed in the brief time the series has existed. I don’t take it seriously because I’m all out of “serious” to write.

I’m here for the world, a world in equal parts created from the series and from the fanfics I have zoomed through as I prepared myself to start writing. I am a tourist in this strange land, and my stories are nothing more than travelogues.

I believe there is room in this fandom for such a lightweight approach. There seems to be room for everything: browsing through all the FIM-fiction chronologically through September 2011, I’ve found nearly 300 good fanfics, which compared to the fandoms I’ve been in before now is just insane. I normally despise the cheapness of breaking characters in order to demonstrate how disappointed the author is that life isn’t fair, and yet I’ve actually found grimdarks in this fandom that are worth reading, along with romances that show an actual understanding of the personality quirks of the characters being matched.

I write for the reason most of the rest of you write: I had a great idea, and I didn’t see anybody else using it first. Also like most writers, I don’t think very much of the quality of my work. If there existed an individual that was a fabulous writer of moving stories that was utterly lacking in inspiration, then I’d give her or him all of my ideas and let that person bring them to life. I wouldn’t even mind if I didn’t get any credit. The point is to get the idea out there. Unfortunately, the person I’m looking for doesn’t exist, so I end up writing them myself and with but one exception, I have always regretted the result. Once again, I suspect I am not the only author in the history of the world to feel this way.

So yeah, here I am. McPoodle. Jim, if you insist on using a real human name. Here to share my ideas with you. I don’t pretend to think that anything I write will change your life, the way some other fiction has changed mine. But maybe, just maybe, if I succeed in inspiring somebody to take one of my ideas and run with it, that might be enough.

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