EOf Lilies and Chestnuts
MLP: FiM
Slice of Life
Unable to have a child of their own, Canterlot socialites Fancy Pants and Fleur give adoption a shot. Enter Chestnut—a filly from beyond Equestria who will quite possibly turn their life upside down.
OC
Fancypants
Fleur de Lis
Bat Pony
Prane · 43k words · 1,930 24 · 18k views

023 Making of: Of Lilies and Chestnuts · 4:07pm Mar 22nd, 2014

023 Making of: Of Lilies and Chestnuts

Making of-of. What a brilliant idea it was to make the first word of a story title “of”. I should have known it would make blog posts like this look weird, and some comments, too (“Check out the brand new chapter of Of Lilies and Chestnuts!”), not to mention promotion (“Hey, have you heard of Of Lilies and Chestnuts?”). Still, I wouldn’t change that title for all the tea in Shanghay!

What awaits to be found in this overly extensive blog post? The origins of the story, a few words about chapters/characters, covers with appropriate links and lots of thank-yous. If you’re in a rush be sure to check the lowermost part – there are some hints regarding the sequel and a huge request of mine. If you have time, though… well, it’s not like you’re getting flooded with notifications these days, aren’t you?

Obvious spoilers below the break!

Hey, I could’ve just titled the blog “Behind the scenes: Of Lilies and Chestnuts”. Oh well.

Helpful tip: the pictures are clickable and lead to hi-res versions!

You probably already know that I originally intended OLAC to be a contest entry for the EQD Batpony Write-off. I really wanted to write something tagged with [Slice of Life] for a change, so such challenge was just the push I needed. Luckily, I didn’t make it on time! With around 6k words already and the plot far from its expected end I decided to write the whole thing at my own pace.

However, in the very beginning it was a much different story from the one you apparently enjoyed. Let me give you some of the very early notes I made.

Fleur de Lis
Fancy Pants
OC Batpony
Slice of Life
- physical description of a batpony
- batpony’s past
- cultural piece about batponies
- lesson from Trixie
“I’m sure your parents just want what’s best for you”
“They’re not my real parents”
“Then you should cherish their concern even more”
1) Fleur at the clinic; she learns about her non-fertilitess; lots of tears and introducing Fancy Pants as her husband.
2) Fleur and Fancy Pants at the adoption center; she chooses a batpony kid over unicorns.
3) OC Batpony at home; she is negative towards everything.

First of all, sorry if the lack of “infertility” in my dictionary at the time caused a massive brain damage to you now, but I wanted this transcription to be faithful. Also: what!? Chestnut, unnamed at the time, was originally supposed to be a troublemaker whom Fleur deliberately and without hesitation chose at the Orphanarium? Say whaaat? And just what the heck was Trixie doing there? Note that OC Batpony was to be a filly from the very beginning, but if she was a colt his name would be Acorn. And he would suck at math.

Well, at least I had some base to work with, but to understand batponies (or thestrals, or noctrals, or negasi, or destrals, or however you want to call them) I needed to see one. So I fired up GIMP, googled a Zee66’s vector and started messing around the color sliders. I started with darkening the coat and wings, but the real fun began around the mane. I said: “Hey, these browns look nice. They remind me of chestnuts.” And thus Chestnut, as we know her today, was born.

I think that the chosen picture made me drop the idea of a troublemaker orphan. But I still needed a pair of ponies who would adopt this utmost cheerful filly: no Main 6, preferably living in Canterlot (because Canterlot is the bestest of cities and I wish there was more Canterlot in the series!), someone who would have trouble with adapting to changes. There wasn’t much choice in that, to be honest, and Fleur and Fancy Pants seemed perfect: two characters we know very little about, often portrayed as a couple in fan fiction, the perfect OCs – as in “undiscovered”, but “recognizable enough” for a reader to get hooked.

Fun fact: at some point of outlining the story it was Fancy Pants who was reserved and Fleur who was the accepting one! Some of the very first lines I wrote were for Fancy Pants angrily shouting: “Chestnut, you will come back here this instant!” during the Lady Bucket Head Showdown after Chestnut storms upstairs. There was a mandatory cliché one: “You’re not my real parents!” or something like that. I quickly realized that Fancy Pants is too good and too polite of a pony to act in such way, so I chose Fleur de Lis to be the heroine of the story.

Fleur, an ex-supermodel from Prance had her life all planned out, much like we tend to plan something in ours. Sometimes it all goes according to our expectations, but sometimes life comes around with a bat and smacks us across our faces. But we strive forward and struggle to adapt. Or in Fleur’s case, adopt. It’s always good to have a couple of reliable ponies around, so this is when we meet Rarity. Did you know that she originally wasn’t in the story at all? I intended to put Flickerflight, Rarity’s OC assistant in her place. Here’s a never published scene with Fleur and Flickerflight at Les Doux Maregots.

But this time, to the mare’s amazement, there was a stranger there. Sitting in their booth!
Fleur turned back and looked around. Between various high society mares and stallions, Rarity was nowhere to be seen. It wasn’t her to be late, so where was she? Maybe–
“Mrs. de Lis?” a soft voice sounded from the occupied booth. “You’re Fleur de Lis, aren’t you?”
Fleur turned around.
The intruder mare was a young, ivory coated pegasus – an actual one, for a change, with proper feathery wings – and was clearly gesturing to join her. Intrigued, Fleur approached the booth and noticed that the style in which her aquamarine coiffure was arranged was oddly familiar, yet enriched with more curls at the price of length.
“Indeed I am,” Fleur replied politely. You had to be extremely careful with unknown ponies in this part of town. “May I be of any assistance?”
“My name is Flickerflight, ma’am. I am here on behalf of Miss Rarity,” the mare said. “I believe you two had an appointment scheduled for today?”
Fleur nodded. That Flickerflight mare sounded very formal, but there was a hint of being nervous in her voice. Not because of Fleur herself, but because of something she was about to say.
“Is there a reason why Miss Rarity won’t be joining us today?”
“There was…” Flickerflight hesitated. “There was a medical emergency and Miss Rarity is currently at the Ponyville Hospital awaiting for test results regarding some ‘minor health issue’, as she puts it.”
With the news finally broken, through a single sigh, all the tension build around the booth went from one mare onto the other.
“I do hope it’s nothing to be worried about,” Fleur said, but when she saw Flickerflight avoiding her eyes, she immediately join her in the booth. “Oh. So it is something to be worried about.”
Three quarters of a coffee cup later Fleur knew it all.

I chose not to include her for numerous reasons. First, I felt Fleur needed an actual friend to vent off about Chestnut. As a model, and since the story is set a couple of years into the future, Fleur would be good friends with Rarity. Second, I believe we were around Rarity Takes Manehatten back then, which – in a way – made Coco Pommel an aspiring fashionista by Rarity’s side, so bonus points for avoiding that. Let’s face it, everyone was in love with Coco, much like they are now with Maud, so Flickerflight wouldn’t stand a chance. Third, that Rarity’s illness mentioned in the dialogue was a reference to another story of mine, but since I had established that I’m revolving around heartwarming content I didn’t want to follow this path.

Oh, and by the way, Flickerflight herself is Sunseeker’s younger sister. You do know who Sunseeker is, don’t you? No? Don’t worry, you won’t be needing that knowledge anytime soon.

I think it’s a good time to thank several people.

I would like to thank the following FIMFiction users:
- Gulheru for using his eyes to read the chapters whenever I was about to hit “publish”!
- Shadowflash for approving this story in the first place!
- Tatsurou for predicting the content of upcoming chapters (more than once it gave me a push to strive for originality!)
- La Vallett1 for starting the awesome TVTropes page (thanks to all who contributed, by the way!)
- Skeeter The Lurker, Divine Path, Seether00 and many others for feedback provided constantly from the very beginning!
- BenRG, redandready45, BeginnersLuck and many others for extensive feedback and long comments!
- Terrahex for feedback which reminded me I can still do better!
- everybody else who read, liked, faved, followed or otherwise appreciated my work – I’ll do my best to deliver more content in the months (years?) to come!

Of course there are also those who aren’t registered users here, or MLP fans at all. The following is a special thank you for two amazing people I know personally and to whom I would like to dedicate the scene in Mr. Inkblot’s store (because they were my inspiration for that one, and they continue to support me and my writing ever since).

Serdecznie dziękuję Gosi i Bartkowi – zajawka na pisanie piórem, którą wtedy mnie zaraziliście była bezpośrednią inspiracją do napisania sceny w sklepie z atramentem i powstania postaci pana Inkblota. Atrament stał się punktem wyjścia dla kolejnego rozdziału i umożliwił mi pokazanie punktu widzenia ojca na wydarzenia przedstawione w opowiadaniu.
PS: Mandarynkowy atrament to najlepszy atrament!

Writing OLAC was a great adventure for me and I’m glad I could share it with you guys. If there is anything I’ve learned from that experience, it would be to never be afraid of trying new genres or characters in your writing. You’d be surprised how much these attempts are going to help you grow.

Now, since I’ve buttered you up I would like to make a request.

Of Lilies and Chestnuts is now something which will represent me as a writer whenever I remind people of my existence, be that through publishing new stories or luring them to my profile page. Therefore, I want to make sure that it has the highest possible quality, but I obviously can’t do this alone. I’m looking for a brave soul (or a couple of?) who will aid me in this mighty quest! Overly dramatic much? Okay – I’m looking for proofreaders EDIT: I've already assembled a team!, or however people good at finding grammar and spelling mistakes are being called these days. If you’re interested, please leave a comment below so we could arrange some gdocs to work with.

As you’ve probably noticed, the story – the adoption arc – is marked as Complete now. Many of you wished it could go on longer, but it was outlined as this single thing and continuing for the sake of views wouldn’t do any good for its quality. After reading through your helpful tips I’ve decided to publish the next arc as a separate story, but since it’s not going to land anytime soon, I’ll make sure to let you know about that in the future.

What will it be, you ask? Nothing is set in stone as for now, obviously, but I think that it would revolve around family vacation to a certain “place of great culture and great antiquity”, to quote the stallion who met the love of his life just there!

Chestnut seems already excited.

(click for original)

Once again, thanks everyone for your support. If you have any questions regarding Of Lilies and Chestnuts, or anything at all, feel free to ask. Now back to outlining the prequel of Dreamlocked!

~Prane

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La Vallett1

La Vallett1 #1 · Mar 22nd, 2014 · · ·

I'm curious, what language is the last quote written in?

Prane

Prane #2 · Mar 22nd, 2014 · · ·

1946154
Oh, that's Polish. A pretty tricky language from what I heard, but since I want to see the look on my two friends' faces when I'll show them this blog post I figured I can address them directly.