Dec
21st
2011
Special Guest Epilogue for The Taste Of Grass · 12:55am Dec 21st, 2011
The writer that inspired me to try my hand at doing my little stories of Equestria has graced me with a marvelous gift.
Midnight Shadow wrote the most marvelous, perfect epilogue for The Taste Of Grass. I consider it Canon.
I have added it as Chapter 31, with, of course, all credit to the amazingly talented Midnight Shadow (whose works you should be reading RIGHT NOW!)
This epilogue was JUST what I needed. I am dancing on cloud like Alexi now.
I hope you will enjoy it as much as I did.
Thank you, thank you so very much, Midnight Shadow.
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Chatoyance · 241 views
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I happily second the thanks, truly a moving ending to a moving work of art
Now how is it fair that i can't give ya'll six stars for this?
I think the ending could have had a bit more oomph, but I am very honoured to have it placed there
Just... don't ask what Alexi was wishing them
I have to give all credit to Chatoyance, if you ask me. She built a world and characters I fell in love with, so much so that I had the temerity to meddle. Through her writing, the world of Equestria during and after the age of man has come so much more alive, with all it's flaws and imperfections. I wish I could kidnap her and keep her writing foorrrevvaarrrr.
I'm going to be sad saying goodbye to Alexi, Caprice and the rest. This was all so much more than I would have or could have built.
I hope she writes more :)
To the hills with "meddling," I'd call it collaboration. From what I can see, ya'll bounce enough ideas off each other and have similar enough visions of the CB universe that your work meshes nicely. More importantly, it felt right...fitting.
And yes, girl, more!
Can't get enough!
I honestly feel that Midnight Shadow did what I should have done. His epilogue was absolutely perfect. I felt ashamed the moment I read it, because I thought to myself "See? This is what this book needed, and you got so frikking exhausted towards the end that you just plain failed to do it! But Midnight did it for your sorry ass!"
And I was just exhausted. I've been cranking these chapters out like a madpony, and it isn't like I don't have a life and all; I've just been going without enough sleep, pretty much.
The story had to get made, I figure, it just happened that part of it came out of Midnight there at the end. He picked up the slack after I crashed, so the story got done. I am very grateful.
I don't see it as meddling at all. Sometimes a story just needs more than one door into our world, so to speak, and Midnight helped out when I pooped out. Simple, really.
Well, from my admittedly odd perspective.
I am also proud to have Midnight there; as I've mentioned before, his work was one of the reasons I started writing. My first CB story was Change Of Life when it came out on Equestria Daily; I hunted down the rest, and before long was reading my second story, which was Midnight's Tale and Twist In the Tail. Gradually, I read the rest, then the guide to the CB universe, and so on. I make references to everypony's works in little ways; at the end of my timeline, Celestia casts Purification, just like from Last Man Standing, as a tip of the hat to Windchaser, for example.
My version of the Conversion Dreams were entirely spawned from Midnight's tale, and... on and on. I absorbed all the other CB authors works, as best I could, and then I tried to boil down the collective essence of all of them into a self-sustaining, self-consistent amalgam. That's my Lost In The Herd concept in short; all the other CB authors worlds distilled down into one vision that can logically hang together and not be in conflict with each other.
Within the six-year timeline I came up with, I can imagine almost every story by all the other CB authors existing within my Lost In The Herd concept. The only stories that can't fit are Yellowstone, and maybe Ten Minutes, but even then, if Celestia is a goddess, a nuke isn't going to be a problem. She could just reconstitute everything. A few others are a little problematic, but overall, I personally imagine 80-90% of all the other CB authors stories as potentially coexisting within the worldspace I play in. Potion R-63 is even obliquely referenced in 27 Ounces. In my head, it stands for 'Recombinant Sixty-Three', and involves recombinant DNA strands bioreactored directly from the Mane Six to serve as a collective template for the nanomachines, but hey, it's still a bow and scrape to them what I look up to.
Ok, I'm blathering now.
Bottom line: I love Midnight's epilogue.