Caution, meet Wind

A new story has begun: Sugar, Cubed. It feels like a small eternity since I’ve written something sad. I guess it balances out all the romances I’ve been churning out. No romance here, just Applejack, Twilight, and… math? If you’re deathly allergic to the subject then consider this your only warning. The rest of you will be fine. Maybe. The first two chapters are up right now, the second two will follow tomorrow.
I’ve been sitting on this one for a while, partly to see if I could pull in another editor, and partly so I could make a few more editing passes myself. The whole AJ Day thing on EQD might have something to do with it too… I guess I can’t pass up the opportunity to get rejected again.
Intentional or not, I tend to pick projects that will challenge me. Lately that challenge has been trying to master the voice of a character I haven’t spent as much time with. For A First Date that character was Rarity. I spent a lot of time on her dialect, and I hope it shows.
Now its Applejack’s turn. Writing dialogue with her particular brand of country twang is a new one, and I’ve left it somewhat understated. One of my favorite self-editing books convinced me that accents in dialogue should come from word choice and sentence structure, not from butchered spelling. When it comes to fan fiction this should be easy to pull off. I don’t have to tell you how Applejack sounds; you’ve all heard her speak before. As long as I pick words that she’d say, or at least make you think that I did, then my work is done.
On a semi-related note, I’d pay good money for a recording of Applejack saying the following with reasonable pronunciation: Orthogonal, Eigenfunction, Stochastic, Disparate, Variable, Paradoxical, and… Schadenfreude.