And Then He Was Deep · 11:43am Nov 14th, 2014
About to let go of all her dreams of the future, Octavia is salvaged by a memory and the only pony that could save her.
Cover art by josh-5410 and metadragonart, edited by me.
What happens when a person like me tries to write somthing that doesn't have anything to do with obscure comedy or highly questionable clop? This.
I could've also named this story "Octavia Sitting On a Bench and Having a Downer", but I liked a very particular line of the song Agony by Dream Theater lead singer James LaBrie. In fact, that line was probably a huge inspiration for me to even write this story.
But what exactly is this story anyway? Well, in a nutshell I would call it "an imperfect experiment." The idea is that I try to lower my expectations to a minimum whenever I release one, so I can ensure not to get disappointed when it fails. However, on the inside I'm still sad when it doesn't reach previous success.
This experiment had the following ideas to see what would happen:
- Write the story in one session.
- Medium self-editing only.
- Take a concept I haven't done before.
- Write the entire outline first.
- Stay serious.
- Write the entire thing at my public college PC rooms.
- You know this is a perfect recipe to not gain much attention, so don't raise your expectations!
The one-session thing failed, though only slightly. I wrote about 2,300 words last Thursday, then added another 500 yesterday. The outline was written and is with 800 already more than a fourth of the entire story. I let no one but myself see the finished product when I published it. Everything apart from the self-editing process was indeed written in my college.
And of course, the story's resonance was just as low as anticipated. Nine likes in ten hours. So, uh, yay me?
To be honest, I'm not even too sure why I did this experiment. Something about proving something else to myself or something. Not exactly sure what that ever was, but I guess now my past self is happy.
Wow, everything about this experiment is weird.
Experiments often end up stranger than expected. For what it may be worth, I enjoyed it. It was really interesting to see another facet of your writing.