Fic recs, December 1st: What Lies Beneath edition! · 4:02pm Dec 1st, 2014
How is it December already? I didn't ask for this. :|
What Lies Beneath was the very first Ponychan minific writeoff, a 24 hour contest with a three-to-six-hundred word limit. It was pretty intense. It inspired a couple of stories, like Pascoite's Canon, which were later expanded into full stories. I took my first second place with The Call of Carrothulhu, and last place with Hot Shot and Hugh Jelly in JaAm Adventures, becoming the first (chronological) winner of the coveted Wooden Spoon award. :D (And destroying my chance at beating Pasco to first place on the leaderboard.) Anyway, having just added all the stories I could find to the group's folder, and discovering that, surprise surprise, many of them were still in short form in compilations, I reviewed a bunch because I was kind of itching to get a journal out a day early. Go figure. More announcements.
Pascoite is signal boosting a thing he and I wrote for. They’re still looking for authors! Go check it out, info on his blog.
Wait, wait. Nope, nevermind. We’re good now.
H: 0 R: 3 C: 3 V: 1 N: 2
Daring Do and the Tomb of Tirek by Ezn
Genre: Archaeology
Found this while working on Project Writeoff, and given the title and the fact that What Lies Beneath came well before season 4, I just had to know what was up. (This took 7th place in that writeoff, by the way.) There’s not much to it, being just 417 words long, but it creates a legend and sets a scene, then leaves with a bang. Definitely worth it for a short read.
Recommended as Light Reading
Under the Apple Trees by alexmagnet
Genre: Slice of Life
(This is gonna end up being “What Lies Beneath edition” if I’m not careful.) This is just 500 words of Applejack visiting a memory of her parents in the orchard. I can definitely see where it could be expanded, mostly in the vague “Twilight saved us today” part of the one-sided conversation. Still, it’s a worthwhile short piece, and finished just after the previous one.
Recommended for Fans of Appleparents
The Song of Secrets by TacticalRainboom
Genre: World-Building
Twilight visits Zecora, asking for information about Tartarus. This presents a good look at Zecora as a character, just by that one little interaction with her masks near the start. That said, it fails the Zecora test hard. Worse, her dialogue is formatted like poetry, which is a huge no-no as far as I’m concerned. Also, it’s basically just a headcanon dump about what Tartarus might have been like back in season two. For being a short read, this is kind of hard to get through.
Not Recommended
Peace Negotiations by TacticalRainboom
Genre: NLR
Y’know what? I don’t care. This is What Lies Beneath edition now, and I’m reviewing a bunch of stuff by all these guys what have story collections. I don’t know if this piece is actually meant to be New Lunar Republic in nature, but it’s got that kind of setup: Luna and Celestia conversing ahead of the rebellion they know will split them apart forever. For being such a short piece, it’s packed in a lot of tension and interpersonal drama. This is how you make a few words do a lot for you.
Recommended
Top and Bottom by TacticalRainboom
Genre: Shipping
Rainbow happens across her marefriend, Twilight, during an indiscretion. I like that Rainbow backs off Twilight when she seems unsure about letting Rainbow take care of her “problem”. That and the ending are probably the best parts of this. The rest is kind of standard “they’re already in a relationship” stuff, which is admittedly not surprising, since this had to be under 600 words. Shippers only, that sort of thing.
Recommended for the Twist Ending
Wings of an Angel by alexmagnet
Genre: Drama
Tired of not being able to fly, Scootaloo does something desperate. The one thing going for this is that it doesn’t have a sad ending. Well, that and the imagery as Scootaloo climbs a mountain is well rendered. That said, I didn’t feel too much one way or another about this, likely because it’s the kind of thing I’ve seen before. If you can’t get enough Scootaloo, though, check it out.
Vaguely Recommended
L For… by alexmagnet
Genre: Sad
Rainbow Dash flies home. (Yes, that’s an Austraeoh joke.) This is one of those stories where you know the ending is going to be bad, and it’s just a question of finding out the details. Honestly, I think alex did a really good job setting everything up in little ways, letting the scenery speak for itself so the reader doesn’t have to ask questions by the end, even though the “what happened” is in no way explained. A very effective little story.
Recommended
Noises by alexmagnet
Genre: Slice of Life
Pinkie gets Twilight to help her with a mysterious something scratching around under her sink. It’s unfortunate that I was able to figure out what was going on early on, because finding out I was right blew this whole thing out of the water. It ends up being a rather pointless exercise in building tension, I guess?
Not Recommended
More Than a Magician by alexmagnet
Genre: What If
This posits a great followup to Boast Busters. It’s probably an idea that’s been done before, but not one I’ve seen, and the follow-through makes it. I really don’t want to give anything away, so this one’s going to be short.
Recommended
Griffin is gonna hate me for this. :B
I think you meant the "alexmagnet edition"
Can't say I liked that last one. It has some interesting ideas, but seems to be missing a final paragraph where Twilight, I dunno, teleports away or something similar. Anything other than just passively letting Trixie smother her with a pillow.
Man, seeing all these other compilations makes me want to make one for my write-off failures, but I hate airing stuff that I haven't polished, and I'm never good at doing rewrites.
2626672
I thought it was a nice horror ending.
2626674
If you check the Writeoff Association's forum, there's a thread I started called "Project Writeoff", where I'm listing all the unpublished fics. Your name shows up quite a few times, if you want to know what's missing. As for doing edits, "git gud", as they say. :V You can do it.
2626753 I think what would fix it for me is having Twilight be too worn out from the Ursa Minor magic earlier to defend herself, that would give it an additional tie back to the episode in a "fruits of her actions" sort of way.
2626753
Oh don't worry. I know which ones are missing. You even missed one too. I did When You Go and Nemeses (which was pretty damned horrible) for "What Lies Beneath." I had always wanted to try and expand When You Go to fit the 1k minimum for its own story, but I couldn't seem to add anything.
Maybe, if I get off my lazy behind, I'll take a shot at polishing some of them.
I still need to work on those Power Ponies stories too...
2626659
I think you meant "a bunch of alexmagnet's shitty old fics edition".
I remember this write off quite well, and I specifically remember thinking, "I wonder how many 500 word fics I can crap put in 24 hours." Turns out the answer is about 2 tolerable fics, 2 terrible ones and 1 really mundane one.
2626769
I got When You Go but somehow missed Nemeses, dammit. :| Thank you.
2626821
Sounds about right!
2626646
Actually, this was nice after I figured out the trick. Since they would all be the same link, I just did each collection title and linked that.
It's only frustrating when you spread out the chapters of a collection over several posts. That's when I hate you.
2626893
Well, that's how I'm doing it for the most part. :B This is an outlier.
2627223
I know! But I have a plan. You cannot defeat my carefully planned text file solution.
2627229
I can try! :V
Eh. None of these really did a whole lot for me. Maybe I'm burned out at the moment.