Behind the doors of Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns · 12:36am Jan 4th, 2015
Happy New Year everyone.
I just realised that The Brightest and the Best hit the feature box one year to the day since I last achieved that with Rock Farms and Nuclear Reactors. I wonder if I can do it again on 20 December 2015?
Time for some post scriptum reflections on this one, which has turned out, by many metrics, my most successful story to date.
The starting point for this was, of course, the writeoff prompt 'Behind closed doors'. As prompts go, this one was rather good, with endless possibilities. There are so many doors across Equestria which it would be fascinating to peek behind. This led me to the doors of Celestia's School and the question of how to gain admission?
In her cutie mark story, Twilight clearly saw her test as a make-or-break opportunity. But this doesn't seem quite right. If every candidate sat the same test—to hatch a dragon's egg—and passed, then there would be an awful lot of baby dragons in Canterlot. But everything suggests that Spike is one of a kind. The idea that every student admitted to the school gets their own little dragon as a personal assistant is cute, but unfortunately a bit unrealistic. So I conclude that her hatching the egg was not actually expected. As we know, Twilight does go a little loco-in-the-coco about exams.
And from the point of view of the examiners this makes sense. If you are testing a group of candidates with the aim of drawing up a ranking, then you want to push all of them to their limit, to see how far they will go. If they get everything right, that doesn't tell you as much as if you give them something more difficult and see how far they get.
Here I could draw on some personal experience, as I mentioned in my very first blog post, university admissions is one of the things I do as part of my day job. Admissions interviews are not easy, for interviewers and interviewees. You have to make a decision after only seeing candidates for a short time. And all students are different. Some are really very able, but so nervous they mess up everything. Others, typically those from posh fee-paying schools, have been very well-taught and coached, with sky-high levels of self-confidence which can mask the fact that they are not actually all that smart.
It would be rather nice if we just had some sort of magical sorting hat which we could stick on their heads to do the job for us.
And—to everyone who asked for a sequel—yes, I think I can do that. But I want to finish another project first. I am behind schedule for my new multichapter story: Keeping Time (title to be confirmed), but I have just sent the first three chapters to my prereader, so depending on how many problems he finds, I should get something posted in the next week or so.
Finally, I can strongly recommend participating in the writeoff events. Everything which Titanium Dragon, Horizon and Bad Horse keep saying about how this is the way to get lots of really good feedback on your writing is entirely true. The next event is on now. Not sure if I will be able to join in this time—I'll see how much time I have tomorrow—but I will read, and vote on, as many as I can.
I'm actually tempted to toss a story into this writeoff, just because the world limit is so small. Now I'm also looking forward to both the longer multi-chapter story you mentioned and that sequel.
So many write-offs...
They keep flooding my read later lists...
I just want to know if Twinkleshine made it
2698873
Do it! I participated the same writeoff, and it was a fantastic experience.