Can't Hold Out Forever : Musings on "A Diamond and a Tether" · 6:03am Jan 26th, 2015
Hello, Dear Reader.
Observe: I wrote a thing!
It's about this tiny horse jerk and her tiny horse problems:
Yes, as I mused in my last journal entry, I indeed entered EQD's More Most Dangerous Game Contest.
Lemmie tell ya, this story gave me a run for my money. This is the biggest word count I've written in this amount of time. 13,000 in one week (and since I write my rough drafts in a notebook, I pretty much rewrite it again when I type it, so arguably, 26,000). Usually this workload is spread out over a month and frankly, I'm amazed I managed it. I'm a first timer for a contest of any sort, and it's all quite exciting/terrifying. How I'll be able to wait for the results, I have no idea.
My Little Dashie was an easy choice for a prompt. Of all of them, I think it has the most potential to go in all sorts of directions because there are so many different stories involved in raising a kid, especially an otherworldly kid.
Celestia's right at the end of that story. Rainbow Dash got lucky. She got really lucky. They both did.
Countless things could have gone wrong and honestly, I credit Dash coming out as well as she did to circumstance and convenience. I mean, Dash just happens to come across someone who's single with no nosy relatives or friends. He just happens to be fully willing to raise a small horse child and just happens to know what she is because he just so happens to be a Brony and thus, totally prepared for the type of pony she is/will be. Protagonist Dad has the kind of head start most parents dream of. And even then, cooped up all alone for like two decades with no interaction besides her human dad, Rainbow came out amazingly well adjusted.
In a nutshell, the premise of Diamond and a Tether is this:
Rainbow Dash and Protagonist Dad have luck and foresight on their side.
Diamond Tiara and Lucy Burdock do not.
(useless background facts and mild spoilers after the page break)
My stories often have a musical cornerstone to build from, either as a basis or as a tool to set the mood. Longer works, like The Last Human, have an album or two behind them. Short ones have a song. Somewhere Only We Know was named after, 100% inspired by and centered entirely around the song of the same name.
To a far lesser extent, so was A Diamond and a Tether
Lucy's theme song. The love is there, but lack of commitment due to the fear something will go wrong is holding it back. Trying, but not trying nearly hard enough.
Originally this thing was titled My Brightest Diamond, but after a certain point I realized that the Death Cab song just happened to work as a better title and here we are.
Lucy's deal is when things get tough, she quickly buries it and tries to move on to pleasanter things before it can hurt her. That's where those post-break up shopping sprees come from. A quick band-aid fix; if she has something nice, she'll feel better and won't have to think about, say, the fact that Brian's been cheating on her, or that besides socializing and shopping, she has no idea what to do with her life, or that she lives all alone and has so much money because she inherited it after her parents passed away. Or the fact that she knows that she's not emotionally prepared to take care of a child, much less the multitudes of issues that come with a pony child. She should talk to someone, but she'd have to confront it to talk about it, so she's not gonna make that first leap, and it's way out of place for Maria to take the initiative (and Maria certainly would certainly like to...but she'd like to also keep her job).
Aaaand sadly, all of that's shown in the fic pretty minimally. A close reading might suss it out, but it doesn't have near the presence it should have had. I did try hint Lucy's avoidance and anxiety issues whenever I could: fidgeting with jewelry, looking away in uncomfortable conversations, and of course the bit in the finale as she walls herself off with Facebook.
If I had an extra week and an extra 3k words to write, I would have spent them on Lucy. I consider lack of clear development on her part is by far the weakest part of this story. However, I also realized early on that to properly explore this would require more time, drafts, and word count that I thought I could afford. I wasn't sure how to approach it or to what extent, it needed time that I didn't have to fully develop because for me, I need to experiment and spend time with them first. And first priority was Diamond's issues, not Lucy's.
Deleted Scenes and Pointless Facts
- Filthy Rich did indeed go Liem Neeson on more than a couple of ponies during those years of searching. Called in several favors, offered some bribes, put the figurative boot up a figurative ass, and more than one Manehattan mob boss isn't happy with him. For a long time, the presumption was Diamond Dazzle was kidnapped and the whole thing became a pretty infamous case. Like Ponyville's own Lindbergh baby.
- As according to my headcanon, all little ponies are musically talented and will randomly burst into musical numbers when they feel strongly about a thing. (Even Scootaloo can do it, just look at Hearts as Strong as Horses!) Naturally, this results in an "I Want" song, complete with angry reprisals and choreography. Maria is more than a little creeped out by this. Diamond doesn't get why Maria thinks it's weird, though she takes comfort that it seems to happen naturally in high school.
- For Diamond's birthday, Lucy would have rented out a theater for High School Musical 3. They don't go, because Filthy Rich and Twilight Sparkle show up before that can happen. Lucy'd already bought the tickets and everything.
The only reason this didn't make it in was at the time, I mistakenly thought the movie came out in 2009 and didn't find out until the last minute it came out the year before... right after Di finds out she can't go to high school.
It absolutely still could have worked--and likely would've worked better, since dropping info about the HSM tickets the day Filthy arrives is laying on a bit too thick. Sadly, that would have needed an entire new scene and not a small paragraph, as I planned.
- Maria's schedule eventually changed from Tuesday/Thursday to a 6 day work week and dropped pretty much all her other jobs. It's more than worth it, Diamond Tiara and Lucy are still less a pain than other clients. Also she's making like $900 a week. Yeah, carmen had a hell of a quinceañera.
- Diamond knows how to read and speak decent Spanish, since she A) needed something to do and B) she was still in those prime years to learn a language so Maria was like "why not". The filly might not be able to hold intricate debates in Spanish, but she can at least follow a telenovela or two.
- Brian's found Diamond in that wet cardboard box on Thursday night/early Friday morning. He met Lucy for her birthday on Saturday evening. Diamond Tiara was in that gift box for about 18 hours. Brian's kind of a douchebag.
- Sometimes on late nights, if Diamond is still awake or Lucy stayed home that day, they'll hang out in Lucy's room, eat Indian food, and talk smack about celebrities. They watched a lot of TMZ. I cut this one for pacing. It's lovely in the rough draft, but there was just no good place for it in the final draft.
- Lucy gets her name from Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds because I think I'm cute. I came really close to pulling a lame "Look for the girl with the sun in her eyes and she's gone" before I was convinced not to because that's really corny Patch, WTF
- Aside from the finale, the scene I'm proudest of is Diamond Tiara taking her problems out of Dr. Truffles. It's how kids sometimes react to stuff like this, voicing inner worries with their toys ("Nobody wants you here", "Maybe if you weren't talking all the time...", "whoever heard of a talking pig?") and parroting stuff she's heard Lucy say ("Ugh, that is SO like you"). Also, it's something of a precursor to taking her problems out on other ponies (ie: The CMC).
- IMO, the last line of this story is one of the best final lines I've even written.
- I can't ever read or write an interaction between Diamond and Maria without thinking of this at least once:
Any chance we'll see those words once the contest is over?
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Maybe, maybe not. Normally I hate making big edits like that after it's already published. But since this is a special case, if I can manage to find a way to integrate it smoothly, I will. Right now, I feel the nuance it needs clashes with the format I ended up with.
Man, this post really makes me feel bad for judging Lucy so harshly. I really wish we'ed seen the scene with TMZ and Indian Food, it would make it so much easier to empathize with Lucy.
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Yeah, that's one I'm definitely gonna integrate once the contest is over.
That reminds me I once planned a My Little Dashie parody in which the narrator's life is great at the start, and he finds Diamond Tiara in a box, and she slowly ruins his life. I didn't even remember it during the contest. Probably just as well.
It makes me sad that this story was written by a well-known fan author, won 2nd place in a big contest that was promoted repeatedly on fimfiction and EQD, was published on EQD twice, and still has only 628 views. Less than half as many as any story that spends one day in the featured box.
Fans are stupid.
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*shrug* Who knows how the public works. Besides, I'm not that well known overall. As far as I can tell I'm the equivalent to an indie film critical darling. I blame my slow output and the fact that my biggest story came out after a lot of people joined the fandom.
...Though writing a Diamond Tiara story probably didn't help.