Writeoff June & July Results

In short: I didn’t make the finals for any of my stories.

June Prompt: “A Matter of Perspective”

The Divide at the Ravine takes place a time after Equestria’s founding. Ponies traveled west to settle the new lands. A stallion and his friends happen upon the Tree of Harmony and it divides the town because the ponies are conflicted on how to deal with it.

I wrote with that idea in mind, but the idea transformed into a movie and what should have been a 20K+ word story had to be cut to around 6K. Of course, I can’t write 20K in three days, only 10K, and I was panicking throughout the competition struggling to finish some kind of story. It faired in the middle. As of this moment, I have no plans to work on it further. I have other stories I want to publish first.

July Prompt: “Best Laid Plans”

I wrote three stories:

Robin Hoof and Her Merry Mares: Pretty self-explanatory with Rarity as Robin Hoof. I had a lot of fun writing this. More details about it here.

Telephone: A silly TwiJack shipfic. More details about it here.

Noise: An experimental piece. More details about it here.

I’m surprised that Telephone fared better than Noise. And even though I didn’t get into the finals, Noise ended up getting the “Most Controversial” story award (for the non-finalists), which I wasn’t even expecting, so that’s cool.

However...

One of the best comments about my story came from a Writeoff chat:

Person A: “There seem to be a number of fics that are overdoing it.
Person B: I'm seeing a lot of people try and fail, yes. [REDACTED] definitely falls in that category. "Noise", too, though "Noise" fails rather harder than just about anything else I've seen try.”

I’ll be honest.
I had a particularly hard day, and when I came home and read that, I didn’t feel too great.

But that comment really was significant because it adheres exactly to my personal philosophy:

”Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.” -Samuel Beckett

I can certainly say I failed better, right?

These three stories seem publishable, so now I have to edit and expand them. And then I’ll finally have something to my name.

Onward!