Coming Sunday: A story, and a contest · 11:50am Sep 12th, 2015
(Art source: Koviry)
Contest? Contest! 
There will be prizes and everything! Sharpen your wits and dust off your keyboards, because this one's going to challenge your sleuthing skills as well as your writing!
Check below the fold for a preview ...
So what's happening here is that, after winning 8th place (and Most Controversial) in this month's Writeoff, I'm releasing the edited version of that entry upon an unsuspecting world.
The Last Dreams of Pony Island
The colony of Myinnkyun had enough problems without Peridot vanishing — trade ships were disappearing, and the island's native minotaurs had launched an attack on the city walls.
But now there's talk that she was murdered, and the city is about to tear itself apart before its enemies have the chance.
One part Spoon River Anthology and one part Rashomon, this story invites you to piece together the story of Myinnkyun's last days — and Peridot's final night — from the dreams of its inhabitants. "Dreams cannot lie," the Nightmares say, but everybody has different concerns and a different understanding of the truth ...
Psyched up yet? I sure am! "The Last Dreams of Pony Island" is an anthology of 16 poems wait stop come back.
Let's try this again.
Yes, I know, the mere mention of poetry typically is enough to get 95% of FIMFiction pulling a Twilight backpedal, but don't take my word that this one's worth reading. Take a look at some of the Writeoff reviews from readers with that same up-front cringe reaction:
I'm not gifted with understanding poetry either, so I sympathize with your view on The Last Dreams of Pony Island. But at the same time I recognize the incredible artistry and attention that went into crafting this piece. ...
I hope this makes it into the finals. ... I expect I'll be giving it one of my highest spots if it does. —Cold in Gardez
Poetry, my only weakness. Well, let's trudge through it.
Aaaaand it was wonderful. The interwoven stories, the different voices, the tragedy of little people (in a species-independent sense) facing the darkness and clambering at what they know and have. Simply marvelous. —Orbiting Kettle
I have been told I have no poetry in my soul. ... I read it all, and I just thought at the end, "I wish this was a story." ... when I say, "I wish this was a story" it's because I liked it, but I would have liked it more as prose.
(Later edited to add:)
Okay so apparently I'm wrong all the time because I noticed myself doing something. I keep going back and rereading it over and over again. It's such a strange and wonderful thing. I no longer know what I want. —Magello
Here's a secret. It's not really poetry, anyhow: it's free verse, which is plain prose with extra line breaks in.[1] To quote Cold in Gardez again, "At times I found myself reading it not so much as a poem but simply as a stream-of-conscious prose with line breaks wherever the POV character's attention shifted. But still, even read that way, this story takes on a Rashomon-like quality, inviting us to view a murder and other village intrigue from a dozen different perspectives."
And that's where the contest comes in!
I am deliberately releasing the story with one chapter missing: the narrator's. Your challenge will be to write it — piece together the story's clues as best as you're able, and tell the real story of Peridot's death in your own words. You'll have some latitude in extrapolating from the text, and you don't even have to write poetry if you don't want to[2]; the judging criteria will be a combination of how correct the submission is, and how beautiful and/or profound you can make it.
I'll post Sunday midday with official rules and a prize list, and Pony Island will go live Sunday afternoon-when-the-moderators-get-to-it. 
If you want to rev your brain up in advance, you can read the Writeoff version of the story; all of my changes are in adding additional clues and clarifying the presentation of what's already written, so you shouldn't see anything there which is contradicted by the official posted version.
--
[1] Okay, that's not true. Good free verse also concerns itself with the shape and sound and flow of words in a way that vanilla prose doesn't. One of the poems is set in the form of squared-off text blocks; most play with line breaks for emphasis; and Peridot's in particular is lyrical (and oddly enjambed to create a sense of altered flow, for reasons that might become clear when you read it in context). But (as the quote just below this footnote citation notes) you can ignore all that and just read it as prose.
[2] Spoilsport. 
There was a narrator?
I suppose that'll be added in the Fimfic version. In any case, good to know that Writeoff participation doesn't entail disqualification. I'm not sure why I thought you might institute such a policy, but I was still concerned.
Interesting.
I figured it out. It was aliens.
3386532
"Narrator" might be not quite the right word. But if you remember the section of Shooting Star (the Night Guard captain), when he directly noticed the dream intrusion and wrestled with the intruder, my intention was that the individual who Shooting Star noticed was the one entering these dreams and compiling the collection. That still leaves the "narrator's" identity quite open (indeed, that's one of the choices that contest entrants will have to make!), but I had always envisioned the story structure as having support for an epilogue in which it was all explained.
Note: I'm blacking that out for people who want to read the story without spoilers, but it's relevant to anyone who wants to enter the contest. I'll try to remember to note it in the official post.
And yes, Writeoff readers are absolutely eligible. The only advantage they might have -- unless there was a lot of analysis going on that missed both the discussion thread and Skype chat -- is that I did drop one clue in my fake review, which I'll make sure I point all entrants toward.
Reading between the lines, I'm guessing that the 'missing' narrator section will be added after the contest finishes.
3386537
Sssshhh, you're spoiling it for everyone
3386546
Er, no — the idea is that contest entrants write that final section, and the first-place entry becomes canon and gets added (with credit) to the story. I could just do it myself, but I think if I throw it to the winds, someone's going to come up with something even more awesome than I would have. Plus, contests are fun!
(I've ninja-edited the post accordingly.)
Have you decided how long we'll have? I'm very interested, but can't promise anything (university is doing a good job at eating all of my spare time).
no, I'm still backpedaling D:
Seems a little risky. Say you receive an entry that's exquisitely written, but the author guessed the narrator's identity wrong, and he loses to a lesser entrant who got it right. Would be a shame.
Anyway, I'm with PP on this one. I've done a little poetry already, and it was plenty for me.
Hmm. There's a good chance I'll give this a shot. Some of my favorite poems are free verse
I see that picture, and I think of the zee...
3386774
A legitimate concern, but I've been GM of enough roleplaying games to have rode this rodeo before. "Correctness" will explicitly be judged on "plausibility based on the facts in the text as written"; I designed what I wrote to all point in certain directions, but if the winner sees those facts and comes up with an explanation which also accounts for all those clues in a way that I didn't expect, then I shift tracks behind the scenes and pretend that that was my plan all along.
In fact, there are a few clues I left a bit of deliberate ambiguity in, for exactly that reason: to give entrants some creative control [1], and to force me to judge submissions against the text instead of the scenario in my brain. If I get multiple entries of equal excellence, then "who came closest to reading my mind" will be a tiebreaker.
That said, I totally understand if the poetry is crossing your tolerance threshold, so thank you to you and 3386600 for considering it, even if the answer is "no."
--
[1] Originally "to give readers room for interpretation and argument, so it would generate more discussion in the Writeoff thread", but hey, if I can repurpose that to drive engagement more directly ...
3387267
Well, Peridot was last seen near the docks ...
3386558
My plan is to give people (a minimum of) one week to write up to 1000 words. If that doesn't seem feasible I can nudge the submission period a bit longer.
3387443
It's more an issue that poetry takes me forever to write. I make it harder for myself than it needs to be. I wrote one story where I decided Zecora would tell stories in higher forms than her usual speech, so one was in a half dozen or so sonnets with iambic pentameter. The other was a single villanelle, which doesn't have to have a regular meter, but I used iambic pentameter anyway. And spent the next three months agonizing over what totaled only a few hundred words and cursing myself for my decision. So 1,000 words, even in free verse, in a week? Too rich for me.
3387480
Thank you, that sounds good. As long as I've got a full weekend, I think I'll manage.
You got my attention. I will have some free time after Wednesday and I will try my best.
Since I:
Couldn't figure out whodunnit in the original version, I reckon I'll hafta give the rewrite a try.
Mike