The Royal Canterlot Library's second anniversary contest! · 4:02am Oct 2nd, 2015
Hiya, folks. As you may or may not know, The Royal Canterlot Library is holding a second anniversary contest! In commemoration of the event, they are selecting one previously-featured author to be re-featured by the RCL, in contrast to their usual practice of one-author-one-story. And they are asking you to help pick which one of us!
Yes, I'm on the list. My novel-length pony / mad science mash-up crackfic "Contraptionology!" was graciously suggested as one of the candidates. So yes, I do have a horse in this race. I'm not actually telling you "Go vote for my story!" because, let's face it, there are a lot of good names in that thread, and giving a green thumbs-up to any one of those entries is probably a supportable and wise plan. I am, however, blogging to signal-boost the contest in general. So, go to the thread mentioned in the first line, take a gander at all the possibilities available to you, and vote by clicking the up-thumb on the nomination post(s) you support getting a re-feature. Voting closes at midnight EDT this Sunday, October 4.
And if you're relatively new to my follow-list, maybe you just wanna try reading "Contraptionology!", which was basically the bulk of 2012 for me. It's a long one, and I know as well as anyone that long stories can get buried. But despite its admitted flaws, I'm still kinda proud of what I pulled off with that story. So if any one of you, because of this contest or this blog post, decides to read my pony novel when they otherwise would not have, and as a result gleans some small enjoyment from it, it has all been worth it.
That is all.
Seriously, you guys.
Go read "Contraptionology!"
It may be the best story on this site.
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Thanks for saying so!
Truly it is one of the greatest ponyfics of all time, especially impressive for having Applejack as the main character. I voted for it.
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Thank you!
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Goddamit, am I put in the position of choosing between Skywriter and Cold in Gardez? It would appear I am.
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Contraptionology! versus anything is a pretty easy choice. About as easy as it gets.
Unless maybe they managed to track down the author of It Takes a Village. That might make it a more difficult choice.
3436654 I'll be honest, while Contraptionology is an excellent story, if I were going to nominate Sky for a second shot into the RCL, it would be for How to Remove a Unicorn Tooth, otherwise known as the best fuckin' thing he's ever written.
(I have a lot of respect for Hates Tea, and it's probably Sky's best-known work, but it isn't his best work.)
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I will be the last to disagree with you on that point.
3436708 I won't disagree, but "Beloved" is also very good. Even though I hate Stravinsky.
3441107 Well, I mean, I don't think Sky has ever written anything bad. He's written a couple things that are flawed, but nothing that I ever looked at and went "this is waste of my time."
The Beloved/Heretical Fictions duo is pretty strong indeed, especially for a sophomore effort. To a certain extent Sky never actually realized some of his early potential with regard to Twilight Sparkle; he demonstrated enormous facility with both her internal and external voice in Observatory Hill and Beloved (Heretical Fictions is more meta than both) that never really panned out, because after that we moved onto Contraptionology, and then he discovered Bestprincess IcecreamMane which brought out his two best works, Unicorn Tooth and Lady Prismia.
But I miss his Sparkle a lot. She was sort of like Eakin writes her except more subtle and grounded, and Sky is a better plotter than Eakin straight-up.
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Thanks, guys. There's little more flattering to me than having smart, articulate people disagree on the precise manner in which I am awesome. Murc, I do have another Sparklefic on my back burner but it's a neurotic fit fic so I suppose that kills any chance of subtlety.
3444608 What's the connection between Heretical Fictions & Beloved? Beloved says it's a sequel, but I don't see any connection.
I have a hard time saying why I like Beloved so much. Part of it is certainly that it has 5 distinctive, interesting, sympathetic characters. That's a lot! And if you start writing down their goals, worries, and issues, and drawing lines between them to represent the relations and tensions between them touched on in the story, you'd have to do a lot of writing. There's a lot going on in that story, and it all comes back to Celestia. It does all that while being funny. Some writers are funnier, and some explore characters in more depth, but I can't think of anybody (and I'm including all writers, of all time) who's as funny (non-satirically; e.g., The Simpsons doesn't count) while working with relationship problems.
But another part of it has to do with the central image, of Beloved singing. This is not a folk tale, where some character's virtues are discovered and rewarded. Beloved's song is a bit of mundane magic hidden in an unexpected place, and it stays hidden there. The story doesn't, like so many stories, imply that this is wrong, that wonderful things shouldn't be in less-than-wonderful places, and then fix it. I like that a lot.
It's difficult to provide a pair of pony goddesses with a plot problem. Celestia has everything, everypony loves her, she can do anything, and she can order anybody to do anything. Well, except she can't order Beloved to sing beautifully.
I don't see how all the threads connect, but Celestia is uneasy throughout, and she needs Beloved, and can't have her. I don't know why she needs her, but Celestia thinks she can sublimate all her distress into something that Beloved, or her singing, will relieve.
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Well, I mean... they flow directly into each other. You could literally bolt Beloved onto Heretical Fictions and read them as two chapters of a single story and not notice any discontinuity. They're chronologically sequential in the same universe.
But! You've asked for details, my fine friend, and details I will provide. From Heretical Fictions, emphasis mine:
That's right at the tail end, right before Celestia needs to pick a secret identity for their little anonymous excursion into public:
From the very beginning of Beloved, again, emphasis mine:
See the connection? It's sequential; they agree to the night out in Heretical Fictions, and then we get the actual night out in Beloved. They're even still going out for Qilinese:
They're chronologically sequential. Same characters.
Well, for my part, I thought the story made it rather obvious, although it would take Sky to confirm it one way or the other; Celestia needs Beloved because she has a desperate, clawing, burning need to give and receive love on a personal level. You say:
That's not true. Not in the way that Celestia wants or needs. Ponies do love her. But they love her in an abstract way, as the giver of life and hope and warmth. They don't love her personally. They don't even know her. Most of them will never meet her. There are precisely two ponies in the world who love her on a direct and personal level, and whom she loves in return: Luna, and Twilight Sparkle. Luna's love for her is complex and weird, as is her love for Luna, but Twilight? Oh man, Twilight was like getting a hit of crack for Celestia. She mentored and taught and formed personal bonds with Twilight and watched her grow and blossom and re-learned what it was like to love and be love, and it wasn't enough, because she can never be Twilight's real mother. Twilight has a family, and Twilight and Celestia will never love each other in the way that Twilight loves her parents and brother and they love her.
Celestia is desperate for that sort of love. She has enough self-awareness to know that she can't possibly raise a foal on her own, she has a kingdom to run, but she wants it so bad she can taste it and is willing to jump through any number of hoops to get it, which is why she has that huge argument with Luna over ways to interfere with Beloved's life.
TLDR; Celestia wants to be a mother, not to a whole nation, but to just one person. Beloved could help salve that need. Or at least, that's how I read it. We could ask the Man Himself, I guess. (I do not subscribe to Death of the Author bullshit.)
Something to always keep in mind with Beloved is that Skywriter wrote it back during his "OMG Eternal is the best fucking thing ever" period; it even predates his love for Candymane Jewelrybutt. (A lot of people forget he had a whole oeuvre before he became the Patron Saint of Cadance.) It and Heretical Fictions always have to be viewed through the lens of how that larger work influenced them.
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Eh, I don't believe in Death of the Author either, but I find that being too heavy-handed about telling your own interpretation discourages fascinating discussions like this one right here. That said...
...yes, these stories were written before I had time to get really smitten with Cady. We hadn't even seen her in canon at this point; we only knew her name and general appearance. Celestia looks for a daughter-figure here, hoping it will give her something she's missing in life, but a very similar Celly gets a daughter figure in post-...Crystal Heart Spell Cadance, and we can see that there are certain problems with that outcome as well...
3455049 I did vaguely recall they might have said something about sneaking out in HF, but it's not like you need to read HF to read Beloved, or that they're about the same things. I'd just say they're in the same continuity.
Yes, but Celestia doesn't express her need quite the way I'd expect if she were conscious of that. She says, "MINE," greedily. Part of Luna's response is that Celestia is trying to possess and control Beloved. So the story does highlight Celestia's isolation, but it also seems to me to critique how Celestia relates to others. Possibly implying that, having lost her trust in Luna, she now strives to have control in all her relationships, yet knows instinctively that what she wants most is something or someone she can't control.
Eh, I'll just tell you that you're wrong.
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But... But that would be evi—
oh yeah i forgot
3455161 As the Buddha says, "If you meet the author on the road, kill him."