TMy Big Batty Not-Wedding
MLP: FiM
Slice of Life
Rumble decides to be wedlocked to his bat-winged girlfriend. The rest of Ponyville doesn't know what to make of it. Scootaloo just tries to keep her dark secret hidden.
Applejack
CMCs
Rumble
Changelings
Bat Pony
Wise Cracker · 74k words · 67 7 · 1.2k views

It's Official: This November, I'll Be Going Batty · 9:30pm Oct 30th, 2015

Greetings, my fellow fimfiction users.

I come bearing tidings of stories to come and of glory to be held in the arena of fiction writing. I come bearing tidings of a contest, a bloody arena, where authors can pit their fiction against one another in bloody combat.

I speak, of course, of the writing contest held by the group known as Bat ponies and Thestrals: stories of the night. There is a cash prize and I have submitted my most recent story to the pool, so it is my moral duty to give it a signal boost.

Not to get my story voted up, mind you, but because it is a cash prize at stake. Someone went through the effort to invest in the contest, and I happen to think if you're going to go that far you deserve to get a good pool of entries. It's kind of pointless to try and entice people to write more stories only to find that you get just enough participants to give everyone a prize. It's also demoralising to win such a contest. Or lose it.

In all fairness, though, the free games were/are pretty sweet, and I will be seeing what I can do inflate the numbers on the balloon pony group. It's just that my current idea for that would get me put on a federal watchlist and aging up the victims would make the plot not work.

Anywho, anyone with a grain of creativity and a fondness for bat-winged equines: go write a good bat pony story and submit it to the contest folder. If you wish to compete with me, I am in the Teen section of the contest, and so far my only competition is JawJoe.

Let's not let it degenerate into a contest between two pony writers who don't watch the show, shall we?

So, that's the signal booster, on to the more interesting stuff. Since I've submitted my story to the contest folder, I am subject to the contest rules. The rules state that the story must be submitted before November 15th, but there is currently talk of extending it to the 30th. Either way, that means I'll be speeding up the releases of chapters, so November will be the month where I release a new chapter once every... two days, maybe three. There are 14 chapters right now, with a possible epilogue that I keep saying I'll write but haven't gotten around to yet. At the time of writing, I've gone over the first five once again, hopefully there won't be any major mistakes left.

Aside from that, though, I'll be writing another story involving equines with bat wings.

It's original, though. Sort of.

See, long-time fans may have caught wind of a colt OC that was going to feature in my first ever pony fic, but was scrapped for a variety of reasons. His name was Dreamy, started off as an Earth pony but really only worked as a unicorn, and even as a unicorn he was a bit of a Mary Sue with a story that got needlessly complicated once Cadence entered the picture, and even more so once Sombra became thing. Like I said, scrapped for a variety for reasons, but you've seen shades of him in my work. He was, in a very real sense, the primordial Wise Cracker colt OC. And now he'll be known as Aurelius C. Air, or Riley for short.

The working title of the story is Tales from the Tundra, and it will be my NaNoWriMo entry for this year. Here's the synopsis:

Eclipse is a simple mare, a so-called 'fleeder': bat-winged, but mostly equine. She's just like anyone else her age: out on the job market, recent graduate and Master of Magic (that's what it says on her degree), and former thesis student under none other than The Lady Radiant, Goddess Empress of the United Fair Lands, and professor of magic due to a minor political spat about gods getting day jobs a few centuries ago.
But just as Eclipse is about to start applying for a job, The Lady Radiant, in her infinite wisdom, sends Eclipse away with a most urgent mission: to find and retrieve The Book of All Ends, a spellbook that contains the incantations that will end the world. A simple task if ever there was one. There are only two problems.
One is that Eclipse graduated with more than just a degree and a very impressive Master's thesis: she also got a little unicorn boy named Riley out of the deal, who is now her ward and her responsibility. She doesn't like to talk about that.
The other is that the book in question is located in an ancient library, in reindeer lands. And even by magical horse standards, reindeer are a little nuts. Their immortal leader, the ancient butcher known as Rudolph the Red, is even more so. Nobody likes to talk about that.
Still, it's a simple enough task: go to reindeer lands at the start of tourist season, pretend to be a custodian so she can find the ancient tome - like finding a needle in a stack of needle stacks, but at least they're ordered by topic and author - and get the book back to the Fair Lands, where it belongs.
And make sure the book doesn't fall into the wrong hooves in the process.
And at some point, she's going to have to start preparing little Riley's future. Preferably before any of the locals find out why she can't have Riley be anywhere near snow or an arts museum.
This is going to be tough.
But at least it's not college.

You may note that I'm using Rudolph the Red, a name from my Berry fic. The fact is, I'm planning to use a lot of ideas that have popped up in my pony fiction, but giving it a few twists to make it more original. There will be a reindeer version of Doldrum Whimper, sort of, and Tobias from the Krampus fic may come in at some point, but there's nothing really taken from the show. Riley is no Spike, no sirree. The Lady Radiant is not Celestia, not by a long shot, and is in fact one of the reasons Dreamy never made it as a pony OC in his original plotline: making Celestia into the kind of villain that she would have been just wouldn't have made much sense. Eclipse is no Twilight Sparkle, either, not exactly. But I ramble.

What about last year's NaNoWriMo, then? Well... I'm stuck. Again. I keep getting stuck on the same thing, and have for over a year. I've gone over the whole thing, tried rewriting, never got far. Right now the basic problem is that I want to write about prejudice when I am incapable of writing decent (ie believable) bigotry in a high school environment, and that the story's supposed to be about my main character looking for magic when his parents want to make sure he doesn't neglect the mundane. I can write the magic okay, but I seem to have painted myself into a corner regarding the mundane. I either have to go with something that I don't know and don't find interesting (dodgeball, which is what I wrote originally) or rehash the same ideas I keep rehashing (doing muscular activities or martial arts, both of which I've done repeatedly in fiction). There's parts of it that are just fine, but the whole thing doesn't mesh together properly, which may indicate problems at concept level. If that's the case, it's a month's worth of work and a year's worth of reworking in the bin.

So yeah, not going to be a ~~best-~~selling novelist anytime soon. Not quitting my day job just yet.

Of course, I'd have to get a day job first anyway.

But that's a story for another time.

Take care, all.

Oh, and if anyone's wondering when this whole stalling 'no spoilers, plz ' silliness will end: I'll probably catch up with the show on the Saint Nick weekend, December 5th and 6th. Seems appropriate enough to reward myself once the new novel's done and it's an actual holiday. If I didn't miscalculate, by then the Season should be finished and a little bit of time should have passed so I don't get caught up in any hype or too many spoilers. So probably going to try and avoid the site around the time the finale airs, if I can. It'll depend on what update schedule I settle on.