A Big, Scary Thank You · 1:39pm Jun 25th, 2016
Thank you for helping Love, Or Something Like It get featured! Its stay in the feature box was only a few hours overnight on the 20th-21st, but I didn't expect it to get there at all. Love, Or Something Like It is pretty frickin’ dark by my standards; but then, it’s a Writeoff story. Like Dio once said about writing songs for Black Sabbath (if I may be forgiven the comparison), the Writeoffs tend to bring out weird, dark stuff in me. Speaking of which, I’m in the midst of cleaning-up another Writeoff finalist fic that treads similar ground...
Ironically, I'm more of a Celestia fan in general
As with many of my stories, though, Love, Or Something Like It taps into things I’ve personally gone through. Specifically, Luna’s part at the end; reaching out to someone close who's been abused, wanting desperately to find a way to help them, and ultimately setting into the (un)happy medium between taking action and giving them space.
If you’ve ever been in that situation--or, worse, on Spike’s side of it--then my heart goes out to you. It can be gut-wrenching to watch someone close to you withdraw from possible help and suffer alone. It's little comfort to intellectually understand that sometimes the best you can do is to just be there for them; to just show up every day and encourage them in the belief that they are beautiful and important even as they are. The desire to “do something,” and to also see them taking action to help themselves, can be overwhelming.
I can only hope that screwing it up is natural, because I’ve done that. I wrote my story Conscience to echo some of the emotions from a time I mishandled that, badly. And I wrote The Counselor as a fairly bald-faced PSA that sometimes issues go beyond what non-professionals can deal with effectively, and it’s okay to acknowledge when that happens and to seek that kind of help.
I dunno. Hopefully this isn't too maudlin. If you guys have been there before, or if you're going through it now, just know you're not alone. And if you feel like sharing anything, please feel free to hit up my PM or comments.
Sometimes you do something that you think is going to get only a minimal amount of attention and all and it ends up being bigger than you'd hoped. Of course making sure it's good helps too. Sometimes it helps to have a point of reference in real life when writing. It can just make it feel, even if just to yourself, a bit more honest.
4048929 Indeed! I find it helps me to write the stuff I do, and I aspire to make it worth people's time.
Predicting the likely reader response in advance is hard. Or at least, it is for me; I'm sure there are people who have their finger on the pulse of things who can see the trends coming. But this one blew my expectations out of the water. Of course the flip side is writing something that you think is going to make a big splash, and it doesn't. That's a pain!