Georg and His Hatching Idea Eggs plus Quackers picture · 8:41pm Mar 7th, 2017
First, FanOfMostEverything is having an Imposing Sovereigns writing contest, where Princesses get to act up. I'm entered, and you can too. Go visit his blog and see what it's all about.
Now for the main topic, just to let you know what I’m working on, and to allow you to put in your own two cents about where I should concentrate my efforts. Not literal cents, but if you have real money to chip in, I would suggest the Patreon accounts of Estee, Bad Horse or Foals Errand to name some random people who have no idea I just plugged them.
Cover Art for the Quackers the Duck series below the break
by KCoder, done as a gift (I just love fan art)
Major projects (each at about 4 chapters so far)
- Equestria - 1940 The island nation of Equestria finds its neutrality threatened by the growing war across Europe, while in the shadow of the moon, a far more dangerous darkness is growing.
- Flim, Flam and the Little Lost Apple Scam - The Flim/Flam brother return to Sweet Apple Acres with a little twig off the family tree who could tear Applejack’s world apart.
- Farmer Bruner Has Some Ponies - When dark forces threaten Ponyville, Princess Twilight Sparkle evacuates the town, transporting most of the population to the Raindolph spell tower next to Manehatten, on the shores of Turtle Lake. She should really have worked on her spelling. In the meanwhile, a human farmer near the town of Randolph on the shore of Tuttle Creek Lake finds an unexpected visitor dropping from the sky. And then another. And another…
- Her Royal Coffee With Sugar - Princess Twilight has a coltfriend that she doesn’t know about, and he’s not too certain about it either. Then Luna steps in...
Minor projects (each about one chapter one-shots in various stages)
- Quackers the Duck (The Series!) - Short kids stories about Quackers the Duck and his adventures. I’ve got one, but I need more to meet the FimFiction minimum.
- More Precious than Silver or Gold - The Goddess-Princess of Reduit has a new applicant to become a sister in the order. A dragon.
- My Little Priestess - Worship is Magic The Goddess Celestia, who Raises both Sun and Moon while ruling over the Theocracy of Equestria, is worshipped by all ponies within her lands until one fateful day when she sends Acolyte Twilight Sparkle to Ponyville to prepare for a ceremony....
- The Cakes and the Spoons - Every year, Mister and Missus Cake exchange the strangest anniversary gifts. Pinkie wants to know why.
- Lost and Found - A ‘Fixfic’ answer to the Blinked series. I could publish it now, but it’s rough, and I really need to pad it out a little when I get in the right mood.
Parked:
- Letters From a Little Princess Monster - I have an arc mentally drawn out, but it’s complicated and could chew up a couple of months so I’m putting it off for now.
- Twinkle, Twinkle, Speaker to Dragons - Ditto the above.
Next Turnip to Fall Off The Truck:
- Princess Flurry Heart’s First Kiss - Get your minds out of the gutter. Ahem. Problem: Mommy only packs two cookies in Flurry’s lunch for the nursery school. Solution: One of the colts at school always brags about bringing three cookies every day. Path to solution: Mommy can always get Shiny to do whatever she wants, so Flurry should be able to do the same for this colt, so she… Hey! Didn’t I tell you to get your minds out of the gutter! Shoo! Go on.
- Dear Pinkie Pie in Canterlot High - A series of short-shorts that I’ve been pasting in snippets as I think of them. Just waiting for a good time to pull the trigger on this one.
- George’s Thoughtletts - Like Snigletts, or Drabbles, only more thoughtful. Ideas inspired by stories but too small for stories of their own and too large to throw away. (see Drabbles) Normally left on unsuspecting author’s blog posts or stories like droppings. Do you remember Kentucky Fried Movie? Kind of like that. Spawned by the fact that I like to type up my creative (or not-so) little tidbits on author’s blog posts or stories in a Gdocs document to cut down on typos.
Here, let me throw in a few examples:
(From There Goes the Neighborhood)
Meanwhile, in another time and place...
Agent Murial looked up from the giant wad of paperwork at the sound of a light tapping against the Secret Service office door, giving a brief gasp at what she saw there.
"Excuse me," said the tall white horse, who was looking around the office rather shyly. "My sister and I are looking for the White House Transition Office. We're both so glad to be working for the new president."
"Y-y-you're..." Agent Murial continued to stare until the horse gave another blink of surprise.
"Oh, pardon me. I'm Celestia and this is my sister Luna. Luna?" Celestia looked back over her shoulder and gave a sigh. "Nevermind, she found the coffee machine. Anyway, we're the new minority hires with the presidential transition team."
"...unicorns," finished Murial rather weakly, suddenly feeling an urge to unpack that bottle of gin she had in one of the correspondence boxes.
"Alicorns, actually." The horned horse extended a snow-white wing slightly and gave it a brief flap. "Technically, we're endangered species, but whenever that gets mentioned in a government office, somebody always brings up the topic of a breeding program, and that inevitably descends into a discrimination lawsuit. We just need a little space to put our things." She smiled in a way that made the thin sunbeam coming in through Agent Murial's window seem to twinkle and dance. "You'll never even notice we're here."
From Estee’s blog post
https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/719610/patreon-blog-takeover-how-to-general-equivalency-diploma-your-dragon-brumby-run
What's worse, Spike has become accustomed to being the Most Trusted Individual for the brilliant Twilight Sparkle (now Princess), and acting as sort-of the anti-Twilight, as in when she's panicked, he has to be calm, when she's overworking herself, he has to step in, etc... And some of that 'bright' has rubbed-off.
"Ah!" Measured Response gave a huff of suppressed aggravation at the sight of Spike casually strolling into the testing room. "Finally! Take your quill and be seated, please. This standardized test for the Equestrian Education Evaluation committee will take four hours, starting--"
"Just a moment, Mister Response," said Spike, looking over the top of the sealed test. "You have the wrong age category on the E3 here. This is the Twelve Year Revision B7 Stroke Q E3 test for multi-species performance evaluation."
The bureaucrat frowned, flipping through his notes. "You are twelve."
"Yes, but testing for non-pony races is based on a sliding scale," explained Spike. "Twilight was researching it a few years ago. You need the table found in 'Equestrian Educational Evaluation Average Age Adjustment' or what Twilight called the E3A3."
"Not a problem." The unicorn dipped into his briefcase and flipped through forms briefly before extracting a piece of thick cardboard festooned with numbers. "Now, your species is draconus vulgaris, which puts us on this line, average age of—" The bureaucrat stopped and looked at Spike over the top of his glasses.
"One thousand, eight hundred and fifty," confirmed Spike. "Which leaves you in the first column, Toddler Pre-School. There's only one E3 test for that age category, and the answers are triangle, house, red, blue, pegasus, unicorn, and Princess Celestia. Can I go now? I left Twilight alone in Princess Luna's library, and she's in a reshelving mood."
(From a comment on Drifting Down the Lazy River)
"So..." Gaberdine looked down at the rough husk digging into to his chest. "We managed to get the pod attached, and you said it should provide nutrition and oxygen for the foal—"
"Foals," corrected Pearl shyly.
"Foals," said Gaberdine with a gulp, looking down again at the rough brown pod. "So another four or five months before they hatch, right? We should probably get a pair of bassinets before them. Or..." Gaberdine hesitated before venturing, "or three?"
"Fifty-seven," said Pearl. "It will probably become a little uncomfortable around the fourth month while they nurse through the skin of the pod, so we'll have to keep your strength up with a high-protein diet high in clam meat and fish, but I don't see why they can't all make it to full term. And if you survive, we'll have to see if we can do this again in a few years to give them some little brothers and sisters."
(A comment on why you don’t let a general contractor work unsupervised, which I left somewhere and don’t remember where.)
Princess Celestia stood very quietly with her tongue stuck in the corner of her cheek while looking up at the mountain. Finally, she took a deep breath and addressed the young architect at her side.
"I seem to remember asking for a quiet mountain cottage with a view of the valley. Three rooms, perhaps four, a private retreat where I could spend the occasional weekend away from the troubles and stress of court."
"There's at least three rooms in your tower, Your Highness," said Cost Overrun, pointing with one hoof at the tallest tower in the city, done up in enough gold around the edges so that it reflected considerable glints even at this distance. The obsidian glints from a similar tower just slightly behind and to the left made it totally excessive for him to add, "I made a tower for your sister too, just in case.”
Celestia cast a sideways glance at her sister, who was still lying on her back, holding her belly with all four hooves, and laughing her plot off.
"Yes, I can understand why we might not want to share a room." The unspoken "Or I might attempt murder while she's sleeping for suggesting you as a contractor" drifted silently through the air.
Bwehehehe. I mean i'm a fan of the Equestrians in a field fic because I've helped you edit what you already have.
Thanks for the unexpected plug!
Also, My Little Priestess looks especially fascinating. And I'm very glad to hear that you'll be collecting your comment fics in an easy-to-find place.
4447091 I just have this mental picture of Mayor Mare standing in a grassy field in Kansas, looking out over her voters with a frown.
Pokey: Well, Mayor. Everybody's here and in good shape. Why are you frowning?
Mayor: Because our 'Case 7457: Extradimensional Evacuation' forms are all back in Ponyville in the top file cabinet drawer. It's going to take weeks once we get back to fill them all out.
...only in Ponyville.
4447100 My Little Priestess is a *bear* to write and keep just the right balance of Monty Python in it. Like so:
And Lo, the Goddess of the Sun and Moon did descend into the worshipers of the Early Service and chastise them greatly, saying unto them, "Do you not have families and jobs to go to? Begone! Out of my rose bushes!"
And the multitude did rise up and praise Her Holy Name before She departed unto her Tower of Light, leaving the Sacred Band of Stallions to guard her path, lest any disturb her meditation upon the evening.
And the Night did last a great span of hours, far more than the prescribed schedule written in the Holy Book of Day and Night (Available at all worship institutions for 14.65b plus tax). The Faithful did gather within the Great Southern Lawn and did lament our wickedness to great volume, upon which the demigoddess of Love did come forth to the window and call out, "Forsooth, mine aunt hath departed for Ponyville for the Rising of the Sun. Hold thy weeping and wailing, for it is distasteful to mine ears, and doth drive the Commander of the Sacred Band most wroth."
And the ponies saw that the demigoddess of Love was indeed disheveled, and certain sacred hairs of her mane were damp, as if they had recently been entreated by the Commander of the Sacred Band, and we were sore afraid, for his wrath at having Sacred Congress with the demigoddess of Love interrupted would be great indeed. So a peace settled upon the assembly, and we awaited the Rising with patience as She would have commanded, had She not been elsewhere.
Both Farmer Bruner Has Some Ponies and My Little Priestess sound great.
Pretty sure that last snippet was also from Drifting Down the Lazy River.
I may need to collect such ficlets I've left behind in comment sections, myself. I'm rather proud of one I left on Carabas's Winterheart, in particular.
I need this.
Biologically, yes, but measured in sarcasm, closer to 53. 73 if you weigh in cynicism.
Now I want to read the full adventures of Celestia & Luna, White House Interns.
Dang it Georg, I love all these ideas, and picking a few to recommend you focus on is damnibly difficult.
I'm gonna go with top 3: The Flim Flam story, My Little Worship, and Flurry Heart's Cookies.
Been forever and still waiting for the story about the spoons. Pleeeease!
4447137
I get less of a Monty Python vibe from it, and more of a Terry Pratchett.
Little Lost Apple Scam looks pretty interesting to me.