Random Ramblings CLIX · 8:00am Mar 28th, 2017
IN WHICH WHAT IS SLEEP
I've had this tendency the past few days to eat and then pass out. I like to think it's from The Itis, as I did eat a burrito for supper from the burrito place that served as the inspiration for the Burritoverse. I finally spent enough to earn a nearly-free meal, a credit I should redeem by the end of the week, as their loyalty deal gets stingier starting Saturday. This on top of losing the wonderfully cheap Daily Special during the last Bikes Blues & Barbecue – a windfall for hotels and Confederate T-shirt vendors but hell for locals. But I'll bitch about that more in September when it happens.
Slowly but surely I am working on my next story. I've finally reached the part where I actually have to be a writer and describe things and that's going to be hard because I suck. Even a paragraph is better than no progress at all, I suppose. But what constitutes a paragraph? According to some on here, my paragraphs break the "four-sentences" rule. I tend to prefer my own paragraphs be shorter than that if the action demands it. A short paragraph, especially amidst a bunch of longer ones, has more of an impact. Going through my story, most non-dialogue paragraphs tend to be two or three sentences, albeit often longer ones with digressions and commas and em-dashes. I guess that's because I don't like huge blocks of text unless there's a good reason, like with Rarity's apology rant in RVSS@4 — FUN FACT, that rant was originally written as one long run-on sentence. I changed it because (1) it came off as too "Pinkie", and (2) I couldn't narrate the thing in one breath, and I sometimes like to read my lines aloud as I work on them.
But even eyeballing things can show you stuff. Like, I'm really f-ing repetitive. Every time I've gone back to look at my in-progress story, I've had to change a line because I worded it exactly like a previous paragraph. Whatever writing mojo I had back in 2015 and 2016 is surely gone now. That's why once I'm finished with this latest story, I'm going to attempt to Gdoc it (ancient laptop = incompatibility) and perhaps politely request one of my two regular readers take a look at it and confirm whether or not it sucks.
Incidentally, thanks to Estee's shout-out for Comma Comma, I managed to hit 150 followers! That's a thing I certainly hoped for but never expected to happen. It's only marginally regrettable that it happened well after my 150th blogpost, so I couldn't coordinate them like I did with Post No.100. Still, #159 is close enough. It's getting harder and harder to joke about how few readers I get… though the lack of love for Rarity Pays For Burritos and A Day In The Park still stings. It makes me think the only thing I'm good for is writing stories about Sunset Shimmer going through mental trauma.
One of my regulars has gotten onto me for being too "self-inserty" with Sunset. That's a valid complaint and I'll own it. Sunny-sun is sort of my character muse because I identify so strongly with her. I do insert little details that mirror my own life and experiences. Some writing teachers will say "Write what you know." Actual authors (especially if they are British) say a true writer can write what they don't know yet make it engaging and believable anyway. I obviously don't know what it's like to have been a teenage girl, or a twenty-something woman pretending to be a teenage girl, or a horse, or in fact a drunk. My happy pills preclude me from imbibing in the demon liquor. It sucks.
Anyway, sorry this was even ramblier than normal. I just woke up and it's 3a.m. CDT and I wanna get back to sleep. So I'll go do that now. Peace out!
I'm guilty of going into rapid-fire one-line paragraph mode when I get excited. Sometimes dat editing process is downright embarrassing, because people see things that are legitimately not ideal that are hard to fix without massive restructuring. Like when I was comma-hunting and semicolon-hunting in Heavy Rock, and I managed to purge a lot of the semicolons but eventually gave up on the commas. I don't know where this is really going anymore but the point is that a story can work even if you're inconsistent (or too consistent in a weird direction) about things like paragraph length. (Though in my case things usually descend into talking heads fast enough to allow for my deviant short-paragraph ways.)
And I know well the scourge of the under-viewed story.
Though I'd submit that both Rarity Pays For Burritos and A Day In The Park are absolute barn-burners compared to the last two I dropped. I'd urge you not to get too caught up in wanting the rush of a big response and getting bummed when it doesn't happen though... because that rush is a heck of a thing, right? But it's not always gonna happen. There are a million possible reasons why a perfectly worthy story might get passed over. It sucks but it doesn't mean that the story sucks or that you suck. And hopefully if the story means something to you and the people it does bring in, then it was still worth doing in the first place. And there's always another story to be written, and each one is a new chance.
I don't know the magic formula. I do try to observe what people who routinely knock it out of the park do, but I haven't figured it out yet.
4494589 - I feel so awful about the lack of reception to your last two stories (I haven't had the chance to read the Vinyl×Starswirl one yet, but I did read the writeoff version and liked it). I like to believe I tried my best to steer readers to Heavy Rock – I loved the initial draft. I enjoyed helping you tweak it. But you're right; sometimes it just doesn't happen. Sometimes a story is a slow-burn – I still get the occasional fave on some of my "Recovery" stories even if I wrote them months or years ago. I hope your latest works eventually get the respect they deserve.
The talking heads thing is something I was very guilty of when I began doing pure prose, because I started out as a cartoonist. Proper narration was something I had to get used to, and it took years. Give me the chance, and I will have a full page or more that's just two characters talking. Problem is, that gets boring quickly without visuals.
As long as I live, I will never understand why or how Highs & Lows gained such a huge response, because it's really not a good story on a pure technical level due to its being completely unedited and Sunset's character is all over the place, which was kind of intentional – Moth told me flat-out he hated it (comparing it unfavorably to the Burrito fics, though he later also disliked "Aria") and explained why… and I found some of his criticism to be valid. Ever since then, I've tried much harder to keep characters more grounded, and made more use of the "AU" tag.
If there's a set formula for attracting readers, I don't know what it is either.
I'm in kind of a block right now with my latest stories, which happens sometimes. I know where I want to go but not exactly how to get there. Maybe it's because I always get depressed in April? I dunno.
4494659 Seasonal depression can be a real thing. It doesn't happen to me but I know someone who always has a couple rough months during the year because of some past bad stuff that went down. It's gotten to the point where I just put it in my calendar as an annual recurring thing because I always forget even though it happens every single year.
I still remember reading Highs & Lows for the first time and thinking it was something new and different; I mean, it's such an unusual take on Sunset, but it works. And it made me want to read more, which obviously happened when a whole series popped up around it.
Ah, and you've been great about Heavy Rock.
I don't know why the Vinyl X Star Swirl one didn't take off readers-wise. It's got a fantastic votes-per-reader count; it just failed to get people in the door, despite its success in the Writeoff and (IMO) really sweet art that VanillaGhosties did for it. If I had to speculate, I'd guess it's just asking too much of the audience to take a leap of faith for a romance-mystery involving such an egregiously cracky pairing; the mystery prevents me from coming out and laying down the full premise from the get-go, so I'm basically asking people to trust me on the rest of it. Also, I think its performance in the Writeoff probably got a boost from its bald-faced coattail-riding on Horizon's Writeoff-winning Time Enough For Love, which people still remember and talk about and want to see finished a good year and a half after its initial publication; that's a bunch of built-in context that just doesn't exist for a non-Writeoff audience.
But what can ya do? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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It's a bit ironic that series – the entire "Recovery Arc" – was never planned. I thought about doing a follow-up shortly after due to the amazing reception H&L got, but the combination of Moth's harsh criticism (on Christmas morning, which is why it affected me so badly) and uncertainty about how I wanted to go about it made me shift to working on my annual Mayor Mare fic and Burritoverse stuff instead. Eventually, real-life issues — I did not have a good 2016 — caused me to basically shut down, and I poured all of that into Lows & Highs. I struggled to write that story; I agonized over individual words because I was so determined to get it right. Given its reception, I like to believe I succeeded. After that, I knew I wanted to get Sunset to a more stable place, since readers had become genuinely invested in what happened to her. And so had I. Cue me pumping out the rest of the "Recovery Arc" while struggling to finish A Day In The Park.
Won't lie; I have a difficult time narrating L&H aloud without choking up. It's very raw.
(I'd post audio of me reading my own work, but who wants to hear "Redneck Garfield"?)
Night Of Faded Sun crystallized when I learned my ex-GF found herself a new beau, though its existence was planned before that – the annual Mayor Mare story had to come first.
Also, my getting depressed in the Spring might actually be latent PTSD due to years of fretting about school and grades; I still have trouble checking my own mailbox due to years of my mom inevitably finding a report card (or 5-week report) with bad grades and chewing me out. Note that I live alone and have had my degree for nearly 5 years.