OPERATION WESTHORSE · 5:10am Apr 19th, 2017
Operation Westhorse: Status - COMPLETE
Wow.
We did it.
So, on April 3rd, I came up with a silly idea. A STUPID idea. An idea to make a collaboration fic for ShortSkirts&Explosions for his birthday.
I concieved of a story idea, partly inspired by the unpublished Bon^12 story that Skirts has never written. It's a cute idea, and a weird idea, but I stole the soul of what made it fun: A pony ends up in Disney World with a popular fimfic personality and ends up having a fun conversation with them about life and stuff. There's lots of other parts to Bon^12 that wasn't used, but I took that idea and made it an end point.
The start point? Why, Austraeoh, of course. The epic story of Rainbow Dash flying East, doing cool shit.
So, thus was born Operation Westhorse. A surprise collaboration story that grew far beyond my expectations, bringing in a few dozen writers, friends, and fans of our Marsupial Overlord, Skirts. For some people, writing pony fic is not new. For some people, this chapter was their first foray into writing MLP Fanfiction. For some, this was their first time writing ANYTHING fiction, beyond school stuff.
This project is immensely satisfying, because it got people writing for something good. We all wanted to express a little piece of this journey to Skirts, just like he's been doing for us for the last FIVE years as Imploding Colon, the nom-de-plume of choice for Austraeoh, and as Blue Harvest, the writer behind Appledashery. He's done innumerable other stories and written so much for us, too, but those are big ones. They constitute a piece of his day, every day, that is delivered to us all in the form of writing that we enjoy.
That's pretty special.
So, in honor of that, we all wrote chapters inspired by Austraeoh. These chapters were written SIMULTANEOUSLY. Nobody had the foresight of what came before, or what was to come after, so everybody was writing in a vacuum. The only thing that linked each story together was the rule: Rainbow Dash Always Flies West. Every chapter ends with that, some even START with it, but the pieces fell into place.
While people wrote, I complied a map, which you can see above this post. All of the chapters are organized by distance West from the starting point, with the exception of the very last chapter, "Castle", because Rainbow Dash... well, you'll see. Go read it, if you haven't.
I want to stress something. Even though a lot of people are giving me credit for this whole thing, this story is well beyond "my baby". This belongs to everyone who contributed, chatted, encouraged, or worked hard on a chapter. A few people didn't finish in time, sadly, but I didn't want to keep extending out the deadline, so some chapters will never see the light of day... but that's okay, because even if a chapter didn't make it in, those people contributed to the excitement and spirit of the project that helped EVERYBODY involved write these excellent chapters.
No chapter is the same.
I love that this story shows a massive range of styles, ideas, genres. It goes all over the place, but for something like this, where every chapter was written from the heart, for a mutual friend of all of us, it doesn't matter. All that matters is that we made a journey, together. We built a story, together.
That's pretty fucking cool.
So, thank you, to everyone that participated in Operation Westhorse.
You guys are the best.
yay
Huzzah!
Well, good on you all who did this!
Makes me wish I was in on this. Ah well, perhaps next time
Once again, my reclusive tendencies bite me in the ass.
Oh well. This looks really cool.
That was an excellent read and the perfect gift one could give to Skirts.
Thank you all for coming together to write that story for all of us.
I might have little problem typing up a couple k of comment to certain things, but try and come up with a story? Ive got a far greater chance of making a workable chocolate teapot by adding forced water cooled refrigeration to it 8(
TL:DR. Dont ask me how I do it because I can only do it when I dont know what Im doing.
4503609 Would have loved to have you along, Booster. You should join the Noble Jury Discord that Skirts set up. PM me if you're interested. If you're already there, then I've just somehow missed you on there!
A fine hurrah as we wait for the continuation of the East Horse. A story worthy of a drink.