1000 Upvote Milestone: Rarity Snuggles Everypony (Whether They Like It Or Not). · 6:41am Jun 17th, 2017
I didn't really expect this story to hit the 1000 upvote milestone, but I'm staring at 1000 upvotes now. That's pretty cool.
I want to talk about this story, and how it changed how I write things and why I write things.
Rarity Snuggles Everypony was, as per usual, an idea born out of a silly conversation with ShortSkirts&Explosions. We were joking about snuggling ponies way back in 2014, and it turned into a fic idea, and that fic stands as my second-highest rated, and MOST read story to date. And now we're staring down that milestone of 1000 upvotes. It's pretty cool that it finally got here. It's pretty surprising that I actually finished this story at all, really.
Rarity Snuggles Everypony was a huge success. You could almost call it my 'first' huge success. I'd had other stories hit the feature box, certainly, and lots of great reactions and reviews and even a reading, but this story blew up really hard. I learned a lot about how to advertise a story, how to bring up cool ideas, how to make readers interested. Ponies being cute certainly help, but it was a good experience.
Rarity Snuggles Everypony also became a metaphorical albatross around my neck. I had some difficult times and some really significant life events happen that kept me really busy, and whenever I'd go back to look at FimFiction, there was Rarity Snuggles Everypony, a project that honestly should have taken three months to finish, and it was unfinished. I would look at this story and feel like a failure to my readers. I had a really excellent group of people surrounding my work, and they just slowly slipped away as months turned to literal years waiting for this story to finish. It was a really awful feeling. I felt guilty every time I logged into the site and didn't even touch this story, and that just made me want to work on it even less. There's only a few places I can be in my head in order to produce good writing, and guilt isn't one of them.
This was the story that made me understand why ShortSkirts never went back to finish End of Ponies, and eventually buried it.
Finishing this story, honestly, was less of a work of love on my part and more of an attempt to kill the one thing holding me back from starting fresh. Casting off the albatross, if you will. Getting to do new things. I started a little daily fic, but in and among that, I worked hard on finishing Rarity Snuggles Everypony, and, by God, I finished the damn thing.
I can't really claim that the end is perfect or that it's even incredibly good. The good stuff was the earlier stuff, for sure. Finishing this, however, taught me that I can push through that doubt and guilt and get something done, despite misgivings or feelings of wanting to cancel. I can't imagine feeling that way with a dozen chapters or more to finish. I would have canceled it if it'd been anywhere other than a few chapters from the finish line. But, I was SO CLOSE. It was at the finish line, and I stalled out for years on this story.
Getting it done was a liberating experience, and being able to feel decent about logging into fimfiction without the specter of this story changed everything about how I feel about writing here.
I learned how important it is to finish projects before they get stale. I get why people push hard and write massive stories all in one go. Keeping at something, even a little bit every day, makes a difference. I do a little bit of work on SOMETHING every day, here. It helps me feel like I'm pushing forward, even if the progress is slow.
I feel like I've been in a sort of renaissance, recently. Breaking 500 followers, getting 1000 likes on a story, getting several stories into the feature box in a row? It's been such a cool experience, and I only have you guys and your support and comments to thank for this accomplishment.
So, here's to 1000 upvotes. I didn't deserve them, not on this story, but we're here, and it feels pretty incredible.
Thank you all!
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Long live the Propaissance
I can certainly understand that feeling of guilt, it's what helped lead up to the general loss of my own on-demand creativity. Leaving me stuck with this once-in-a-blue-moon hope that I can get something interesting done for whatever projects I'm doing for people. To that end I am very happy that you managed to not let it drag you down too far, that you managed to soldier on before you let it get you and run off. The story was also quite cute, so there's that!
Congratulations!
I know my own stories have been lying abandoned for yonks, and I don't even know how to finish one of them.
Maybe it would be best just canning it, and if I ever do try to get anything more out again, then I should make sure I definitely know where the story is going, at least, before publishing...
Congrats, Prop!
It was really a great story, and I loved every minute of it. I'm glad you were able to finish it. I know how it feels to have a story sitting untouched and seeing it slowly get forgotten. Very Loopy was like that for a while. I ran into creative trouble and just couldn't continue it, and it felt awful every time I looked at it, or saw someone add it to their favourite when I knew I wasn't working on it.
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*boops Skirts*
Wooop, woop, woop, woop! *zoidbergs away*