Random Ramblings CCII · 10:00am Nov 6th, 2017
IN WHICH I ACTUALLY RAMBLE
It's nearly four in the morning here in my little home in the Ozarks. I've been listening to a wide variety of music ranging from K-Billy's Super Sounds of the 70's to acapella covers of Dolly Parton songs to Sakura Gakuin. Hey, when you're a crappy former musician like me, you learn to appreciate almost everything. Speaking of songs…
I've been wanting to do another story about the Dazzlings like A Day In The Park (a title which nobody seemed to get was a reference to The Beatles' "A Day In The Life"). It took me months to write that story even though it's only 1600 words, mostly because I had trouble finding disparate song lyrics that could be woven together for a coherent story. Vince Guaraldi alone, as it turns out, wasn't enough. I consider that story to be my biggest disappointment, not because I think it's bad -- quite the opposite actually -- but because I'm the only one who seems to like it. Maybe it's because I'm in my 30s and grew up listening to my parents' music, explicitly rejecting most of what was popular during my formative years and then rejected commercial radio in favour of NPR (because the commercials got too annoying), so my musical tastes are really skewed.
I've listened to a lot more stuff since this time last year, bought a few CD's (yes I prefer physical media if I can get it). So I probably could do another all-lyrics story. The question is whether I should.
After all, I still haven't finished a capital offense yet, though I'm close. I made more headway on it last night. More worrisome is that I haven't touched that secret historical adventure story in over a month -- still better than the year-plus I left it sitting before spending most of Summer working on it, taking it from 2.5k to >20k. Since I'm nearly finished with ACO, I guess I should move on to that.
I haven't had time to get back to the library to upload stuff to my part of the Cloud yet. Three completed Recovery Arc stories (one a non-canon epilogue) plus my "novelization" of Anon-A-Miss, which I'm debating whether or not I should attempt to post here, because I do alter the plot to fill some holes the original comic had and add new dialogue in several places, but a lot of Anderson's original words are still there. I don't know if trying to upload it would get me banned or not since it skirts the "Don't Upload Work That's Not Yours" rule. If I am able to get it up, then that would be a nice lead-in to the Apple Bloom story that immediately follows it, of which I have the first three chapters written but have stopped to concentrate on other things.
I DON'T MULTITASK. At least, I admit I suck at it. That's why having so many stories on my plate drives me crazy. Sure, I wrote the last two "Recovery" stories at the same time, but that's because I knew how I wanted the Arc to end, yet I suck at penultimate chapters.
Tempting fate here -- it would really suck if something happened to me before The Rejected and Recovery were to at least be shared with someone. Because then the Arc would officially end with Rarity murdering Sunset in cold blood in a non-canon Halloween story (which I had a blast writing, by the way). I always intended the Recovery Arc to end on a hopeful note from the moment I realized it would BE an "arc".
Speaking of which, I had a reader come and shit on my latest Burritoverse story. I wouldn't have a problem with that (more than usual anyway), if he hadn't flat-out admitted he didn't read it before complaining about it. He said he read "Sunset" and "Sonata" and then stopped, telling me "Two stories was too many". Even Moth -- who recently decided to follow me, the act of which has left me in a state of abject terror of screwing up -- liked "Sonata" (another one I enjoyed writing), though he called "Aria" weak due to my use of a pastiche of Donald Trump. Like almost every other bit of criticism Moth has given me over the past two years, he's right. I won't apologize for writing it though, because I always intended to have Aria kill someone in that story -- Trump just happened to be the juiciest target at the time. I could have killed off Bill Clinton or some talk radio blowhard, but I didn't. Besides, introducing Orangeglow to my universes allowed me to write experimental stories like Comma Comma and the upcoming ACO, as well as add some continuity to the Burritoverse.
Anyway, the criticism hurt because it wasn't specific. He was complaining about my story's existence sight-unseen. How would he even know the series is a mess if he only read the first two, which are the exact same story from different points of view? I've written six Burritoverse fics (plus ADITP) in two and a half years. That's NOT exactly cranking them out on an assembly line. Sure, some entries are weaker than others, and you may disagree with me on which those are. I write them when I want to, because I want to. They're meant to be sort of experimental, allowing me to get into a character's head. But like I said before, I know when to hang it up, and I know better than anyone that the formula is stale. That's why I had to scrap the original version of "Octavia" and should have rewritten "Maud", but I kept "Maud" as-is because the ambiguity of Boulder attacking a sexual harasser was just too amusing to not keep -- and yes, I finished "Maud" months before the Weinstein news came out. Didn't sit on it nearly as long as I sat on Highs & Lows though. I'll talk more about "Octavia" next time because I will need outside help on it.
So this is what I do when I'm bored and lonely in the middle of the night. Just sit and write for an hour nonstop on my blogspace on a site about My Little Pony Fanfiction. What is my life.
I love all y'all regardless. If you read all this way... my condolences.
Peace out!
May I suggest a response that approximately matches such a complaint's level of creativity and effort?
Also, while your musical tastes are far more diverse than my own, I encourage you to do your thing there. Not everybody is going to get all the references all the time, but you know they're there!