The Moon Also Rises: A Retrospective

First off, to all those who stuck their head into this world, thanks. It's nice, in its own way, to see one's words reach another.

It's been just a little over four years since I started writing the first chapter of The Moon Also Rises. The project was always intended, first and foremost, as an exercise in writing - and I've certainly learned a huge amount in the process. It feels fairly monumental, to finally be on the other side of it; freeing, in a way, as while I've written plenty of other stories, some even published here under different accounts, this was the project that was always hanging over my head.

The purpose of this blog post is to clarify my thoughts, I think, and to serve as a meta-epilogue, a closing-of-the-door. I want to go through a few things that I thought worked well, a few things that didn't, areas where I improved and areas where I can see improvements waiting to be made. Writing has been a mix of cerebral and instinctive, to me - the entire TMAR manuscript is in first-draft form here (and will always be), and there are plenty of little touches in there that weren't necessarily planned, and plenty of little touches that would find their way into a revised version, given space to think and plan.

For instance, there exists a tonal issue with the story that resulted from the Crossover element, tied together with the somewhat unclear function of magic within the story. MLP, ala Tolkien, uses a "soft" magic system that functions on thematic resonance, whereas Sanderson's cosmere, ala Isaac Asimov or perhaps even Worm, uses a "hard" magic system that functions on "narrative causality". With Coromancy, I had two goals: 1) to tie Equus back into the cosmere as a whole - give it a Shard, or several, a hidden history to draw on (Odium broke Life well before anything shown in TMAR, among other things), and a role in the wider universe, and 2) to retroactively turn MLP into a "hard" magic system. This meant that Coromancy needed to explain Pinkie Sense, needed to explain the Crystal Heart, and so on, and so forth. I remember at the time following the show, trying to fit the events into that system. The strain got too much right around the time Fluttershy redeemed Discord, which broke more than just the magic.

So how does that tie back to tone? "Hard" and "soft" magics both have their place - "hard" systems are good at solving problems, "soft" systems are good at developing theme and tone. I knew from the start I wanted to escalate the stakes towards something approaching that of The Hero of Ages - leaving the entire planet in peril - and have an ending reminiscent of MLP, where they are, completely and totally, able to save the day. To do otherwise would betray the source material, and, I think, render the point of the crossover rather moot.

In meshing the two magic systems together, I feel that I ended up with somewhat of a middle child, halfway in between the two. The best example of this style of magic, part "hard" and part "soft" might be Harry Potter. Similarly, the tone was caught between two conflicting ideals. I don't think this was as successful as it could have been.

On the other hand, I'm fairly happy with the way time travel was used. It's usually better to simply avoid time travel entirely, as it generally breaks the plot in half, but I think I've stumbled on a fairly decent way of sidestepping that problem here. By constricting the plot to a single timeline, and letting the characters break causality, they attain almost unlimited potential to affect the world. But instead of ignoring that, they use it in several ways to solve problems - Pinkie uses it to brute force answers ala The Methods of Rationality's Do not mess with time, Trixie and Rainbow use it to retcon Shining Armour's murder - and therefore every other murder in the story, save perhaps Boundless. By addressing the potential power of time travel and using it, I think I was able to come up with some pretty neat ideas, and it ended up helping to clarify some of the worldbuilding set in the far past.

One of the focus points at the beginning of The Moon Also Rises was pacing. I'd gotten a few comments on how quickly Lethe moved, and while I don't think that necessarily to be a problem with it, I did want to pay more attention to pacing here. TMAR was structurally broken into five parts, centered around the following plot resolutions: 1: Shining Armour murdered; 2: Appleloosa crisis resolved; 3: Hornwall crisis resolved; 4: The Veil dropped, Rainbow and Rarity return from the past; 5: Typhus, The Well, etc.

Yeah, that's not what happened. Just about every plot thread in here was elongated past what I'd planned for it - most noticeable in Applejack and Fluttershy's little sojourn south. All that extra time it took to get them out of there directly stole time away from Pinkie and Daerev in Hornwall, and I think that does translate to the characterisation. Applejack and Fluttershy both get more to do and more time to develop, and it results in Pinkie and Daerev both being fairly weak. A similar problem occurs with Rainbow and Rarity, where the pacing is too slow up front and too fast towards the back of their segment - a lack of discipline early on results in later threads getting cut short.

In terms of character arcs and characterisation, though, I'm not terribly upset. Another point I wanted to hit here was individual voice, and tailoring my writing towards the POV at the time. I think there's a noticeable improvement in that over the course of the story, and a marked improvement in it over Lethe. I'm particularly happy with Trixie's arc, perhaps over all others, because for every moment of explicit development, there are a number of implicit developments, it comes across, to me at the least, as somewhat more subtle than the way it was handled with the others. I've always been prone to simply having characters tell each other what they're going through - and therefore the reader - and so noticing areas where Trixie's behaviour changed without my writing feeling the need to sit the reader down and tell them exactly why is nice. Show versus tell, I suppose. On the negative, I chickened out of Celestia's characterisation, I think, in particular that of her past self. She's just too nice, and her actions don't necessarily follow.

That did engender a comment on the climax of Part Four, where the big group argues with each other over whether or not to kill Boundless and use the Crystal Heart to break the Veil. Thinking about it, I did feel that characters were acting *in character* - although I could have done more to establish that. I think a large part of the confusion stems from being unclear on Coromancy, in particular the emotional instability it engenders with heavy use, and because, in terms of the argument itself, what was in my head simply wasn't on the page.

By this I mean that too much attention was paid to the positive aspects of the Veil. At its core its the old security vs. freedom debate - so I wanted to present security with the strongest argument I could. In doing so, and in hammering that point as much as I did, I ended up not really developing the other side as much as I could have. The Veil was intended to stagnate progress, cull creativity, and force everyone, pony, dragon, and animal, into precisely the same ethical code. Those negatives were just not there anywhere nearly as strongly as they should have been, and that's a real shame, because it renders the whole thrust relatively one dimensional.

I could probably go on in a similar vein for thousands of words, but I'm largely rambling. On the whole, I'm pretty happy with TMAR. It isn't anywhere close to what I had in my head four years ago, but it *does* follow the general outline, and I learnt a tremendous amount from the process of writing it.

A long time ago I announced Sage's Might, a smaller work set in between Lethe and The Moon Also Rises. That was the first of six stories roughly 60k in length each, in the style of The Dresden Files. I have about half of Sage's Might complete, and a rough outline for most of all six, and while I will not be returning to those, if for whatever reason you would like to see what does exist, send this account a PM.

And if you've made it all the way down here, thanks once again.

- Nicroburst