On The Completion of Twilight In Plain Sight · 4:05pm Dec 27th, 2017
So, that was a thing. A short novel, conceived, written, and delivered in the course of a month. Twilight In Plain Sight was a happy accident, and the most successful thing I've done on the site so far. I've been putting my editors through an awful lot, pushing out regular chapters in such close succession, but they came through with useful advice and invaluable feedback at every step along the way.
Of course, most people do this sort of 'short novel written in a month' thing during November, but I've always been a bit off-kilter when it comes to these sort of communal efforts. I doubt I'll ever submit anything to the many organized writing contests that the various FiMFiction groups sponsor over the course of the year. But then, I never thought I'd produce two prompt-inspired stories in close succession as I did with Twilight In Plain Sight and A Requiem for Lost Libraries, so never say never, I suppose?
Twilight was written in the traditional American mystery mold, equally inspired by Sharyn McCrumb's Appalachian Ballads, Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins novels, and Rosmary Edghill's Bast mysteries. But that's just on the traditional side, on the pony side of things I also was definitely thinking about King of Beggar's ongoing Sundowner.
I took the latter in particular as a guide on how to navigate the space between the real world and the fantastical Equestria Girls setting. Fantasy isn't simply a distraction from the tedium or greyness of the world as it is – it is a tool for heightening the moral, the human aspect of our shared reality. There's a certain tendency in literary fiction to suppress, to down-play, to play hide and go seek with meaning. As if ideas, morals, sentiments are somehow more powerful or precious for being buried deeply under a pile of obscurity.
Well, if you're going to hide your light under a basket, and then bury that basket six feet deep, you should at least offer your readers the courtesy of a complementary shovel. I hope I did so here.
For now, I have other stories I had set aside to work on this one – Trixie Lulamoon in particular has been languishing in Limbo for over a month now! But I definitely want to come back to Dusk Shine and Skyla sometime in the new year, and write more of their story. After all, there are more like Blitz and Butterscotch wandering somewhere out there in the anonymous American night.
Was that really all in a month? No wonder I'm knackered.
Congratulations. Don't do it to me again straight away.
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Yup. Started roughing out the idea on the morning of December 1st.
And I think I'll take a couple days to decompress and catch up on some TV.