Rejected! · 12:36am Feb 9th, 2012
Well, I've got some good news and some bad news. The bad news is that Equestria Daily has rejected my submission for Project: Sunflower.
The good news is that I got a ton of valuable feedback as to why that is (which is listed at the bottom of this post, in case anyone wants to see it).
While I don't actually needto get my story on EqD in order to be happy with it, I do want to make it as good as it can possibly be. Which is why I'm taking that feedback to heart, and is also why I'm going to put new chapters of Sunflower on the back burner for the moment. My first step will be to go through the story and follow this advice as best I can by myself, in order to first correct what I can before sending it off to Ponychan or wherever for some tough love.
My current plans are to clarify story elements, tighten dialog and grammar, and get some ponies into the story much sooner. That's what people (including myself) want, after all! Once I've gone as far as I think I can on my own, I'll open things up for pre-readers. And, of course, if anyone who happens to read this post has any advice, I'm completely open to it!
I've already got some ideas, including one I wish I had thought of weeks ago (would have saved me a lot of headaches!) of having Erin actually start out having gone through the conversion process, and filling in the backstory as we go. I need to play with that a bit, though, to see how that works out.
Sunflower isn't going away, by any means. I plan on keeping the same characters, backstory and events... I just want to make it more fun to read. I currently have chapter 5 about 90% done, though I want to finish my re-writes before I release it, since there's a chance that the pacing of the story will have changed significantly and be much farther along by the time we reach chapter 5 in the new revision.
Thank you, as always, for reading!
EqD's prereader's comments:
~~~
[List of Issues]
1) Comma abuse. You have many run-on sentences strung together by commas.
2) Word repetitions.
3) Other punctuation errors.
4) Lots and lots and lots of the humans and you're only alluding to the ponies as of yet. You're showing them in videos and snippets, but we don't get to see and hear them.
5) You're dropping some impressive tech on us all of a sudden. And you've given us no justification for it. 'Turning dogs into cats', etc etc? You can't expect us to accept that at face value. It smacks of Deus ex Machina.
[Suggested Fixes]
You've got a whole lot of promise here, but you need to find a way to incorporate the ponies much sooner. I think it would be beneficial for you to take your story over to Ponychan and have it looked over there. They'll help you find the little fiddly bits to tweak. A bit of polish, and this'll be quite the story!
[Final Verdict]
2.99/5 Not postable yet. Ponychan highly recommended.
~~~
Quite frankly I think EqD could go stuff itself under a bus. Some of their "critiques" I've seen people post smacked less of plot importance or grammar and more of personal preference. I don't mind improvements but some of their advice is outright stupid. One time a fellow was told his chapters were too short. What the hell? They weren't super short, a thousand or so words, but not the monolithic chapters some authors are capable of. Why should that matter?
I think it's not a bad thing, polishing the story before finally getting it on EqD is good for everypony. The critique actually looks valid for the most part.
The stylistic and grammatical issues, if present, are not serious enough to distract from the story (for me anyways, but my English is probably not good enough to notice the finer points). Still it needs to be addressed.
On point 4. I had no problems with a "slow" start involving lots of humans, but I can see why people may find it boring/unrelated/whatever. So feeding the backstory through flashbacks sounds like a really good idea.
I must agree on point 5. Too much unfeasible tech all at once. Project Harmonics itself is perfectly fine and essential for the story (as is magical pony world), but aside from that we have highly unlikely conversion process and almost “magical” alien nanotech. I have no idea how scientific you want your story to be, but it’s always nice to see that author did the research. I may be able to help to justify some of these things (if you need such help of course, the last thing I want is to intervene in your creative process).
For example let’s take the Black Tide. Obviously, it needs to be a global threat, but the reasons why it can’t be stopped are not entirely convincing (from what I’ve read these reasons boil down to absence of means to destroy the Tide). Why swarms of molecular automatons (or groups of such automatons merged/nested on some kind of bacteria) would suddenly become almost immune to various hazardous influences? It's just a fragile matter. If you’ll excuse me I’ll just throw some points on the subject instead of writing a coherent paragraph:
Nanites don’t have to be immune, just more resilient than humans (much more likely).
Nukes are not ineffective. The nuke would, no doubt, destroy a huge amount of nanites, but it would send even more to the upper atmosphere seeding them around the world.
If humanity knew about the source of the Tide in time (minutes/hours/days from the start) then it could have been stopped. Small pockets of the Tide may be contained or even destroyed.
Any method that can successfully purge the nanites will make the territory uninhabitable by humans.
Purging all nanites at current stage is probably no longer in humanity’s power, and if it was it would make planet’s surface uninhabitable.
And so on and on and on.
If you find these kind of details useful in some way and relevant to the story then I’ll be happy to provide more, if not (and there sure are more important aspects of the story for you to work on) then I’m sorry to distract you.
No, no, by all means, keep the feedback coming! Writing happens in a vacuum, but publication is for everyone, and the only way I can improve is via feedback!
I could offer explanations of the pony conversion process, and I could explain the Tide better... however, if I have to do that outside of the story, then I've obviously failed as a writer to implement those elements in the story. So, that is a required rewrite no matter what kind of other feedback I get.
I like your "seeding" idea with nukes, I may just steal that, if you don't mind. I see it as "Hurray! We just blew up and destroyed a bunch of... ohmygodthey'reeverywhere!"
kind of thing 
Things are working out well, though. So far, it looks like chapter 5 will be the new chapter one, with the previous chapters being edited and condensed, and introduced via flashbacks or dialogue. I started plugging away at it last night, and it was amazing to me how much better it flowed. Both the story itself, and my writing. I felt like I was kind of forcing things before, during the first three chapters.
I'll re-work the introduction as well. As I said in my first blog post about this story (published before the story got approved, which was silly of me) I wasn't exactly happy with the intro, but I decided to just write it and get it out there, so I could get on with the story. Going through the first three chapters and the intro... yeah, I see lots of evidence of my being lazy and just wanting to skip to the good parts. I think a big part of the problem with the Tide is that I was recycling elements from an old short story I was writing, and I was really reluctant to give those elements up.
Anyway, thanks again for the feedback and support. I've got me some more writing to do!
11019 The reason that the reviewer said that is because the minimum of chapter length for EqD is 3,000 words.
I love that 2.99/5 -- What you can't up that to a 3?
Sucks to hear mate but practice makes perfect and in the end I guess its good for writers to get feedback on their writing and to see how they can improve. For me I didn't even notice any of those points mentioned and even with them brought up I'm still not sure I see them as being huge problems.
In any case you still got people itching for more chapters so there's that motivation for ya