The Buttery Snake Show: Future Plans · 5:21am Jul 15th, 2018

Slowly- -and very carefully- -Buttery Snake crawled out from under his on-stage desk.
“Is it over?” he asked.
“I’m not dead,” replied Unwhole Hole. “So I guess not.”
Buttery Snake slowly climbed into his chair and looked suspiciously at the person sitting in his interview chair. Living in it, in fact, based on how few other guests he got. But that just probably meant that the purpose of the format had diverged from its original intentions.
“Of course it did,” said Unwhole Hole. “I originally intended this to discuss my views on various topics, like the roles of OC’s, structure of Mary Sues, and the nature of the genera, and to answer any questions the audience might have.”
“The audience doesn’t have questions.”
“I know. Which must mean I’m an excellent writer, doesn’t it?”
“No. You’re not. I’d say your moderately competent.”
Unwhole Hole shrugged. “That’s all I’ve ever been. I’ll take it.”
“Yeah. Except at writing these stupid blog posts. I mean, you’ve written like, four? Five? And not published any of them.”
“They have to be written in one sitting, or I get bored.”
“Are you bored now?”
“No, just tired.”
“Because Lemmy-pills are expensive?”
“That, and because that last story took a lot out of me. It nearly killed me several times.”
“A story can’t kill you. You know that.”
Unwhole Hole glared at him. “No. As in I spent so many nights up late working on the last ten chapters, I started falling asleep while driving. I usually would go out three to seven times every day. Once I stopped in the middle of the road. And kept nearly going off it almost every day.”
“But you do that anyway.”
“Not the point.” Unwhole Hole sighed. “It’s these large-scale stories. I wanted to ease up on them because they have low returns. Especially after ‘The Murder of Elrod Jameson’.”
“Oh. I forgot about that. How did it go?”
“Very poorly, as expected. It’s a niche subgenera, but it was a blast to write. But that’s the thing. People don’t want big stories with a serious tone. They want short, funny comedies. That’s where the money is.”
“You don’t get paid.”
“Metaphorical money. I can use it to buy metaphorical food.”
Buttery Snake grimaced. “Don’t. It tastes like soap.”
Unwhole Hole leaned back in his chair. He lifted a glass of water- -tax policy changes had made affording chocolate milk too expensive, and metaphorical dollars could not remedy that.
“At least I figured out how to upload it in pieces. I had hoped that doing so would improve viewership. But I don’t think it does unless you have a very large base. This site is just so huge; several hundred stories update every day, and it’s easy to get lost.”
“Still having trouble breaking into the site?”
Unwhole Hole nodded. “Which isn’t entirely unexpected. I’ve never done anything impressive here.”
“Well, you failed impressively hard with ‘Four Yellow’.”
“Don’t remind me.”
“Too late. You should rewrite that one.”
“No point. I’ll just let sleeping churpos lie.”
“What is a churpo?”
“If you don’t know, you don’t want to know.”
“Oh. Do they sleep?”
“Of course not.”
Buttery Snake paused for a moment, wondering if there was a metaphor in this- -but that thought quickly turned toward whether or not Unwhole Hole would try to eat it.
“So,” he said, changing the subject. “You’re not doing any big stories for a while.”
“I say that every time. It never turns out that way. But the cycle progresses.”
“To?”
“To a comedy I’ve been planning. I hope to start either this week or next week and have it done by the end of August.”
“I see.” Buttery Snake checked his notes. “‘Derpy Deeds (Done Dirt Cheap!)’. What’s the premise?”
“Derpy finds out she’s pregnant with Dinky, and becomes a hit-mare to make ends meet.”
“So it’s pre-Twilight?”
Unwhole Hole nodded. “Yes. That’s a setting that isn’t very common, but I think it works better for this.”
“Anything else?”
“There is a horror I’ve also been thinking of. It will be short and simple, but it’s still in development. I actually considered dropping ‘Hand of Doom’ to write it, which probably would have been better in the long-run.”
“And there’s also…”
Unwhole Hole sighed. “Yeah.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“I don’t know if I am. But I think it’s almost time.”
“For you to leave?”
Unwhole Hole paused for a long time, and then shook his head. “No, not exactly. Do you know why I came to Fimfiction in the first place?”
“Because you love pones?”
“To an extent, yes. But the real reason was I wasn’t great at writing. I had certainly done it; even before I got here, I’d written more novel-length stories than I have pony stories now. But I wasn’t quite getting it. None of them were good enough to publish.”
“You never tried.”
“I know. And I might for some of them, especially ‘192’.”
“Bob’s original story,” noted Buttery Snake. “For those of you that don’t know, she’s a recurring villain in the ‘Mass Core’ series.”
“And comes from an independent non-pony story, which is itself a spinoff of ‘Voqtus’, the last true large-scale non-pony story I wrote. That thing was like five hundred pages long. And no one ever read it. Not a single person on earth.”
“So what’s your plan?”
“I want to write something new. Something based on the knowledge I have gained from Fimfiction. Mainly, that people like interwoven action and comedy, and that cruelty is invariably more compelling than any other effect.”
“It will never get published. You know that, right?”
“But I still have to try. I have a concept worked out and am doing the world building right now, but it takes a lot longer with independent stories than it does fanfictions. I have to generate every character, as well as the world they live in, governments, technology, everything.”
“So it’s science fiction?”
“It’s the only genera I can do.” He sighed. “I want to have it done within two years of now. Who knows. Maybe this will work.”
“How will we know if it’s you?”
“Because I’ll tell you. Or just look for my name.”
“Hole?”
“No. My real name. It’s actually a type of animal, a kind of deer.”
“You’re named after a deer?”
“Essentially yes. Hence the awesome pseudonym.”
“But will you ever be back? To make us Hole again?”
“I might write both at the same time. Who knows. I had an idea for a Cadence origin story that acts as a prequel for ‘Hand of Doom’, to show what the Dark Thirteen were up to back in Sombra’s time. But that one will be big, and I don’t know if I’ll get to it. I really want to reach three million words, though.”
“Can you at least try to? Because if you leave, I ceased to exist.”
Buttery Snake’s eyes became wide and tear-filled.
“Don’t worry,” said Unwhole Hole. “I’ll still be here. For the foreseeable future, at least.”