Land of Enchantment in Retrospect · 10:07pm Sep 10th, 2018
So, Sunset Shimmer in the Land of Enchantment. The first story I've really felt the need to do a retrospective on. I think I've definitely learned a lot about my writing, and it was immensely frustrating. I really had to beat my head against the wall to make this come out, and I'm still not quite happy with it. On the other hand, it also has some of my favorite things I've done.
The first thing that I learned while writing this is that I hate hate HATE word count limits. It's a consequence of both how I write and especially how I do world building. I love to take ideas, combine and expand on them, and use that as a framework to build the story.
That's great for telling a long rambling tale. For a short story? Not so much.
In this particular case, I was looking for a plot to parallel the shipping and ended up on the high concept of "Human Sunset Shimmer Invades". That rapidly became 'but where was she?' and 'Queen Arachnea and Spaceman Spiff are the Bomb' and led to a chain of 'Oh, UFOs! New Mexicolt! Perfect state motto'... and questions about what the Humane Seven were doing there and...
The point is that, when working with a word limit. I need to contain my enthusiasm and keep to a very small point. Because, of course, I wound up with several intertwined story ideas that simply take way too much space for a contest.
Another issue came from my characters. See, I wanted the plot to parallel the emotional arc. If I'd had my way, the emotional climax would have come at the same time as the action one. But unfortunately, Sunset Shimmer wouldn't cooperate. She was insisting on talking things out with everyone at the earliest opportunity, like a sensible person. It's almost like she's learned something about friendship. And I couldn't come up with excuses to keep it from happening. I'm not exactly complaining. The interactions came out much better than what I originally had planned. There was originally a REALLY BAD subplot with Rarity flirting with a (pretending to be friendly) Arachnea in a misguided attempt to solve things without causing problems for anyone else. I'm very glad I dropped that, but it did cause a problem where all the emotional interactions were front-loaded and the alien plot was rushed. Rushed enough that I had to drop my favorite ideas for how to parallel them.
Lessons learned: Don't try to tell two stories at once if you can't make the timing work. If you really must, start the action plot and the emotional plot at the same time. We'll see how I do with that.
Basically the upshot is that there were a ton of things that I really wanted to include but ran out of time for, with the result that I really like the beginning and middle but the end was too short and needed more foreshadowing to do properly. It's probably getting a director's cut once the contest is over.
Some general What Might Have Beens:
Significantly more red herrings that the 'aliens' were led by Starlight Glimmer.
Arachnea had a 'pet' 'mountain lion' named Diogenes, who ended up getting a crush on Fluttershy. "What happened to the mandibles of death you sissy furball?" "I was beguiled by her feminine charms! Yow! Go soak your head!"
Generally paralleling Human-Sunset to Calvin, especially when she inevitably gets high on magic and grows ten feet tall. Applejack: See I told y'all, giant women.
A significantly longer time exploring the village, with the Podlings being obviously odd but not completely blatent
Time to get to know Human-Sunset with her pretending to be friendly, until they find the pods in the basement and Human-Sunset catches them snooping
Even if it got a bit squished and could have been better, it was still quite a concept and ended up still enjoyable. :D