"The Water's At Your Neck, There's Lightning In Your Teeth"; Or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Write Ponies Again · 7:34pm Oct 7th, 2018
I promised a longer blog post, and I am here to deliver.
So!
For those of you who are interested (and if you're still reading this, I'm assuming you are), my latest story is the culmination of a pretty long creative process, and one that I'm still a little shocked I pulled off. Spoilers ahead, if you haven't read it.
First of all, even the idea of writing something again after three years was nerve-wracking as all hell. It's easy to scoff, and say it's just fanfiction on a my little pony site; but this is not just my first piece of pony fic in three years, it's my first piece of creative writing at all in three years. Getting back on that train was a bit of a leap for me. Still, I'm glad I did it.
I'd known since I first saw the contest, off of Darkstarling's utterly excellent (and first) entry Royal Peanut Butter, that the Dear Love: A Beautiful Discord contest was going to be how I returned to writing, one way or another. Even if I had not finished my entry at the eleventh hour (quite literally), something would have popped up a couple of days later, just not in time for the contest.
This was in large part due to two factors. First, that romance was a genre that I absolutely consider my weakest, and so a real challenge, something I could sink my teeth into. Second, and more importantly, was that I'd come up with no less than seven ideas in about 2 days.
Yeah. Seven.
And I don't mean rough ideas either. Two of them were either scrapped or combined into others, but I now have four solid story plans and one actual story inspired by this contest - and every single one (yes, including this fic) has at least one planned out sequel.
And up to about 3-4 days ago, I still wasn't sure which one was going to end up in the contest.
I had a story about Sunset Shimmer that I really liked, but depended on reformed Sunset as a character, so that was out. And while my Discolight fic would have fit the contest perfectly, I wasn't really feeling writing it at the time.
Which left a slightly comedic Chrylight story with a bit of a twist, a Starlight Glimmer x Celestia story that I am really excited for, and this one. Honestly, it felt like the weakest idea to me. Even up to Friday, I was wondering if I should write one of the other two. But somehow this one just seemed to flow in a way that the other two, despite my excitement for them, were not. So despite the fact that I was hemming and hawing about actually going through with it, and had barely written 1000 words by the time Saturday morning rolled round, I somehow managed to write something that I'm reasonably proud of.
It started, as my writing tends to do, with a song. TV On The Radio are one of my all-time favourite bands, and this is far from the first MLP idea scattered around various documents to be inspired by them; it's just the first one to be actually written. Which on the surface feels strange, as Staring At The Sun is far from their best in my opinion.
Don't get me wrong. It's a great song - but it's not even the best song on the (excellent) album, Return To Cookie Mountain (that honour goes to Blues From Down Here tied with Hours in my mind). But what it does have in boatloads is atmosphere. Or to be a little more meme-y about it, A E S T H E T I C.
Every note, every little buzzing noise in this song serves to create an ethereal, otherworldly and dangerous feeling, which when combined with the menacingly romantic lyrics, makes it an utterly perfect backdrop and inspiration for what I was trying to write. It's to the point that whenever I was having trouble getting back into the mood of the story, I literally just had to start singing the song to myself and I could keep writing. Lyrically, in particular, I found that the idea of being so transfixed and caught up in a relationship that you barely realise that "the water's at your neck" carried over strongly into the narrative.
The story was originally intended to be one single chapter, but as I was writing I quickly realised that it made far more sense to split it up into smaller acts, the major events of the story. That ended up being a major part of how I wrote it too. Instead of one seamless narrative, it ended up more like a series of intense, connected scenes, snapshots of progression in the relationship between these two characters.
At it's core, this isn't actually a story about Daybreaker. She's an important part of it to be sure: the impetus for all of the major events. But it's Luna's tale, really. The story of how she finds her sister's dark impulses, and how she wrestles with the guilt they(/she) bring(s) up in her. Whether she succeeds at conquering her own more metaphorical demons is, in the end, up to the reader. She may claim that Daybreaker "knows why she has come" in her final chronological appearance, but we definitely don't.
In a way my goal with this story was to explore in part how even the most unhealthy relationships are not devoid of joy - Luna and Daybreaker are far from a healthy pairing, and I did my best not to let that be lost, but I also wanted to convey that despite what an awful idea this was, it didn't only cause pain. I don't know how well I succeeded - that's for you to decide.
I'm sure I've missed stuff here - if you are curious about anything else (further questions about this story, about any of the other ideas I mentioned), feel free to ask me down in the comments below, and I'll get back to you ASAP.
As a parting gift - I mentioned earlier in the blog that each idea for this contest had at least one sequel planned. I don't know when I'll get around to it, but for now, here's a little teaser:
Always a trip getting back in the saddle after so long without..
4950185
That it is! Definitely worth it though.