So what's up with "Tales of the Ponyville Blacksmith"?

First off, not super happy with that name.

Unfortunately, it seems I only had so many good titles in me, and they all got used elsewhere. Oh well.

Alright. Context.

Ever since my friend got me into it in kindergarten, I've loved drawing cartoons and coming up with stories. Over the years since, I've gone through several characters and stories, but my favorite, and the one that's held out the longest, has to be the one involving Parody and his friends. To me, they're a fun set of characters to work with.

I first created them almost nine years ago, and since then, they've gone from silly caricatures, to more fleshed out personalities with a proper story behind them. That story has been written, erased, re-written, and changed a lot over the years, but now it's a story that I actually want to write. My problem is that I'm not super confident in my writing skills. I'm still working on my style, and I have a bunch of problems I have with writing (comma splices, transitioning to and from dialogue).

Enter: fanfiction (or fimfiction)

This gives me an opportunity to write stories with an audience that can provide feedback, let me know what I'm doing right, what I'm doing wrong, how I can improve. etc.

What's stopped me so far is that almost every story I create involves Parody and his friends in some way. I can't help it, they've just become a large part of my life and my creative thought process. The problem with this is that the Parody you see in these stories is from in-between the second to last and last book in his series, which, if my notes are any indication, means you're missing out on five to six books of backstory. Only those in my circle of friends would have any understanding about what's up with these characters, and I didn't know how best to fix that. Writing in-depth character bios didn't seem right (Hey, I wrote a story, but first, here's some required reading), and short character summaries felt like they wouldn't properly convey enough information. I just didn't know what to do.

So I stagnated.

I would have continued to do so if I hadn't thought about one of the side stories from that universe. What made it stand out (aside from being lore dump, shenanigans, lore dump, shenanigans) was that, while heavily involved, Parody wasn't the main character. It was told from the perspective of three characters who weren't his friends, and didn't really like him. As such, the only explanations they got for anything Parody was doing, was what he decided to tell them. And for whatever reason, coming up with scenarios for that story is some of the most fun I've had.

So I decided that would be the best way to do stories here. Launch right into the story with no prior explanation, and as the story progresses, you'll slowly learn about Parody's life, his friends, and the weird world that he's from. That's why none of my stories here are told from Parody's perspective; you would be privy to information that he has, and that would be too much too quickly. Instead of writing paragraph upon paragraph of exposition, I'd rather seed in bits of info in-between general shenanigans. That's why, aside from the initial world set-up in Wake Up Call, you aren't going to get a lot of information right away. Everything will be explained eventually, but I want to do so slowly and organically.

So, that's my plan for this. I already have a bunch planned out, and aside from a few different side stories, everything will go in "Tales of the Ponyville Blacksmith."

I hope that I'll at least somewhat entertain you while I learn.

"Learn by doing!" -Ryan Haywood, 2017