The Q&A Style Blog Post For "The First Real Mother's Day"

I'm doing this Q & A in the style of stories put in the Royal Canterlot Library, so if you want to skip to story specific questions, go past the page break!

Give us the standard biography.

A twenty four year old woman and mom who is basically a shut in and spends most of her days writing on her laptop to do fanfiction and Role-play online. I love writing, watching Netflix, Apple Products, and being a mom. And most days I can do all of it at once, so it's pretty great.

How did you come up with your handle/penname?

Gosh this was like five years ago so I don't remember too much, but I love the words fabulous and diva, and Rarity was my favorite pony at the time.

Who's your favorite pony?

Shining Armor is my current favorite. Rainbow Dash has always been the steady favorite but occasionally someone else can steal the spotlight. There’s something to be said for a man who isn’t afraid of his emotions and is a good father. I really respect that.

What's your favorite episode?

This is tough. If I had to pick one, I think it would be Parental Glideance. I love episodes that elaborate on the backstories of characters, and since Rainbow Dash is usually my favorite, this one obviously holds a special place in my heart. But this was such an exceptional episode to me because it really hit home for me as a parent- trying to be endlessly supportive of your child, clinging to the past (as was detailed by the endless RD memorabilia Windy and Bow had), trying to build them into confident people. And how much we can be blinded to the feelings of our kids because we're trying to do that. Another honorable mention for this would be The Parent Map for many of those same reasons. But over all, it has to be Parental Glideance.

What do you get from the show?

Joy and most of the time, inspiration for stories. A lot of the show influenced my love story with my husband, so I guess I got him out of it too, even though he introduced me to it!

What do you want from life?

That's a question I can't really answer too well. The one I can answer would be, "What do you hope to have at the end of your life?" And that one is simple. All I want at the end of my days is a loving family, good friends, and to make an impact.

Why do you write?

Because once the inspiration strikes I can't not put it down. But in all seriousness I've been writing since I was twelve in the fanfiction circuit. It's always been an emotional release for me. It's also very therapeutic. But the biggest reason why I write is to give different perspectives. If I can make someone think of something in a new way, or show them something they didn't know and are now interested in, I feel like I've made a difference. If I can touch someone's heart with my words, I know I've done my job as an author.

What advice do you have for the authors out there?

Write what's in your heart and what you're passionate about, even if others don't like it. At the end of the day, you have to live with yourself, and not the reviewers who are commenting on stories. If you can say that you wrote something you are proud of, and that you wanted to make possible, that's what matters in the end. Who cares what other people think? If you're proud of it, that's what matters.

---

What inspired you to write "The First Real Mother’s Day"?

So, my friend Pip and I were doing an RP with Twilight Velvet and Shining Armor. And as they’re talking, I’m inside of Velvet’s head, and she’s thinking about how quickly he’s grown up and how there isn’t enough time to have with him. And it got me thinking about how much I feel that with my own daughter, and how much my Mom must have felt that way with me. It got me thinking about the song “Mother” by Kacey Musgraves- and the story behind that where she was looking at her hands while on a trip and realized that she had her mother’s hands and that it was a generational thing. So I thought about how Shining would feel toward his mother now that he knows what she’s been feeling all that time. And I thought of all the times my mom had sacrificed for me and how I have sacrificed for my daughter, and this poured out.

Why do Shining and not Twilight in the further future?

I’m always down for an incredible Mother Daughter Fic. I mean, it’s like the air I breathe, and if you guys have read pretty much any of my other fics, you can see it. But for me, In choosing Shining, there was something really special there. We saw in "Once Upon A Zeppelin" that Velvet loves taking risks, and I think Shining got that from her, whereas Twilight took after Night Light more. And more than that, He was her first baby. He was the one who made her a mother in the first place, and although I absolutely adore Twilight, I do think Shining gets the shaft a little because he's not acknowledged enough as far as bonding fics with either of his parents go. I get it, he's not the star of the series, but he's important too, and I wanted to touch on that.

Why not do Cadence and Flurry instead of Shining and Velvet?

Simple: Cadence's only relatives are Celestia and Luna, and while they are amazing aunts, they aren't her mothers. They're the closest she's likely ever had, granted, but there's something I find particularly magical about carrying this soul inside of you for all these months, just waiting to meet them and wondering what they'd be like, and then suddenly they're here, and you fall in love with them. You watch them grow up and you see them start families of their own and it's like getting to see a bit of yourself in them. Maybe it's because my daughter is adopted and I didn't have that with her, that I find it so important to write about.

Where did the idea of Shining being born Premature come from?

So, for those of you who don't know, I have paranoid Schizophrenia. And a lot of times, the ponies or people I write about can internalize and become voices in my head, and have thoughts of their own. As Velvet was speaking to me about her feelings about hearing her son finally understand what she went through, I saw this image in my mind of Shining in an incubator, with tubes coming out of him, and Velvet looking on sadly. It wasn't my idea at all- It was her speaking through me. She talked about how she knew how strong he would become because of how hard he fought to survive, and it really resonated with me. She told her story on her terms. The only part that was my idea was how far premature he was so that whatever developmental delays he had would make sense.

In the story, Velvet tells Shining that she told him as a little boy that someday he'd see how smart she was. And later, she says, "The price of you understanding how I felt came at the expense of your own fear". What did you mean by that?

So like I said in the Author's Note, I believe we don't understand all the shit we put our parents through until we have kids. Parenting opens up a third eye for all of us, with more love than we can imagine, but also more newfound fear than we have ever had. The price of Shining understanding how Velvet felt all those years only came because now he had the same fear as her. It's bittersweet in that way.

Time is a big theme in the story. What made that so important?

I'm going to put a quote in here from my previous works to start with: "The one enemy to all mothers, however old or young, was time. Too much of it, too little of it, and the inability to stop it. So many times, they wish they could rewind it, or freeze a moment of it and live in it forever, or even fast forward it when their child was going through a difficult stage. But the passage of time was a source of fear for every mother, because although they knew change in time was inevitable, the knowledge of it’s passing, of their children growing up and not needing them anymore, was a source of constant anxiety and pressure. The need to make every moment perfect, to remember every little thing because they knew someday all they would have would be their memories, was so pressing that many times they felt as though they might break."

Every parent, no matter how new or old, has felt the presence of time. It's a heavy hand atop us all. We worry so much about not making the most of our time with our children, that we aren't doing enough for them, that we've somehow failed by not giving them enough of our time or even too much of it in some cases. But we always feel as though there isn't enough of it, in any case. For Shining to feel that pressure now, and to know how his mother felt, it opened up a whole new world to him. I think he needed to understand just how much fear his mother went through raising him in order to understand her better, and to understand himself, too.

Velvet tells a lot of stories about Shining as a baby and toddler in this story. Where did the inspiration for those come from?

You know, The one about hiding food in his nursery was completely hers. But as for the one about the cruise she took him on, I drew some inspiration from those commercials for the Disney Cruise Lines. Looking at those awe-inspired kids looking up at or hugging Mickey or Minnie Mouse, I thought "Wow, how much of an impact could that have on someone later on down the road?" And so I found out through Velvet, who took that story and made it her own. There's a quote from one of my favorite shows, The Haunting Of Hill House, that describes Velvet's mindset with this. "When we die, we turn into stories, and every time someone tells one of those stories, it's like we're still here, for them. We're all stories in the end." And at the end of Shining's childhood, that's all she had was stories, and she wanted to tell them to keep that piece of him there with her.

Velvet gives her son the advice to tell stories like the ones she told him to his own daughter. Where did that come from?

You know, that came directly from me. I can remember so many times when my mom told me stories of what she liked as a kid or what I was like when I was a kid, and I just never really took it in. But now that I'm a mom, I ask her all the time, and I tell those stories to my daughter. It's like passing along different pieces of what made me who I am today, and I can only hope she carries on that tradition someday.

Thanks for reading, guys!