ERun Away With Me
MLP: FiM
Romance
Drama
One week after Flurry Heart is crowned the Ruler of the Crystal Empire, she runs into Cozy Glow.
Flurry Heart
Cozy Glow
semillon · 14k words · 278 41 · 5.3k views

Run Away With Me: A Retrospective · 10:42am Nov 16th, 2019

Inspired by one Paperhearts and this old B_25 blog that's actually about author's notes and not retrospectives in the form of blogs,

I've decided to write a retrospective on my most recent story

Also because it's easier than addressing each and every comment when there's a pattern to the feedback that I've gotten

Leggo

_{god they're so cute}

Also I've been drinking a bit so this might not be the best written

This first part's going to be about process.

So first of all, the inspiration for Run Away With Me is purely because of Lilith1light's gorgeous pictures of Cozy and Flurry interacting—visual art has a special way of provoking a story within the mind

Also because I think it's fun to play with Flurry Heart as a character, because she's kind of the definition of unearned power.

I wrote Run Away With Me for FanofMostEverything's Imposing Sovereigns contest, which I found out about through a blog written by Carabas. I wasn't on Fimfiction for the first one, there were several authors whom I either admired, was friends with, or both who were participating, and I thought the whole category thing was super fun, so I decided to enter.

Initially I thought about taking on one of the changeling brothers, or maybe Ember—those three would have been in my comfort zone. But I asked my SO and he suggested that I do Flurry Heart combined with Abdication, and I was like, "Huh...that actually sounds really interesting."

So that's what I ended up doing.

My goal with the story was to have this all this dramatic tension surrounding one decision, and for the prose to offer a lot of opportunity for dialogue. Having the abdication be a thing of joy and positive emotion was also of major importance to me. I was interested in doing some minor worldbuilding as well, but that came as a low priority compared to just, like, finishing the damn thing before the 10th.

I wrote the story in three days, which by far is the fastest I've ever written a story that was more than 5k words. Outlining was done before that, over the course of a couple of weeks, on and off, because I was in a major crunch period for school so I had a lot of other writing to be doing. The outline was relatively extensive but not super detailed. I wrote it in the program that I use for screenwriting, omitting any dialogue and just describing the most important beats in a concise manner.

Now for reflections!

I have a small idea about how I got featured, and it's that CozyHeart is just an interesting ship. Because I'm not big enough on the site yet to command a huge following, and because I didn't ask for any help from anyone in promoting (not that I ever do that anyway, anyone who happens to mention me in a blog is a sweetheart and has never been asked to by me), I think people came to read my fic because they thought that the basic premise was interesting. Because it is!

CozyHeart is a ship that looks like it could be a crackship, and is likely considered to be a crackship by many people. But there's something there, and that something is why I think the story was successful in terms of exposure.

In terms of execution, wellllll

I've never been one to write a lot of words. I only have one long form fic out right now and it's only just reached 23k words (more Never Seen soon, btw). So imagine my surprise when all of a sudden I'm in the middle of writing Run Away With Me and I find that I'm only a third of the way through Act 2, and I'm a 8k words, and the word limit for the contest is at 15k! It was nuts. I've never had to worry about something like that before. It was super interesting.

I ended up having to make the beginning more brief than I would normally have, and cutting out some scenes from the third act. I succeeded in submitting according to the word limit, but my story definitely was not as strong as it would have been if I had been allowed, say, 20 or 30k words. Not to blame the contest organizers! I understand why there's a limit. But yeah, the word limit in this case was not my friend.

However! If I do say so myself, I think I did a decent job at trimming the story down. I think that structurally, Run Away With Me has enough to it to feel like a story. Maybe not the most complete story, but a story that provokes some sort of emotion, and doesn't feel like a waste of time.

Emotionally, I hope it hit. Writing something so fast meant that I didn't have time to reflect on each and every character's emotional journey, and I had to rely purely on my editors (love you Miller) to tell me if things were hitting right or not. It's still way too soon for me to be re-reading from an unclouded point of view, so I still am not sure about the emotional impact of the story. There are plenty of comments saying that it worked out, and a few saying that it didn't. Both are fair, and valid.

I really enjoyed writing Flurry Heart. I think that writing a character with absolute power (and yeah, that's my headcanon for her) was a lot of fun. Thinking about the different ways that someone who can do anything they want can be restrained was fun. Writing her interactions with Cozy and her parents were a lot of fun, too. She had some really sick banter with Gallus originally that I ended up cutting out due to time constraints.

Cozy is incredibly hard. Just thinking about how to make her manipulative tendencies shine through while making sure that she's still maintaining this saccharine exterior...not to mention constantly wondering if you're writing enough instances of golly or gosh in her speech.

Cadance's character in this story is one that I'm fond of. I think having two abdications in one story was fun. I'm not sure about how she ended up hitting with most of the readers, but I like the idea of Cadance finding herself in a loveless marriage. It's an obvious, ironic, maybe even cliche sort of situation, but god it tickles my inner drama queen.

Shining was.......corn dog.....

I'm ending it here before I say something weird.

I had a lot of fun participating in this contest. It's only the second contest I've taken part in on this site, and I can definitely say that it was an interesting experience. I got to try something new, get a little bit out of my comfort zone, and though I'm unlikely to place I think that I had a lot of fun and that's what matters kind of except man that money would have been a nice treat