Jinglemas 2019 · 11:25pm Dec 24th, 2019
Christmas Eve/Hearth's Warming Eve is here, so get some hot empathy cocoa and settle in with some nice fanfiction. The Jinglemas gift exchange this year has 75 stories listed, and that's just in the SFW category.
In this year's Jinglemas, I enrolled with Featherbangs as my requested character, and got this nice story from The Seer:
It's a story about Hearth's Warming music, and how much Featherbangs hates it. It's a rather nice gift to receive, as I also hate Christmas music!
Thanks, Seer :)
For my own story, I got Raven Inkwell, requested by Captain Hairball.
Raven Inkwell has never spoken a single line in the show, but in the absence of canon, she has plenty of fanon. There were 37 stories published (38 now) tagged with Raven Inkwell. So, from the comics, fanon, and Captain Hairball's own story about Raven, I developed my own model of how I would write her:
- Intelligent, but practical. Not as smart as Twilight, but more able to stay focused on the big picture, and more grounded. In Battle of Canterlot: I Want to Break Free, Raven knows the population of Canterlot to four significant figures, but still makes a "reasonable person" foil to Blueblood's extreme personality.
- Celestia's aide. In my story, she continues her work with Princess Twilight after Celestia and Luna retire.
- A unicorn. (She sometimes appears as an earth pony in the show.)
The premise was suggested to me by an IRL friend: I like heist stories, and I like shipping, so this was a way to combine them. Although they originally suggested lingerie, I figured I could get a bit more "crap past the radar", so to speak, while still qualifying for an E rating.
The story was a success! I finished it on time mere hours before the deadline on the 21st, with my final edits being returned just 20 minutes past the deadline (still accepted, fortunately). I'm glad that the story has been well received so far.
More importantly, the story was a success in another way. I used this opportunity as a sort of experiment, to try and create an obligation for myself.
For the longest time, I just couldn't get myself to make time for writing. And when I did, I never followed through to make anything publishable. Right now, I have over 100k words of prewriting, outlines, and half-complete chapters. But, as you can see on my account, I have less than 10k published words. I've been wasting too much time on addictive games that I don't actually enjoy playing, and I've been wanting to spend more time being creative.
So, my experiment was this: enter Jinglemas, to create a real obligation, with a real deadline. A contest wouldn't work, because even with a deadline I could still give up and abandon my entry. I needed an actual obligation to complete the story, which Jinglemas provided.
In the end, even with a few life-changing events during the month, and attending a wedding the date of the deadline, I managed to complete the story. Hopefully, that's enough to get me back into it, and I can work on some of my stories. Here are the stories I'm planning for the next few weeks:
URCC: Adventure, Romance, EqG. ~15k words. First in a five part series.
Sunrise: Slice of Life, Sad. ~3k words.
Bully Me: M-rated, Romance, EqG. ~6k words.
Jojaburger: M-rated, Thriller, Gore. As this is a Stardew Valley fanfic, I will be posting it on some other site, TBD. ~15k words.
Wish me luck. I would be grateful for any messages that you send me telling me to get up, stop playing Factorio, and do something constructive.
