Dream Boat · 10:10pm Dec 28th, 2019
So a funny story about Admiral Biscuit and I… we keep not recognizing each other!
Initially when I had him edit Team Boat, he had forgotten our rather brief meeting at this years TrotCon. We’d met in the dealer hall while hanging out OldGreyMane and had a fascinating discussion about some Civil War reenacting minutiae there. I can’t thank him enough for the changes he recommended, and his willingness to make suggestions on what initially was a complete strangers work.
Ironically, at TrotCon I actually mistook PresentPerfect for Admiral Biscuit earlier that day at registration. Whoops! Then, later that day I went all Fluttershy despite sitting right next to the admiral at the hotel bar. In my defense, I had drunk some not very good canned Guinness entirely too fast. So “Is this an Admiral Biscuit?” became a private meme for myself and OGM.
I never expected Team Boat to be as popular as it has become in such a short period. It’s now my most liked story ever, in spite of not even featuring any cannon characters, ore even settings! I am so glad everyone has liked it and I hope my readers both new and old enjoy it and my previous works.
Team Boat started as an idea that has been stashed away in my head for a long time. After I read about the Burlington Bat wreck, of an actual horse-powered ferry boat of the 1830s found in Lake Champlain in the 1980s, I knew it was an awesome concept crying out to be used *somewhere* at *somepoint* in a pony fan fiction. I had gauge ideas about a ferry on the rivers in Ponyville, but never really developed it.
Then, this year, I ran across Admiral Biscuit’s blog post with his story challenge. Previously, I’d written a story as part of RobC’s timed fiction writing panels at TrotCon. The result of that was Midnight Flowers, which Present Perfect recently reviewed and was well liked. So I was confident I could take on the challenge, though I didn’t expect anyone besides Biscuit to really read it.
Since the story prompt was to have thing set on Earth, I tried to keep the story as grounded in history as possible. I quickly decided upon keeping the setting as Lake Champlain, since that is where this type of boat originally operated. I had also been playing around with writing in an epistolary form for another story (which may come out in the future, it’s centered around age-of-sail naval warfare), so I decided to write what was going to be a short story anyways as a letter, and really let my 19th century-isms shine.
I was well aware that just the gimmick of the Team Boat wasn’t enough to carry the whole story, so I knew I had to come up with an interesting about the human narrator too. I decided on making them a Hudson River school landscape artist, to give them a reason to visit the setting. I set about researching the movement, to try and glean some more information about it’s artists so I could write a representative character. In doping so, I discovered that it’s founder, Thomas Cole, had a sister who was also an artist, Sarah. Not much of her work had survived the raveges of time, unfortunately. This, however, meant that she was a possible blank slate for me in terms of writing. My choice of her as a main character came when I discovered that one of the things that had survived from her were her letters, which she sent tot her brother, including one where she rather touchingly encouraged him not to give up hope and abandon art. Drawing from that letter, and another surviving letter where she complained of the misery of a carriage trip. Using her surviving writings and my own attempts at Victorian stylings, I started to write the story.
Castor and Pollux take their names from the Greek gods. That’s deliberate, since in the early period of the Republic we were very much obsessed with classical references especially to the democratic Greek traditions. Even houses and public buildings were Greek revival style! So it made sense to give these odd ponies Greek names. The two brother gods are referred to collectively as “Gemini”; hence how I named the titular team boat.
My much beloved hat joke was a combination of Victorian edict and fridge brilliance. I felt I couldn’t entirely go without mentioning the obvious oddity of a talking horse in such a piece of historical fiction. But the prompt stipulated that such sights were supposed to be normal, so I had to make Castor’s speech startling for a new reason. I hit upon the idea of talking ponies being common, but almost the same as non-talking ponies so that the only reliable way to tell the difference was by the fact that talking ponies wore clothes. And the old Victorian dress manners said that a gentleman wasn’t fully dressed outdoors with out a hat. And so, the scandal of a hat-less pony was born.
When I published this story on Thursday, I knew it was good. Admiral Biscuit had liked the first draft, and that was fairly unpolished. I didn’t expect much, though. It was destined, I thought, to be an amusing little experimental story that would languish in obscurity in comparison to my other stories. Instead, I saw the views and then the likes explode. Then Admiral Biscuit made his blog post. Then I was in the feature box, and in the popular stories. Team Boat has become my Dream Boat
All I can say is wow, and also thank you. Whether Team Boat is the first story of mine you’ve ever read or you’ve had your eye on me for a while, thank you for reading and liking my story. I hope you have enjoyed it, and please enjoy my other stories and blogs. I have more stories in the offing for the new year, and I hope you will all stick around to read them when they are ready!
I came from ab reccomendation, and definetly loved team boat, great work, really, a lot of talent here.
Is crazy how this things go, and how a random story can be "the one" to spark with people, i think all content creators (artist, youtubers, etc) always point it out how out of their control can be wich picture or video suddenly hits the jackpot, i think it often has to do with something in the content, the story for example, that somehow resonates on the people on a way the author didny necessarily intended. Thats not to say that your story didnt earn it by its own merits, cause it did, but theres something beyond quality on the formula.
In any case, your story hit it, and you clearly deserve it so, hope to see more of you.
Pd Sorry for the rambling, writing on my old phone is very unconfortable.
Thanks for commenting on my blog! Glad you enjoy it, and my story, stay tuned for more.