Where is Unwhole Hole? · 10:03pm Mar 7th, 2020
Butterford Ignatius Thomathy “The Snake” XVII approached the door carefully. The smell was peculiar, a must something akin to the scent of a damp basement. He had ignored all the signs to beware the chrupo, and was pretty sure he saw a small horde of them churping from the various grimy windows of the house he approached.
When he flung open the back door, thousands upon thousands of empty root-beer bottles tumbled out. He squeaked in raw terror and jumped back, overwhelmed with the unnatural scent of must and diet root-beer. As the bottles poured out, an extremely musty Unwhole Hole eventually flowed out amongst them, coming to rest in the chilly damp of his unmown lawn.
“GAH SUNLIGHT!” he or she cried, blocking his or her eyes from the glow of the sun.
“It’s night time,” noted Buttery Snake.
“Says you! My eyes! It BURNS!”
“It’s supposed to.”
Unwhole Hole shifted, eventually turning himself over to lay facing the ground, limp and still.
“I came over to check if you were dead.” Buttery Snake paused. “Are you?”
Unwhole Hole looked down at himself. “I...don’t know...”
“Well you smell like it.”
Unwhole Hole looked up. “I had a cockroach infestation. That’s why I smell like this.”
“You keep telling yourself that, smelly.”
“Stop undermining my self-confidence.”
“It’s literally why you created me.”
“No, I created you because I needed to make these blog-posts interesting.”
“Even though you are using them for literally the wrong thing?”
“I meant interesting for me.”
“Oh. So you’re just weird then.”
“I’m not weird, you’re weird.”
“Which one of us is talking right now?”
“I don’t know, usually one of us would have sighed or turned to something by now.”
Buttery Snake sighed and turned toward Unwhole Hole. “I brought metaphorical papers.” He threw them into Unwhole Hole’s face. “Turns out, ‘Equestria 485 000’ got covered by Seattle's Angels. AND! ‘The Murder of Elrod Jameson’ got covered by the Royal Canterlot Library.”
“Yes, I know. I was there for those parts.” Unwhole Hole shifted on his pile of bottles and induced a change of set-piece, instead moving the pair to a room indoors. “And it’s a huge honor. I am always happy when people enjoy my stories, and even extra happy when people like them so much that they promote them.”
“You even got to do an interview.”
“I know.” Unwhole Hole paused. “The Kaiser said I sounded like a raving lunatic, though.”
“You always sound like that, though.”
“Yes. I know. I took it as a compliment. Nobody likes a boring interview.”
“Is that why you write your blog posts as weird conversations with yourself?”
The fourth wall of Unwhole Hole’s house suddenly collapsed. Must air began to rapidly escape, and more churpos began to enter from outside.
“Great,” sighed Unwhole. “Three is not enough...”
“It’s good, though.”
“Oh yes, definitely. Not the wall, the coverage. They said so many nice things, and I was so happy. To the point of even being a bit embarrassed. Or bashful, except I am not a dwarf. Although I have to say, I was not expecting that response for ‘Elrod’.”
“But people seem to like that story.”
“Yes, but it’s a strange one. Almost more a meta-fanfiction than a fanfiction.”
“Weren’t you trying to convert it to a standalone?”
“I was, but editing makes me sleepy. The story loses a lot of weight without the pony aspect.”
“But there’s still ponies.”
“In the edited version, I called them ‘jednor’. The winged ones were called Valkyries. Forth was renamed as Fourth. And Morgana got re-skinned to something that made me start to wonder if she would work better as a Chrysalis instead of a Twilight.”
“Meaning?”
“In the standalone prototype, she was re-framed. Meaning her character in the ‘show’, instead of becoming an alicorn princess, became a villain in one of the later seasons, assuming a distinctly threatening ‘evil’ appearance. Which is meant to make it more poignant that despite being (spoilers) a rare default version, as she is, she takes on the later-season form instead.”
“That went over my head.”
“Mine too. The problem is the middle third. That was very hard to re-write. I stopped almost at the point where they wake Twilight up.”
“And then you done caught the dead.”
“I’m not dead. I hope.”
“Then why did you leave us?”
“I’m not gone entirely, either. I still check the site.”
“To read?”
“I can’t read well, so no, not usually. But to see what is happening.”
“You can’t read? But you write, so--”
“Reading is exponentially harder than writing. I don’t know why that is, it just is.”
Buttery Snake, being a daring fellow, took a seat on an especially virile churpo. It churped loudly. “Then what have you been doing?”
“Working on my last two goals. One is to finish school...”
“What, high school?”
“No. I’m not that young. Even if my diet largely consists of candy, ice cream, and cookies.”
“Stop lying, you know you can’t afford iced cream.”
Unwhole Hole sighed. “What have I been doing...”
“I already asked that.”
“I know, I’m writing your parts, same as mine. I’ve been working on another attempt at an independent story that I want to eventually try to publish.”
“And failing at it, I presume.”
“Stop voicing my insecurities.”
“I am literally a division of you. Stop voicing your own insecurities.”
“You stop first.”
Both of them stared at each other. Then they continued.
“The story I’m on now is having scale-creep, so it’s getting too big for publishing unless I split it. But I’m about half way. It will probably be about the size of Elrod.”
“And?”
“Well, I’ve got back in the swing of writing non-fanfiction characters, which was hard at first. Fanfiction characters are a little easier because they already have a ‘type’ that you need to either write to or subvert. Writing my own characters without type-characters to support them was an adjustment. And, weirdly, they don’t do at all what I want them to do.”
“But you’re writing them.”
“I know. But I don’t control what the characters do. I put them in a room and see how they interact, and sometimes they don’t go the way I want.”
“As in?”
“As in, for example, I had written a character in the current story meant to be a shy, somewhat stubborn girl who eventually realizes the beauty of her world and seeks to explore it rather than being obsessed with returning home.”
“How cute! So what happened?”
“She devolved into a conniving jerk, eventually turning into a power-obsessed cannibal.”
“Oh...oh...” Buttery winced. “But when doesn’t that happen in anything you write?”
“I don’t know. It’s just strange. I intended all these characters to be nice, fun people, and now they’re all depraved lunatics.”
“Doesn’t that say something about your own psyche, though?”
“What are you, Sigmund Freud?”
“Well, at least there’s nobody with an Oedipus complex in the...story...” Seeing the look on Unwhole Hole’s face, Buttery face-hoofed. “You sick sun of a Celestia...”
“That’s okay for a young-adult story, right?”
“What in the name of Luna’s fluffy tail would give you that idea?”
“We read Oedipus in tenth grade.”
“That was sophomore year of college, you nincompoop.”
“And how am I supposed to remember things? When did I even go to college?”
“You probably didn’t. And nobody cares.”
“I know.”
“More to the point, when are you coming back to fanfictionland?”
“That’s a good question. Probably for a brief time after I finish what I’m doing now. I actually have several ideas.”
“You always have several ideas, and where has that got us now?”
“Nowhere.”
“What are they?”
“Well, I have an idea for a horror, a comedy, and an action story.”
“You mean the only three things you can actually write?”
“Yes!”
“Are they any good?”
“No, I haven’t writ them yet. The horror idea is the most fleshed out; it’s based on Sunburst desperately trying to stop a plague of Swamp Fever set off by Sombra Loyalists in the Crystal Empire.”
“I guess that could work as a thriller, maybe?”
“That’s the idea.”
“The comedy, then?”
“The least fleshed out. I only have a premise. The idea that Luna is attempting to re-integrate the various races of night-pony that she once ruled over as Nightmare Moon into pony society, including batponies, mothponies, and so forth.”
“Sounds like it could be cute, but a little cliché.”
“That’s the problem. That one needs more thought.”
“And the adventure?”
“Intermediate. The idea is a prequel to ‘Daring Do and the Hand of Doom’, showing an extremely young Daring Do investigating a tomb in Southern Equestria with her adoptive sister Wun. I know there’s probably a million Daring Do origin stories, but I think it would be fun to tell my own from the sort of weird psuedo-technological Equestria I really like writing.”
“So, like the Mummy, but with ponies?”
Unwhole Hole slumped. “Yeah...”
“Well, it sounds fun. But you should really get to work. I mean, these things aren’t going to write themselves.”
“I know. It’s weird, I’m getting recognition after I’ve mostly moved on to other projects. Might be enough to pull me back, though.” He paused. “Actually...if I could get an idea for a super-short story, I might try that. Like ‘Herp-Derp’. I wrote that during a layover at an airport. I’ll have to give it a think.”
“Don’t think. Just do.”
“I don’t think I will.”
“Well, maybe if you focused on writing instead of making ridiculously long blog-posts about yourself?”
Unwhole Hole glared for a moment. Then, he went on to do something else.
Well, I had fun.
Can't wait to see them.
5215824
Ditto
I await with bated breath. Every single one of those projects sounds swell, so I'm just plum excited.
We're all mad here...
Well now I'm even more interested.
Please, sir—I want some more?
After reading some of your stories I think I would enjoy reading even the non pony ones from you. You’ve more than proved yourself capable of bringing to life unique worlds!