• Member Since 25th Aug, 2019
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paperhearts


Don't read anything into it.

More Blog Posts46

  • 47 weeks
    ~

    Smolder exhaled. Whether the smoke that followed came from biology or the dragon's refusal to contain the cigarette's erosion Ocellus couldn't tell. It blossomed, though, a smudge of grey against the bruised sky, and that was enough. But in that moment Ocellus was certain that whatever Smolder did would have been enough.

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    5 comments · 136 views
  • 81 weeks
    Architects

    S'up. Been a while, hasn't it? But yeah, I've been writing some horsegriffonwords here and there. It's very rough, and I'm not sure if it'll go anywhere or see the light of day, but here's a small part of it that I liked and thought I'd share.


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    2 comments · 150 views
  • 107 weeks
    Wrote Something Last Week

    Not a story as such (or, at least, not anything approaching a complete story), but the foundation of something that could conceivably become a story with some time and effort.

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    3 comments · 181 views
  • 109 weeks
    Saw the G5 Movie Today.

    As is probably apparent by my lateness to the proceedings, I haven't really been motivated to catch it thus far, but was babysitting and my charge wanted to watch it.

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    10 comments · 207 views
  • 116 weeks
    Time Flies

    Smolder lay sprawled across the rug, limbs and claws entwined in dense yak hair. Her scales had become uneven shimmering planes, given their fleeting new life by the light of the fireplace. There, prancing tongues lived and died erratically, the only concession to the passing of time.

    "Hey, you see the moon from there?"

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    3 comments · 160 views
Mar
22nd
2020

Results Day: A Mini-Retrospective · 9:25pm Mar 22nd, 2020

Hello again! This post is coming a little earlier than I intended, but I had some free time, and I thought it would make sense to get my thoughts down before they have a chance to escape!

But first, thank you very much for giving Results Day a pleasant opening run. I don't publish with any expectation of feature boxes or mass consumption; just knowing that a handful of people find some pleasure in what I produce is enough for me, and the comments I have received have been encouraging on that front. I also wanted to thank those of you who have recently decided to hit that follow button. It means the world that you found enough enjoyment in my work to warrant doing that, and I'll do my best to continue to entertain with any future pieces of work.

TResults Day
Sugarcoat's life plan demands academic success, something which her recent results are threatening to derail.
paperhearts · 1.1k words  ·  41  2 · 911 views

Results Day originally came into existence as an entry in the Flashfic group's March round, the prompt being "face your fears!" With a 150 word limit, I discovered the idea to be a little deep for me to execute cleanly, but I was reasonably satisfied with the entry. But I was left wondering what I could do with another 1,000 words or so. I was keen to explore a subject where the 'fear' existed on multiple levels; I wanted to avoid scenarios where a person simply had to overcome something in a static sense. Instead, I wanted the person to have had to make a choice where either option brought with it a whole new level of uncertainty and doubt. Where the 'fear' cannot be avoided and the 'facing' it is a byproduct of that difficult choice. There were plenty of directions I could have taken that, but I enjoy writing adolescent drama, and so an unplanned pregnancy plot became the most insistent of the various ideas I was throwing about.

That plot device more or less chose the setting, but I've been writing a fair bit of YA fiction recently, not to mention warming myself up for Persona 5 Royal by playing, um, Persona 5 (:heart: Haru!), and that further encouraged me to try my hand at something within the Equestria Girls universe. I wish I could say that there was some detailed plan in mind for my choice of characters, but, uh, there really wasn't. I've watched a few episodes/features involving the Shadowbolts, and I quite like their characters. Sugarcoat came to mind as someone who might be perceived as being less likely to find herself in such a situation—a longer story might well have explored precisely how and why she does—and Lemon Zest because she seemed an appropriate foil, with the added bonus of getting me to write a different type of character for a change.

The story itself joins Sugarcoat having already made her decision, and who is trying to find the courage to go home and tell her parents. I wanted the fear to be two-fold; the obvious point was to be the act of telling her parents, but the less obvious, and more long term, fear is the impact it will have on her life goals. The latter also enabled me to try and add another dimension to the story by over-exposing the impact of being a young mother on Sugarcoat's exams in order to layer in something of a red herring. I don't know if I was really aiming for a twist ending—perhaps more of a stick to gently prod the reader towards a conclusion that suddenly makes sense. I'm not sure I achieved the balance completely, but by and large I was satisfied with how it came out.

As for the tense? Well, I mostly just wanted to have a play around and try something new. The tone of the story felt right enough to take a stab at it here.

I'll leave it there for now—it's only a small story after all! But hopefully that has given a little insight into my thought processes during the development of the work. Thanks for taking the time to read this, at any rate. In a week or two I'll post another blog covering some of the stories of my followers, so until then, take care! :twilightsmile:

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