Turnabout Clopfiction: The Miraculous Recovery of Social Distancing · 1:25pm Apr 24th, 2020
I wasn't there when The Scent of Prey featured back in 2014. I'd fallen asleep and woken up to an ocean of "you lucky bastard!" comments which were sadly deleted after an extensive edit back in early 2015 (the 2.0 edit with Firesight mentioned in the long description) saw the deletion of chapter six, Among The Stars. As people who've followed me for a while may know I have a complicated relationship with TSoP. I've come to accept that it featured despite its many, many flaws as a story and found some measure of pride in the aspects that did work like Chapter Five's sex scene.
The fact that after six years, this rusty piece of pandering HiE being the thing I was known for was something that never sat well with me. Part of it is general laziness; part of it is my unwillingness to develop proper outlines and stick to a routine, something that doomed Foolers Rush In. For those who've never tried writing a long story, it's extremely draining and I have no idea how Firesight finds the stamina to do it but I digress. The point is if you start a long fiction and it doesn't do well at the start, there's little motivation to continue to bust your hump, now more then ever with a flagging active member count resulting in badly deflated voting turnout on stories. Reddit runs on upvotes and interaction which is why they have all those stupid badges. They understand any good friendship simulator needs a digital "attaboy" to power the free-content machine. This is why Fimfiction is where you go for stories and not Equestria Daily.
The fact I'm a backpacker who despises the last two seasons has done me no favors at all either. The fandom as a whole has accepted things like Friendship School, Third-World Yaks, Neo-Liberal Changelings, and Dragons with Western Democratic values. Frankly, I've never been much of a pioneer when it comes to fanfiction. I'm still very much a product of Fallout Equestria and the clopfiction scene in 2014-15 — an odd combination to be sure.
In short, I've never been a great writer or had pretensions of making a career out of my hobby but I always wanted to be an "okay" writer — one with a feature every now and then. Instead, what I got was one feature in 2014 and none again until a very brief feature in 2019 that no one ever noticed and doesn't even really count. If I sound somewhat uncharitable for my attitude, ask yourself out there if you really want to be known for the first thing you ever wrote.
When I posted my last blog, the story was active on fimfiction for about three hours and had just hit 9/6. Things looked pretty bleak. I put out a blog asking what went wrong and a few things happened all at once. Firesight made a blog about my story, mentioning it as something his readership might like. I made a whole slew of group adds to my story, something I hadn't wanted to do until the story was off the front page. Lastly, the comment section on Social Distancing started going crazy. One commenter had mentioned not liking the story without having read it and suddenly everyone was replying to it. I did my best to ignore the troll but I admit I couldn't help but smile as the comment section happily took up the responsibility of explaining why you don't judge a book by its cover for me.
Social Distancing picked up twelve likes in a single hour, then another ten after that in two. By the afternoon, Social Distancing was featured at #4 and remained in the box for about twenty-four hours marking it as my longest-running feature ever. It won't ever match the like-count of my old feature due to the demographics of the site and the story has already cooled off to the point it got no new votes yesterday but for one full day I achieved the very thing I'd always hoped for:
I was no longer the TSoP guy. It felt pretty nice.
To everyone who read Social Distancing, you rock. To everyone in the comment section who showered green over everything, Éire go Brách! To Firesight for promoting my story, you're the best friend and editor a guy could ask for!
Stay awesome!
You're very welcome, friend. And I can certainly understand not wanting to be known for the first thing you did six years ago and not everything you tried since. You didn't sell out as an author; you constantly tried to test yourself and push into areas you hadn't before, attempting exotic themes like FoE-based Angels of Oasis or Roseluck crossed with Zebras in Loving Submission.
Even those stories that didn't take off aren't failures because they taught you and at least showed your willingness to try new stuff. So many people don't leave their comfort zones as writers or artists. You do. I am pleased with your progress, young Padawan, and greatly gratified that your story took off when it looked dead on the launchpad. I don't honestly know how much of that was due to your story adds and how much to my blog post, but that was still a turnabout for the ages, one worthy of Phoenix Wright!
I look forward to seeing what you write next. You've already told me about a couple ideas, which I won't mention here, but I'll be happy as always to preread and edit them when the time comes. Also look forward to seeing your add to the thestral scenes on Firefly!