State of the Author, August Edition. · 1:32pm Aug 10th, 2020
Been a while since I did one of these. Not gonna lie, it’s been a rough summer for creative work. And now that I sit down to write it everything I put in it seems very… apologetic, for some reason. You know, “I’m still here, sorry this is taking forever”, etcetera. I don’t like that.
I ran a session of my D&D game on Saturday, and it was wonderful. This was my first time ever running D&D out of one of the books, so that was a new experience. The book was Ghosts of Saltmarsh, a collection of nautically-themed adventures that seemed a natural fit for my ongoing all-LGBTQ pirate campaign (which, incidentally, is the greatest D&D campaign ever and the most fun I’ve ever had running a game), and it was a blast. We played the first adventure, searching an abandoned haunted house on the cliffside by the sea. Which, I did have to do a lot of adjustment to make this lvl 1 dungeon work for my lvl 7 party, and the whole party nearly wiped when a single bad saving throw removed the healer from play entirely, but everyone sure seemed to have fun.
With that done it’s back to working on chapter 9 of The Seven Trials of Clover the Clever for me. I think I got a good start on this chapter. It’s around 6k words so far and I’m just getting started working on the middle act. It has a bunch of new-yet-familiar characters from Equestrian history who are all going to be just amazing. Currently they’re engaging in spirited debate about the great questions of their time, like “can we trust this soldier from the conquering imperial power?” and “who gets the best serving at dinner?” and “should we maybe do something about the magical monsters driving out whole villages?”
I’m still watching Pony Life each week, and while its short episode length make it very difficult for it to tell solid stories, I enjoy it. I’m also enjoying The Owl House, which just put out a prom night episode a few days ago and it was adorable 
I have just a couple of links to share on this occasion. You know, I’m sure I must have seen more things I wanted to share lately but I keep forgetting to copy them.
Here is a horse playing the piano: https://twitter.com/AC_Roald/status/1292458891054325770
All hail Queen Arctorius: https://twitter.com/TomTaylorMade/status/1289622761090867200
And here is an interview with the always-excellent Ada Palmer about the history of censorship and the Inquisition, that somehow manages to be just utterly delightful in spite of its subject matter and everyone has to go read it: https://www.eff.org/pages/speaking-freely-ada-palmer
Finally, I’ve been thinking for a long time it would be fun to share little previews from The Seven Trials. Perhaps make it a little more real. I already shared a few lines from the prologue way back when, which is now in chapter 1 proper. So this time I’ll leave you with this, from chapter 2:
The Journal of Clover the Clever, Date UU.
I am writing this over breakfast in the roadhouse where I spent the night. The sun has just come up, and once I finish here I am going to set out on the last leg of the journey. It’s supposed to be just an hour or two’s trot to Granny Springs from here.
The road has been long, and hard on the hooves. I don’t mind traveling. I’ve been on plenty of trips since I became Star Swirl’s apprentice, and many of those trips went off the beaten track, so really this is nothing out of the ordinary. But at least the Professor always knew where seemed to know where he was going, and there was generally sure to be something interesting to look at. Plus I always had somepony to talk to. Although admittedly that pony was Star Swirl the Bearded.
Now I’m traveling alone, in a county I’ve never been to before with very confusing road signs. I bought a map to try to navigate, but it’s one of those cheap fold-out maps that doesn’t want to fold properly and it’s a piece of XXXX it’s challenging.
I’m sure it’s not properly to scale. Also it gives unusual prominence to cabbage soup eateries. Those are represented on the map by talking cartoon cabbages with smiling faces.
So all in all it’s been a rough trip.
I still have no clue what I have to do once I get there. Or even if there really is anything to do or if this is some kind of elaborate magical prank. But if nothing else I get to visit a historic site I’ve never been to before, which is an achievement of its own in a way, right?
“There’s probably no apocalypse,” Clover muttered to herself as she walked, as she had done a hundred times in the past few days, “but it never hurts to be prepared.”
Stay safe out there everyone.
The preview from chapter 1, reposted:
Delightful to see what you're working on. Here's hoping the words keep flowing. Also glad to hear you're enjoying D&D. My own group's on the way back from raiding a giant robot that crashed from orbit for components so a blue dragon will tell them where to find their missing father, who also happens to be the king holding together a very fractious little city-state.
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Thanks, and I hope so too. Writing is hard. Rewarding, but hard.
Also, Clover is still just the best.
Your game also sounds excellent
My game has mostly been about pirating against various imperial navies, and there haven't actually been many dragons or dungeons in the game before now, so this collection of dungeoncrawling adventures is quite a sea change here. The one dragon they did encounter before now was way too powerful for them and they ran away, before using its lair as a death trap to dispose of a company of slavers despoiling the jungles outside. It was glorious.
Ever thought about doing reviews of Pony Life? The only people I know who were doing so gave up on it.
I've heard very good things about The Owl House. I don't have Disney* but I'm considering buying Season 1 from Amazon.
I love the voice you've developed for Clover as she becomes older and wiser. Very Pratchettesque.
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* Jeeze... that makes it sound like a disease, doesn't it?
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I mean, Disney is contagious. It spreads everywhere. But yeah, The Owl House is really good.
I can't say I've thought about doing reviews, really. I enjoy the show for what it is, but yeah, the episodes are really short and... "insubstantial" sounds very harsh but it's hard to think of a more fitting word to use. When an episode is five minutes long things move along quickly and with a minimum of development. And since my previous dives into episode reviews were, like, thematic analysis and stuff and I often struggled to think of something to say about them even when an episode was 22 minutes long, it would probably be even harder here.
Still, I do enjoy the show. It's character-driven and I like the characters, it's witty, and it's not a bad thing that they feel more liberated to introduce new characters, places, and magic things than FiM could in its middle and later seasons. The downside is it seems unlikely we'll ever get anything in Pony Life like the fantasy adventure two-parters of FiM.
Clover is great
It's quite ironic to look back at this bit here now, where she's complaining about walking a long, boring, easy road. If only she knew...
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Well, they weren't quite the easiest words I've ever written but I have nonetheless written over 500 words tonight and I think they're pretty decent. Forceful characters are pushing at each other. It's definitely an improvement over the several pages of notes and no actual prose I had before.
Thanks for sharing more interesting things to read. Censorship and the Inquisition is not something I had any real interest in, but turned out to be the distraction I needed last night when I couldn't sleep due to the heat.
When are you planning to publish the Seven Trials?
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I know better than to try to guess when that will be.
When it's done, I suppose
Glad the interview helped. I thought it was great, and strangely heartening in these dark times. The bit about people smuggling forbidden books inside other, more popular forbidden books? Just delightful.
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Y'know what, that was a bit negative. Let me try that again.
So I'm trying a very different process this time around: I'm writing the whole thing before posting it. Previously I've written, edited, polished, and posted one chapter at a time before moving on to the next, and it felt very inefficient. So I wanted to try to see if this would be better (it probably hasn't been, unfortunately). I've left each chapter at the first draft level (or even less, for some of the lesser chapters) in order to push ahead to the next to try to maintain some forward momentum. But that also means that even though I'm working on chapter 9, none of the previous chapters are actually completely finished yet.
Another thing is that, while the other stories roam and meander and cover a large number of smaller stories that are fairly loosely tied together, the way the Seven Trials developed it has a strong central storyline running through the whole thing, and I feel like I won't know for sure what the beginning has to look like until I reach the end.
And I realize the irony that the one story that has a tightly connected plot is the one whose title suggests it should be a collection of semi-connected stories
Because my curse is to never do things the easy way.
Chapters 1-8 currently make up around 62k words, and there are plenty of chapters left to go. So it's going to be a substantial story, to be sure.
Also an epic one. I realize that I absolutely suck at hyping my work but make no mistake, I think this story is going to be absolutely amazing. It is the heroic epic of our age, and Clover is all of us, even as she is always herself. It has comedy, adventure, love, heartbreak, and the great questions that have troubled humanity since ancient times, and I absolutely love it. So I hope everyone sticks around for... however long it takes.
Star Swirl does not give up on tasks once he starts them, and neither do I.