On Writing "Gabby's Surprise" · 11:14pm Nov 17th, 2020
Ah, this one was fun. I follow a few MLP artists on DeviantArt (and at least a couple Furry/MLP artists on Twitter) and ever since I first saw InuHoshi-to-DarkPen, I couldn't help but imagine what some of the reactions would be with Gabby just introducing her dragon son to her friends.
As far as shipping goes, Spike and Gabby aren't my first choice. Not too surprised that Spike would have the largest variety of pairings in the entire franchise, although it does bother me a bit that most of them are with adults (I've mentioned in an earlier blog post how I feel about Spike and Rarity). My favourite Spike ship has to be Spike and Smolder (they're closer to the same age, Smolder is shown to look out for him on a number of occasions, and because Young Six), and while Spike and Gabby have a nice friendly dynamic on the show, the age difference means I'd prefer keeping them as friends.
That's not to say I have a problem with people making stories around other ships, especially if they're good and/or set in alternative universes where you aren't restrained to the show, hence I like InuHoshi's take enough to write a story around it.
Also pretty happy with this one because I'm now getting the hang of a new writing approach. In my earlier stories, I would write out descriptions of each "scene" and then try to write out in full based on those descriptions. The problem I found with that was I'd get hung up on the details, like establishing settings, trying to weave in dialogue, and describe interactions in ways that would be plausible, so most would take weeks.
Then for Strange Day at the Recruitment Office, I had all the dialogue in my head, so I just wrote out all the lines in order and write short actions in between them. Once that was all done, I could read through and make tweaks before expanding things out and I ended up finishing the story much quicker than I expected. Then I took Best Young Yak that was already halfway done using the old approach for several weeks, and finished that off with the new one in one week.
This story is now the third one to use the new approach, the second one to fully utilise it, and it seems to be paying off well. Thanks to everyone who's read it, hope you all found it funny.
I'm moderately certain Gabby is around the same age as the young 6.
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Is she? She's roughly the same height as Gilda and most other "adult" griffons, plus she has a job in delivering mail so there's a level of assumption that's she's more grown up than Gallus at least.