On the Subject of Electric Cars, Commuting from Place to Place, and Writing the Frigging Horsewords

So, Chapter One of Pound and Pumpkin Save Sugarcube Corner is gonna go live tomorrow. I've been working on it constantly over the past week, and at time of writing, it's almost done, with only a couple more paragraphs to go. Hopefully, it's good - I've got some neat little shenanigans lined up for the twins to get into.

As I was writing it, though, my mind began to wander. This is, objectively, a bad thing, as the words come a bit slower, and I make more errors when I'm typing, so honestly, I'd rate the wandering mind of a writer a solid 3/10, avoid it if you can. THIS WHOLE BLOG is a product of the wandering mind; in the time it took me to write this, I could have finished the chapter and uploaded it to Fimfiction for you all to see. So, like, haha, oops, I guess. However, during one of my little mental tangents, I noticed something, and I thought "hey, that's kinda funny, I should post about that."

And here we are.

Let's talk about how writing horsewords and electric cars are like, totally the same thing.

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Electric cars are pretty snazzy nowadays. As both the cars themselves and the network of avaliable, public chargers improves, we're all gonna see a hell of a lot more of them on the road. And hey, that's exciting! Electric cars, combined with improved public transit and a shift into renewable energy, are an inevitable part of the future of transportation, and they're already quite impressive! Ranges nowadays extend into multiple hundreds of miles, they've got a slew of modern, technological features, hell, some of them can even kinda drive themselves! If you showed some of the stuff electric cars can do right now to someone from 20 years ago, they'd laugh at you and tell you to stop dreaming, that there's no possible way they could get that good just yet.

That was not always the case.

Let's head back to 2011, before the electric car scene exploded into what it is today.

At the time, you simply did not see them on the road very often. Teslas were present, but they were producing luxury, expensive cars for a very niche consumer base. You'd be hard pressed to even find a hybrid - the Chevy Volt, the first plug-in hybrid for commercial sale, had debuted in November of 2010. The technology was still very much in its early, fledgling stages, and had yet to truly take wing.

Enter, from stage left, Nissan.

Nissan announced the first fully electric, non-luxury vehicle, the Nissan Leaf, and begin selling it in 2011 and 2012. It was a huge milestone in the electric car department, and a much needed step towards a greener, more renewable automobile market. My family, wanting to be on the forefront of the incoming revolution, purchased one.

At the time, it was a wonderous achievement, and a great source of pride for us.

We still have it. It does not hold up.

You see, while the technology was ready to be sold in a commercial unit in 2012, it was not exactly... um, good yet. The EPA gave it a 73 mile range at the time, and the batteries degrade over time. In its current state, the Leaf will drop, quite literally, twenty five miles of range going up a three mile long incline. We're lucky to squeeze forty miles out of it on a good day.

Plus, it just LOOKS weird now. I think my first remark upon seeing it for the first time was "It looks like a bug."

Electric car tech has come a long way since 2011, but we've elected not to replace it. It works just fine for day-to-day commuting and short trips, like to the grocery store or pharmacy.

Anything more than that, though?

Hooooooooo boy.

The 2011 Leaf is both one of the most fun and scariest cars to drive out there. It's got the snappiness and responsiveness of an electric car, but the entire time, you're watching the range meter creep down, and wondering if you really do have enough charge to make it to your destination. We call it "range anxiety," and it is a... delightful thing to experience.

I remember one time deciding to drive up to a mall in another, nearby town to go clothes shopping. The town was fifteen miles away, and when I got in the Leaf, it had fifty five. I thought "that's PLENTY of range. I'll make it no problem!"

It proceeded to drop thirty miles of range on the way to the mall. I damn near had a heart attack. I made it back fine, the return trip was less uphill, but still; holy crap.

Now, that's all fine, and dandy, and jazzalicious, but so far, none of this has anything to do with horsewords. And like, they're totally the same thing. So how does that work?

Well, it's complicated.

This is not my first time writing fic. Years ago, I wrote a not-insignificant chunk of horsewords under a different name. I never gained any huge success, my largest fic only hit about three thousand views total before I took it down, but I had an absolute blast doing it. I'm still having fun - though I am DECIDEDLY out of practice, writing this new fic has been quite enjoyable thus far.

However, even back then, I dealt with a persistent, nagging anxiety.

It wasn't about quality, or readership, or being featured. All those were either a born of practice or dictated by the whims of fortune. Rather, it was about the length of my stories. I was constantly worried that what I was putting out wasn't gonna be long enough.

Now, the length of a work does not dictate its quality, obviously. Covering a piece of shit with enough fluff to call it a husky during shedding season doesn't change the fact that it's shit underneath, and I KNEW that. I still do. However, I did tend to notice that I liked longer fics more, when they were done well. I chewed through quite a lot of fanfiction back then, and as such, longer stuff tended to keep me invested for greater periods of time, and I liked that. Combine that with Fimfiction's one thousand word upload limit, and I was always worried that somehow, my stories wouldn't be LONG enough.

It was quite silly.

And when I started writing Pound and Pumpkin Save Sugarcube Corner, it came back with a vengeance.

With the prologue, it was "am I gonna hit 1k?" With this new chapter, it's "is this gonna be long enough to justify calling the prologue a prologue in comparison?" And with the next chapters, it'll be "is this long enough to hold up?" A years-long break from writing wasn't enough to shake it, and I'm just kinda trying to ignore it now.

And as I was writing the latest chapter, I thought something novel.

"Heh, this is like range anxiety, but for tiny horse fanfiction."

Call that length anxiety, I guess. Just make sure to follow up and explain what you mean very quickly, lest some unfortunate soul misunderstand you in a big way.

And then I got to thinking about it more.

Though range anxiety is a constant for driving the Leaf, I've never actually run out of charge on the road. I've always managed to judge the trips properly enough to enable me to get back to the house. There have been a couple close calls (one where the Leaf died in the garage, and it was NOT a gentle death), but every time, without fail, I've made it.

And it's the same with writing. The prologue was 1300 words long. I planned three scenes for this next chapter - with two of them completed, it's 4200 words long, and I've got one more left to go. No matter how much I fret and fuss about the length of my works, they always end up being... enough. And enough is all they need to be.

That was a strangely comforting thing to realize. Both that the analogy ran that deep (I like to pretend I'm clever every now and then), and that I'd probably always be fine when it came to my silly, irrational fear.

So yeah, that's how an electric car and writing horsewords are exactly the same. Did this deserve a whole blog post to elaborate on? Probably not, but here we are, and hey, it was fun to write, so there's no harm done, right?

That's all, really. New chapter out tomorrow (or, I guess, today - it's currently one oh seven am. Imma put it out in the morning though). See y'all then!

- Tela