Director's cut: Would You Rather...?

First off, you know you specialize in writing a genre, character, or whatever when someone comments about it when you pump out a story without a certain genre/character tag. For me, that’s comedy stories, so how ‘Would You Rather…? didn't have the comedy tag surprised at least two of my followers enough to comment about the lack of comedy tag.

With that out of the way, I’ll start with where the idea for the story came from.

About 2 years ago, I wrote a romance story with Sunset Shimmer and my human OC Eric Reed, ‘When Dating a Sunset…’ and I planned to follow up on it with a sequel; I had even written the first draft of chapter 1 well over a year ago. Long story short: progress got held up, either due to writer’s block, due to other stories needing more attention, or needed breaks from writing, and it’s only recently that I finally started making some progress on the sequel again. Theoretically, I would have submitted it with the first chapter out about a year ago, but if I did, the sequel would have ended up being on hiatus...and it would still be on hiatus. It's a good thing there’s a personal writing rule I follow: never ever ever submit a story with only one chapter written. I learned it the hard way on a now-deleted story.

But anyway, while trying to submit the sequel right now is a no-go for reasons I just explained, I wanted to write something with Eric and Sunset as a couple. I thought about writing a slice of life, an anthology-style story that would work as a stop-gap measure of sorts. But for reasons I can’t say, doing that would have thrown off future plans and been very difficult to sort out while still keeping the style I use to handle stories with Eric.

So, I decided to just write ‘Would You Rather…?’ to finally get a new Sunset x Eric story out. If you have seen my past blogs, you might have seen one about this story where I was debating having it as either a mini-story on a blog or a full-fledged one-shot story. Enough was written for it to be its own story, so here we are.

By the way, if you’re still here after that little rambling I did, you get a gold star! I just don't know where it is.

When I was thinking of things Sunset and Eric might do while hanging out, them playing not just video or board games (they both love games, though Sunset favors video games, while Eric enjoys both around the same) but other games like “Would you rather?”. I’ve never actually seen anyone play it nor played it myself, and only know about it from an old show I used to watch called “Zoey 101”.It might have even been a game that show made up.

But back to the story. The biggest problem I had was trying to pick how many questions would be asked. I wanted there to be enough to not have the story feel rushed, but not too many to risk dragging the story out. I also don’t think I’m that great at writing very interesting slice of life stories (not counting more comedic ones, which I often write), so that was another reason I didn’t want the story to go on too long and get boring. ‘Would You Rather…?’ did have comedy, but not as much as I try to have in other comedic stories -- that was why this story didn’t have the “comedy” tag. 

In fact, I kinda doubted that this story would have gotten too many views since I wondered if it had more of a “self-insert-ly” feel to it than they usually do, or at least that I think my Eric Reed stories do. The views were actually better than I thought, and along with the votes it got, even got the story featured for a while when the likes reached about 20. The view-to-like ratio wasn't great, if not subpar, and was worse than it usually is, but at least the dislikes were low with (at the time of this blog) only three. On a side note, ‘When Dating a Sunset…’ didn’t even threaten to get featured, but did more than good to be on the popular list for a couple of days.

Are you still there? Good. You get another gold star! I don't know where that one is either, but it's yours!

Anyway, this is where I’ll bring up noteworthy cuts or edits, but unlike my last story ‘Twilight Remembers She Can Teleport’, which has so many I had to leave some out, ‘Would You Rather..?’ only had a couple.

The first change was that the number of questions (including Sunset’s near at the end) was only four at first. However, I added three more during editing. These two were the ones added.

Would you rather jump into icy cold water or take five bee stings?

Would you rather spend three months with only Pinkie Pie, or be all alone in the wild for one month?

Interestingly enough, Eric’s last pair of choices he asked Sunset were originally the first pair he asked her.

The second notable edit was to what Eric said after Sunset commented that she wouldn’t last long with games, and pointed out that it was similar to how The Twilights couldn’t take being without books or science for long. Eric then originally brought up how Princess Twilight fell apart when he bet her that she couldn’t go a week without reading. This was a call-back to one of my much older stories ‘Twilight’s Bookless Week (Celestia Help Us!!)’ where the bet happened -- and Princess Twi fell apart. However, partly because I try to keep call-backs to other stand-alone Eric Reed stories to a bare minimum, I took it out. I guess I’ll bring up that I sometimes go back and read my older stories for not just amusement or to check something I might have forgotten, but to see how far my writing has come.

That’s all the noteworthy edits/cuts, so I’ll move on to bringing up that this is the first Eric Reed story that officially takes place in season 8, as was pointed out when Twilight brought up the School of Friendship’s opening being a success. Thus, the young 6 are a thing. It would sooner or later be mentioned in stories, but Eric has a role in the School of Friendship. He will help be like a bridge between ponies and the other races for the students, so what he does is sorta like what Starlight does as a Guidance Counselor. He is the only character that is both an outsider yet is still fully accustomed to pony society -- Spike is basically a pony in a dragon body by being raised by ponies, but Eric is still a human in a human’s body. However, he just “works” part-time at the school. He didn’t really want to be at the school much, but he wanted to help his “big sis” Twilight out more.

One last fact: at first, Twilight really wasn’t sure what Eric could have done for her school. However, she didn’t want him to feel like she didn’t think he was useful, and he also still works at Ponyville’s spa anyway. So bookhorse thought of a “creature-to-pony bridge” role to give him. Partly for how she tried to think of a place for Eric, and did, she generally doesn’t try to have him come in at any set times, but rather he can help if he’s free and wants to, or be a substitute teacher. Vie her back-up planes, Twilight made Eric a, in sports’ terms, “third-string” headmare/principal, and Starlight’s the “second string”, but neither Starlight nor Eric knows she did it.

Oh, and about the “position Twi has for Eric at the school, I’m actually not sure what it should be called. Do you have any ideas?

One last thing: The story's name was not a play on the story 'When Dating a Sunset...' I just thought it fit.