Phew, contest entries done for a little bit!

If you follow me, you probably saw the nail-biting finish for my last MxM entry a little while ago, The Zebra and the Bat! No one asked, but here I am, talking about it again!

Honestly, I think there's even more to the story; I simply overshot in my planning, and undershot in my planned writing time. I think I mentioned it somewhere before, but I was absolutely inspired by a 100k extreme-slowburn fic I read a few months ago, and I wanted to create something with a similar energy, but with even more world-building. But when it's a contest, and you're already at 22k words when the cap was 20k, and you're nowhere near your planned end ... you just try to make things fit, you know?

I do think it makes sense in the story I wrote, though; it's a sudden realization of feelings, bubbling over after an abrupt trauma-dump. But ... (spoilers ahead if you haven't read it yet!) Candle literally just escaped from being kidnapped and kept as a pet, and he watched his captor's home burn down, potentially with his captor inside. He's just a normal dude, and he just basically said 'yeah kill him or whatever, I'm fine with it.' At the very least, it's arson! And he's got anxiety!! Of course he's gonna just - explode in feelings once he's safe. Luckily, he has Zeffir there to cuddle him and tell him he'll stand between him and the scary stuff. Awww!

So yeah, there's definitely a lot more to unpack there! So I hope to get to that - uh, eventually? You'll probably laugh, but I had a WHOLE OTHER fourth fic I was working on for this contest - and it was ALSO turning into a sprawling world-building exercise with OCs! (Although this one had one canon pony, at least! A backgrounder, admittedly!) I got 14k in, and realized it was gonna turn into ANOTHER 22k+ story, and simply ran out of time. October was a bit crazy for me all around!

Which brings me to my latest story - Constructs of Friendship! Which, well, talk about a study in disappointment. Not from the contest or the story or anything, since for a change I decided to try and get my entry done VERY EARLY, to prevent another Zebra/Bat situation! But Sci-Fi isn't a genre I've written for before, so I even got 1k into a whole world-building discussion that I had to scrap - too much tell, not enough show! (Even though it was sooooo satisfying to tell about!) I wrote a story in the lines of the science fiction short stories many of us read in high school/college - dystopic, ambiguous, with dark themes about society and mankind churning beneath the surface. The ending is a little sudden - both to play on that ambiguous angle (what happens next? what do we, as the reader, think should happen next?), and to ensure that it's not another 22k epic!! It's literally a story about ponies being made from raw elemental parts like gemstones and horns, and then it turns out our hero is made from a chunk of Twilight Sparkle (implied), and someone tries to kill him to chop him up and combine him with another person!! Heavily implied to be Pinkie Pie's construct! I mean, there's a whole book in that concept, and I had to force myself to keep it very short and exciting!

What ended up being disappointing was more the reaction - or lack thereof. I worked very hard on this story, simply because scifi isn't usually my 'bag', and I wanted to make sure it was good. It's hard to write scifi!! Super hard! It's hard to sound technological, when mostly you write about ponies falling in love! But I was so proud of it, and my original characters, and I put it up expecting it to do really well! I mean, heck, I used the 'dark' tag, I gave the pony a gun! It even has meta implications!! It seems like readers eat this stuff up!

And then the feedback I got was 'this sounds like I, Robot and I don't want to read it' and 'if I hadn't known this was by you I wouldn't have even looked at it.' I came back to one note on the story - which was the contest organizer adding it to their 'to be read' list. Which I mean, hey! One notification is still good! But I was hoping for like ... excitement? Interaction? Anything? Bueller?

As writers, we write to be read; at some level, we all want our work to be seen, to be appreciated, to have someone feel things as a result of our writing. Even just a 'hey! I loved this!' means something to us. And for the past few weeks (months?) it feels like I've found more venues for interaction with other writers, but more than ever it feels lonely, like I'm shouting into a void.

I'm not really sure how to finish this blog; it's intended as sort of a musing over my current works, but it's feeling pretty bleak. I'm still hoping for the MxM contest to turn out well (I'm excited that contest even happened!), but I think I'm going to lower my expectations significantly when it comes to anything beyond simply writing for my own pleasure. It's hard not to lose hope, when the top ten fics in the 'trending' box are mostly some variation of '[pony] has huge boobs and lots of incest!' you know?

Anyway, on that depressing note, happy early weekend! I'll definitely have at least one more story for December, so keep an eye out for that! Or, don't. No pressure!