• Member Since 31st Aug, 2018
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Ghost Mike


Hardcore animation enthusiast chilling away in this dimension and unbothered by his non-corporeal form. Also likes pastel cartoon ponies. They do that to people. And ghosts.

More Blog Posts226

  • Monday
    Ghost Mike's Ponyfic Review Monday Musings #106

    In Monday Musings’ early days, if I was lacking in a suitable blurb opener, I would often reach for whatever I’d been watching or playing lately. I kind of retired that after a while, mostly because they tended to not be what my regular readers are interested in, and largely only elicited shrugs of the “I don’t care for it” variety. Well, this time, it’s too dear to me to hesitate: on Friday, I

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    20 comments · 151 views
  • 1 week
    Ghost Mike's Ponyfic Review Monday Musings #105

    Nice advantage of a Bank Holiday Monday is I don’t have to have Monday MusingsTM ready to go on Sunday night, owing to not working up to nearly posting time of 6PM UTC (distinct from GMT, which doesn’t account for time zones). Meaning I can, and am, throwing this together shortly before pressing submit instead. Not a bad side bonus to national holidays always giving the following

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    12 comments · 128 views
  • 2 weeks
    Ghost Mike's Ponyfic Review Monday Musings #104

    March 1st saw witness to a brief but strong (and unexpected, to the ire of the weather people) bout of snow. Which, if you’ve never been to Ireland, is extraordinary rare – the last notable such spell we had was six years ago in March 2018, a cold front so strong it actually shut schools and college down for several days (all your Northern Americans and Canadians are yawning at this,

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    9 comments · 96 views
  • 3 weeks
    Ghost Mike's Ponyfic Review Monday Musings #103

    Eventually I’ll have to contend with these yearly anniversaries getting a day further off each time (or two, Leap Year and all), as I started on March 7th. Price to pay for committing to a fixed day in the title, eh? But that day isn’t yet (likely next year, where I’ll have it three days after rather than four before, to be closer). Right now, it’s here. Folks, Ghost Mike’s Ponyfic

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    20 comments · 188 views
  • 4 weeks
    Ghost Mike's Ponyfic Review Monday Musings #102

    Anyone else ever remember giving something up for Lent when they were young? Even though it hasn’t been a thing in close to two decades for me, I’m reminded of it by two people in the house doing it for the first time in donkey’s years. Okay, one person, my mom to combat her sweet tooth: my brother is merely relaxing on the soft drinks outside of before and after sports training/matches.

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    11 comments · 156 views
Dec
24th
2021

New Wave of the Frozen Variety – Author's Notes · 6:33pm Dec 24th, 2021


Let’s see if I can keep one of these to a short length (Spoiler alert: I do).


Signing up for Jinglemas again was a no-brainer: returning to publishing fanfiction after a four-and-a-half-years hiatus last time was a hoot, and I remain quite proud of that entry, even a whole year later. Oh, it’s a little rough around the edges, and definitely could have been shorter. But it’s honest, sincere, witty, touching, and has really solid characterisation. So says the comments, anyway – I wouldn’t vouch for that on my own! I even recently got it featured on Equestria Daily.

So yes, I was very eager to participate again, despite misgivings about what characters I might get.

I won’t deny, I was a little stumped when I received Vinyl Scratch and Octavia Melody. I’m showing my relative newness to the fandom and my general coolness on fandom pairings here, but they are simply not characters I ever really think about beyond their “occasional background gags” role in the show itself. Not to say I haven’t read and enjoyed fics featuring the two, for I have. But reading and writing are two totally different ball games.

Of course, getting these two characters gave tons of freedom, in where in the show’s timeline to set a story, how the two leads are connected, and what the story would be about. Before I started brainstorming, I only had one stipulation. It had to have enough depth and character insight to it that it wasn’t just a fun but disposable fluff piece.


Quite how I landed on ice skating as the main plot point, I can’t tell you, but it stuck with me. I can say that showing the first meeting of the duo as fillies was a conscious choice. I found the territory of the two as adults so well explored in the fandom, that I doubted my own ability to put my stamp on that. Going with an earlier incarnation of the two was like virgin snow, still coming with character restrictions that help shape the art, but giving enough freedom that I wouldn’t feel like I was invalidating someone’s headcanon of the two. Well, except those fics that have the two first meeting each other at an older age, usually in music college or the like.

One trend I had noticed was that in many fics, it was Vinyl, being mellow, unfazed, and at ease with life, who served to chill Octavia out. Somehow, I liked the idea of flipping this on its head, starting with a Vinyl who somewhat resembled the character we know, but didn’t quite yet have her humility and appreciation of things she wasn’t personally hot on. But neither would she be alone, with the fic containing hints leading to Octavia mellowing out as she ages too.

From there, story points mostly solidified on their own. Earth ponies being better skaters was a no-brainer, as was having Octavia practising her cello in the park. The story is obviously in Manehattan’s equivalent of Central Park, but I couldn’t settle on a good horse pun name for it (hawthornbunny suggested “Centaur Park”, but neither of us felt it quite worked). Still, everything about ice skating in Central Park and New York informed the story’s background research and context, just with Manehattan being smaller than New York enough that the pond would be light enough on skaters for the story to be basically just a character duet. Once the basic notion of Octavia eventually helping Vinyl to ice skate was locked, and the background context of Vinyl getting there was decided on, and rationale for shuffling her parents off-page was concocted, I could write the story. Vinyl was the POV character from the start, I’ve always liked her more, and I felt more comfortable writing from her viewpoint. There was another reason too, which I’ll get to shortly.


The skating logistics came from a little research, but mostly from my own reasoning. That does the job when working with quadrupeds, you can fiddle around bipedal skating technique. And also from the classic scene in Bambi where Thumper is helping him skating on the ice, one of my two big inspirations for that aspect of the story (the other was the ice skating scene from King Kong ‘05, which I had the music from that scene playing often as I wrote, and which I pictured as an especially great fit for the skating montage towards the end – yes, even though this isn't a romance, it's too perfect a fit).

A few other points. It was important to me that I capture the voice of a foal, not an adult, without letting it dominate the fic. Did I succeed in this? Adequately, I’d say. There’s enough instances of blunt, short thoughts throughout, at least. Plus points where she doesn’t know the right term, like not recognising Octavia’s instrument as a cello (Vinyl used the term diminuendo at one point, but I axed this for breaking the age/personality immersion). Certainly, that Vinyl never speaks puts extra emphasis on her thoughts, allowing the viewpoint of a tween to hopefully shine through. I think it does fit both her mellow, laidback show personality, while having the same confidence and snarkiness common to her fandom treatments.

Then, of course, we have Vinyl not speaking.

Vinyl isn’t confirmed mute in the show, plus she speaks in the comics (eagle-eyed readers may have recognised Vinyl’s cutie mark story as lining up with a background cameo she made in Issue #11 – I was going to include more direct nods to this, including the justification of her brother's absence being spending the holidays with his mare friend/Very Special Somepony, but it ended up being just clutter). And her raspy voice and personality were established in the fandom years before “Slice of Life”, as commonplace as Lyra’s fascination with humans.

Yet, for some reason, I didn’t want to use that. It felt outside of my writing range. The advantage, of course, with having her as the POV character is that we’d still fully get her thoughts anyway. And it gave me an interesting challenge, writing a story very light on dialogue. This turned out to be the blessing – by the time Vinyl meets Octavia and does her first vague gesture, the reader is (hopefully) so immersed that Vinyl not speaking doesn’t break that immersion. From the start, I knew this would just be a side fact nopony comments on, much like the show, and they would “get” what Vinyl is vaguely saying from her gestures. And she never reflects on herself not speaking as a liability either, leaving it unanswered as to whether she’s mute, or is simply not speaking in the body of the story as a character or narrative choice. That editor hawthornbunny reacted with positive surprise when Vinyl started gesturing rather than speaking, I take as a good sign.


How do I feel about the story in the end? Definitely happy. The layers of using the two leads’ preferences in music and ice skating as a middle ground that incorporates aspects of both and provides subtext to the proceedings, gave it the desired depth beyond its surface-level fluff. Not that warm, sweet fluff would be wrong, it is a Jinglemas story! I just like them to have enough content to work outside of being a gift, and be readable all year round.

I did set myself a limit to write a simpler story then my prior two fics, hence being just a two-character piece. I didn’t fully succeed, for it did break my 5,000-word target by a couple hundred words, and I’m not sure it has enough incident to justify even that length. I do need to try writing a more scene-hopping fragmented story one of these days. I had also intended for it to be a comedy, but that never came to fruition, though it remains bubbly and fun, so no biggie. And the Vinyl foal voice, while definitely solid, could have been better.

Regardless, I had fun writing it too. Even if I didn’t end up branching beyond my writing instincts as much as I’d have liked, I think I did good by the two leads, striking a balance between how I’d write them and how the fandom generally does. And characterisation is king. Hopefully greatazuredragon likes it as much as I do.

Happy Hearth’s Warming, everypony!


See? Not even 1,400 words on the behind-the-scenes. So, eh, not exactly “short”, but we do take Author’s Notes quite seriously round these parts…

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