Featured on Equestria Daily! + Flashfic Contest Judging and More! · 6:31pm Apr 21st, 2022
Some pretty big and fun sets of news to share!
First off, as mentioned in the title, I got a fic featured on Equestria Daily today! Specifically, that would be my first fic, "Late-Night Conversations", which I submitted shortly after publishing the sequel in the hopes of promoting it. (Incidentally, just a few days ago, LNC became my first story to cross the 1000-view mark!) However, when I got an email back a few weeks letter with a ton of edits to make, I had just kicked off work on "The Great and Powerful Trixie Needs a Date" and ended up sitting on that email for a few weeks before coming back. Over the last weekend, however, I finally dove in and re-edited "Conversations", and later made similar revisions to "Shaking Off Bad Memories" to match.
Reviewing and partially rewriting these stories was an interesting process. The big thing I got flack from the pre-reader for was perspective. Looking at their advice helped me realize I've kinda been writing a lot of my stories like they were movies, as though they had a camera that could seamlessly switch perspective from one side of the conversation to the other. In one paragraph, you might be getting Rarity's POV; two paragraphs later, you'll get Sunset's. But, of course, you can't convey camera angles in literature, and you can't mix limited and omniscient narrator tropes in that way. So the bulk of my edits were to rewrite the scenes to focus solely on a single character's POV.
I'm probably not going to go back and do this for all of my fics, since I don't plan on submitting stuff like "Unforgettable Luncheon", "Winter Holidate" or "Trixie Needs a Date" to EqD. But it was definitely a good self-improvement exercise and something to keep in mind while writing for the future.
Anyways, "Shaking Off Bad Memories" should appear on EqD sometime next week. If you want to see the changes, feel free to check them out.
The second piece of news is (edit: was) rather time-sensitive if you want to do anything with it. Since December, I've been contributing to Loganberry's Flashfic group, which hosts the monthly Flashfic 150 contest. If you're not aware what that is, basically you write a short 150-or-fewer word G4 MLP story based on the provided prompt! The winner gets to pick the prompt for the next month. Anyway, last month marked my first victory, but because April 2022 happens to be the 5th anniversary of the contest, I got a special bonus prize as well...
I'm judging the contest this month!
So if you want to submit a story and force me to look at your writing, now's your chance! But don't wait -- the deadline is today at 7pm Eastern Time (4pm Pacific Time, midnight UK time)! Yes, I should have announced this in an earlier blog, but it didn't seem newsworthy enough on its on and I already did a "Shameless Self-Promotion" thread for it. But this month's prompt is "The Haunting" and, if you're reading this when I publish, you still have over 4 hours to come up with a miniature-length story! Lots of people submit on the last day anyway, so take a chance if you wish!
Here's the link to the April contest, ending soon!
Finally, I'm super-thrilled with the reception for my SunTrix fic! I know it got a few complaints for not being long enough, and I get it, but I don't plan to make any additions to it at this time. But it was so cool to see this one on the featured page (even with the "View Mature" setting activated!) for over a day. Makes me feel like I'm hitting the big leagues!
That's all in terms of big announcements. I'm developing ideas for my next two "big" stories, a Pride & Positivity fic for June and a potential "EqG Finale" story very different than what I've talked about in the past. I also have ideas for shorter fun stories, and I'm considering resurrecting the "Sci-Twi Hosts Jeopardy" idea as an entry into the "Thousand Words" contest. But we'll see how things go.
Thanks for reading and have a nice day!
-Eileen
Hey! That's cool!
Glad to see yourself improve and I may check out Shaking Off Bad Memories to see what changed. Good luck in your next fics and remember I'm always up to do some preread/light editing.
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The good news is by the time I got around to writing SOBM, I'd unconsciously gotten a bit better at keeping my perspective straight; the only really bad offenders were at the very beginning, when I kept flipping between Roseluck and Wallflower's POV in the first scene, and the epilogue, when I kept shifting from Sunset to Rarity for brief moments. The bulk of the story only needed a few adjustments, the biggest being I had to move some of Wallflower's self-doubting inner monologue from Chapter 3 to a past-tense version early in Chapter 4 in order to keep it in the story. Chapter 2 and 5 were already written entirely from Sunset's POV, thankfully.
Congrats.