//------------------------------//
// Onto the Pony Planet 
// Story: Celestia Sleeps In 
// by Admiral Biscuit 
//------------------------------//

Next chapter of Celestia Sleeps In is right here; just click through.  



I Wanted to Write a Story
Admiral Biscuit
9.19.13


Friends, it’s been quite a journey. Celestia Sleeps In was one of the first fanfiction stories I conceived in my head, although not the first published. I needed practice.

Maybe I should start a little further back. Like most of my readers, I’m not a 6-12 year old girl. I’m male and in my mid-thirties. I work during the week at an auto repair shop, and on the weekends, I work with developmentally disabled adults in group homes.

I got introduced to the show by way of the Cheezburger network. I was regularly amusing myself at work looking at demotivational posters and funny pictures of cats, when I came across my first pony meme. Then another. 

Before too long, I was working with a guy that was a real handful (I finally stopped taking shifts with him when he attacked me in the van while I was driving, then ran through traffic to Family Video); during brief downtimes I was amusing myself by scrolling through pictures of pastel ponies. It was a great form of escapism.

I hadn’t watched any of the episodes. It took me months to work up the courage to do it. The easy part was getting the Friendship Express video from the library. I sat at the computer, looking at the DVD and looking at my pony wallpaper and worried. What if the episodes weren’t as good as the show I’d imagined? What then? Maybe I wouldn’t like the voice actors. As anyone who watches Futurama knows, once you’ve watched it, you can’t un-watch it. Bravely, I clicked the play button.

I loved it. Absolutely loved it. Before too long, I had bought all the episodes on iTunes (after watching them all on YouTube first). My unlimited data from Sprint peaked at 35,000,000 datas one month (I assume that’s 35GB).

All good things must come to an end, of course, and season two finally did. What could I do throughout the summer? I’m not going to claim that I wouldn’t have made it if I didn’t have my pony fix; I’ve probably got thousands (literally, thousands) of books I could amuse myself with. But there was just something compelling about the ponies. I wanted more.

I’ve always been more of a reader than a TV watcher. My parents threw out the TV before I was born, so I never really got into the habit of rotting my brain in front of it; rather, I was flopped out on the couch, reading through my dad’s collection of J.R.R. Tolkien or C.S. Lewis. By sixth grade, I’d moved on to more action-oriented stories, burning through the library’s entire collection of Alistair Maclean, Stephen King, and Piers Anthony. I devoured Clive Cussler, read as many Dragonlance books as I could convince friends to loan me, and got the idea in my head that maybe I could write my own story.

I still have the original copy of it somewhere, carefully written out in cursive pencil. It’s terrible. The idea was good; the execution was not. But I was undaunted. When I got to college, I had it in my mind to re-do the whole thing. Since I’d repeatedly gotten stuck on fiddly details, I just went through the whole thing without ever proofing it; then I went back and started fixing stuff.

My senior project was a short novel.

The next few years were pretty dry; I was coping with all the changes that accompany the transition from college life to adulthood. I moved four times, eventually finding myself nearly destitute and unemployed, and Christmas was coming.

So I wrote. I wrote and wrote. For the next few years, one of the presents I handed my parents each year was a new story. When my dad was down with knee replacement surgery, I sent him short stories nearly every day, to cheer him up.

Now back to the fanfiction. I had a less-than-charitable view of fanfiction writers. I knew that there was a large body of Harry Potter fanfiction, and while I liked the franchise, it held no interest for me. I figured that it was largely poorly-written wish-fulfillment stories by desperate middle-school aged kids who had no worldly experience whatsoever and probably couldn’t spell, either. I’m sure that I was largely right.

However. Being the curious and responsible person I am, I did my research. I started scouring fan sites for the most popular and best (not always the same thing) MLP fanfictions. I discovered such gems as It’s A Dangerous Business, Simply Rarity, Bubbles, and the Pony Psychology Series. I was hooked. I discovered FimFiction, and the marvelous feature box. Somehow, I began to read HiE stories. I’ve always had a fondness for Sci-Fi, and the first-contact scenario is fertile ground.

But as I read the stories, I became disillusioned. Many of them were the same wish-fulfillment story; many of them seemed to end in romance, either explicit or implied. I wanted more, and it was so difficult to find. I wanted the why and how behind the first-contact, but so many authors were glossing that over so that their character could get busy with a pony.

Then I read Arrow 18, and saw what the genre could be. I knew what I had to do.





The idea came about at work. Richard was late; his excuse was that he slept in. I muttered under my breath, “Celestia can’t sleep in,” and there was the first part. I thought about that during the day. Over a thousand years of leadership, the most powerful creature in Equestria . . . and she can never wake to the sun. Her only hope was to go somewhere else, where she didn’t control the sun, and let its warming rays play over her coat, get up, and then hurry back home to raise the Equestrian sun.

That same day, the idea of a hiker crowning a rise on the land and looking down at Celestia fast asleep in the early dawn, a bevy of guards around her, implanted itself in my mind and wouldn’t let go.

I wrote the story in one sitting; it was about 4000 words. It was pretty good, I thought.  A nice little one-shot. It introduced the character of Dale (I have no idea how I chose his name).

But what happened next?

I could have submitted it as is. But I didn’t. Something about the story kept surfacing in my mind. My first two stories about Derpy were published and accepted. I was flattered that people were doing YouTube readings of them. Not Another Human In Equestria, a collection of HiE stories that were deliberately bad (well, most of them) was published and began garnering views. I kept thinking about Celestia Sleeps In. How would one go about making contact with a totally alien species? What if neither individual was a trained diplomat, linguist, or anything else? Just a man and a pony? Where would they meet? How would they avoid detection?

Now we delve into the next part of the story. Those of you who are reading this have no doubt been reading the author’s notes all along; if not, I recommend it. I had to do . . . research.

There’s a book I have by Ridley Pearson. It’s called Parallel Lies. It’s about railroads. Now, I’m not an expert. I’m a fan—I won’t deny that—but I’m no expert. If you asked me whether the Union Pacific or the Burlington Northern Santa Fe had more track mileage, I couldn’t tell you. This guy, though . . . he claims he had researchers help him. If he did, they either sucked or he just ignored them. I found the first major mistake on page 3: deadman’s switches not only cut engine power, they also put the brakes in emergency. A few paragraphs later, Ridley mentions that a locomotive weighs ten tons.  A Kenworth weighs ten tons; a locomotive is more than ten times that. I did read the whole book . . . but I found more amusement at picking out the grievous errors than the plotline.

I’d thought, once upon a time, that writing fiction would be easy. After all, it’s not like a research paper on Poe, where one actually needs to read scholarly works . . . in a nutshell, I was wrong.  Ridley Pearson showed me what happens if you don’t research. Simple questions need to be answered: what’s the golden breastplate that Celestia wears properly called, if anything? If real horses sleep standing up, why don’t ponies? How tall are they in comparison to a human? Most of this was fairly easily answered with internet research.

But other questions were more difficult. The problem with research is that one has to know where to look, and that’s not always easy. I recruited my parents early; they’re of Dale’s age, and my mother is a linguist. For what it’s worth, she figured Dale’s task was pretty much hopeless. I started asking questions about accents as I decided how their language might be written; I was fortunate in finding a co-worker who was educated in France. I even ate a chrysanthemum and cucumber sandwich, just to see what it tasted like (it was the wrong time of year to find daisies). Yes, I checked whether they were toxic first.

As time went on, I was putting my heart and soul in the work. There were times I should have stopped; times I staggered into work on a few hours of sleep because I was up late answering comments or writing another chapter. I skipped a SCA event I’d been to every year for the last 15—the story was more important. I sat on the edge of my chair, watching the view count tick up one-by-one, agonizing every time I got a downvote. What had I done wrong? How come that reader didn’t see it for the masterpiece it obviously was?

Eventually, I came to realize that there would be unhappy people no matter what I did. Virtually all of my stories have at least one downvote; I like to think it’s the same guy. I can picture him, hunched over his computer keyboard, muttering, “Admiral Biscuit published another story. Better downvote.” That’s ok. I can live with that.

Now here we are, just shy of a year after the story was conceived. It’s 145,000 words long; that’s about as long as The Two Towers. If it were published in paperback form, it’d be over 400 pages long.  

I’m an old-school book guy; this whole fanfiction thing is new to me. I posted a question on my blog about whether I should make this a trilogy or not, and the votes were generally for ‘not.’ But the fact is, the way I envisioned it in my head, it’s a trilogy. It slowed me down, struggling to keep going when—in my mind—the story was over. While I might not have the instincts of a popular published author, I’ve got to go with my gut here; the story was always meant to be three parts, and that’s just how it’s gotta be.

So, now for a glimpse behind the curtain. I promised some people I’d give an insight into Dale’s character. 

I’ve heard it said that you can’t write what you don’t know. I personally don’t buy that for a second . . . imagine how drab our bookshelves would be if they solely consisted of autobiographies. I can’t argue that experience makes a better writer, though. I think the right mix is a compromise between the two: write what you know and research what you don’t. 

Dale is largely an amalgam of my grandfather, my father, and myself. He’s not college educated, and stuck with one career his whole life—much like my grandfather. He’s a generally self-made man. He’s patient, thinking before he acts, but he can act quickly if he has to. For his age, he’s pretty accepting of social change. All those traits could be found in my grandfather. From my father, Dale’s age and his love of science fiction, as well as the perspective of a man who’s travelled overseas (my grandfather never left North America). It was my father who provided the memories of the moon landing, and it was my father who speculated with me on language, what Dale might and might not know. He found the nautical charts for North Fox Island, and we went over them together. While he’s not fool enough to actually canoe out to North Fox (it’s possible, but risky), in Dale’s situation, I think he’d react about the same way. Finally, we get to myself. I was the one doing the experiments and taste tests; I was the one who read all the stories and novels that Dale recounts. All of them were old enough that he would know of them.

I want to go back to my grandfather for a bit. He was born in Anne Arundel County Maryland, in 1913. His life always seemed a bit like a mystical story to me, and one of my regrets was that I never had time to write a biography of him. In the eyes of history, he was nobody special—I want to make that clear. He went to school, dropped out of college, got a job at the Baltimore assembly plant, worked his way up to Fisher Body, and eventually retired. He died in 2009. It always amazed me at the changes he saw in the world as he aged: horses disappearing off the streets to be replaced with automobiles and trucks. The biplanes and blimps patrolling the naval air station being replaced with jets, and eventually satellites and UAVs. Perhaps he didn’t understand all of it—he certainly never got a computer—but he saw it. Looking through his old photo albums was like looking through a history book.

He was a very practical man, not given to flights of fantasy. He had a leaf-vac that he dragged behind his tractor. When it wore out, he bought a new one. The first thing he did with it was take it apart, since he didn’t like the design. He spent all winter re-building it into what he wanted. When he finally had to begin using a cane, he modified one, knotting a monkey’s fist for his hand and a turk’s-head knot around the middle, and since he used to make his own fishing rods, it was only natural that he’d put custom windings on it.

I can’t think of anyone who would be more qualified to meet a unicorn on a remote beach. I think he would approach it in the slow, methodical way he approached everything else. 





The idiot ball.

I only include this because it’s one of the ongoing complaints I’ve noticed. People will say, “Why doesn’t Dale immediately recognize magic? How come Lyra doesn’t know what a canoe is?” Without citing other examples, I’ll just say that in a realistic first-contact scenario, both parties are limited by their experiences. To use the above examples, in modern society, an American would be more likely to imagine that a thing which he cannot explain is powered by some sort of fantastic tech, rather than magic. Do I know how my cell phone works? Not really. I’ve got a general idea of circuits and cell phone towers, but I certainly can’t open the thing up and say, “that’s the antenna.” Do I think it works on magic? No. Given the tech level in Equestria, boats aren’t made of metal, they’re made of wood. Lyra’s first impression on seeing an 18’ pointy metal object would not be “it’s a boat.” Especially since it isn’t in the water, and it is upside-down. If you told Columbus that he should build the Santa Maria out of aluminum and steel, he’d look at you like you were a special kind of madman.

The fact is, in a realistic first-contact story, neither party can assume anything about the second party. Just because it looks similar doesn’t mean it is. In terms of basic biological requirements, I’ve been merrily allowing every kind of helpful coincidence imaginable: they do breathe the same atmosphere, they do eat the same kind of food, gravity is roughly the same, etc. Both parties have been able to come to mostly-correct conclusions much faster than they would in a real first-contact situation, based on their coincidentally similar worlds. But, just to use our own solar system for an example: imagine if there were intelligent life on Jupiter. What kind of houses might they build? How would their eyesight differ from ours? What effect would earth gravity have on them?  

I can’t make my readers like this story, of course. You either think I’m doing well, or you don’t. But to those of you who are on the fence, I ask you this: whenever you see a character jumping to a conclusion that you know is wrong, ask yourself why. Because I can tell you, loyal reader: whenever a character makes a mis-step, I was there. I was looking at it, thinking what does this object signify? I probably gave my pre-readers grey hairs (the commenting on the cupcake was . . . lively, to say the least), but I think I got it mostly right.

In fact, I have a challenge for you. Look around your computer or tablet or smart phone or neural implant, or whatever you’re using to get these words into your brain. Pick up something—it doesn’t matter what. Look at it carefully. Now imagine that you don’t know what it is. Maybe you’ve been raised in a cave by wolves, having no concept of life outside the forest. Imagine that you’ve never seen that object before. Maybe it’s a book, maybe it’s a half-empty can of Coke. Doesn’t matter. Look at it as if it were an alien artifact of unknown significance. What does it tell you? What does it imply? Are there images on it? If so, would you recognize them, or might they be foreign to you? Would you be able to tell the difference between the image being a photograph or a drawing? If it’s a machine (and I use this term in the loosest sense), would you be able to identify how it worked? How might you go about identifying its properties? What might you misinterpret? Feel free to comment; I’d love to hear what you discover.





I should close this off, I guess, with a friendship report, since that seems apt. 

It’s hard to imagine that it’s been almost a year since I started working on the story. During the course of that year, I learned a lot about myself. I learned that I can write novel-length stories, if I put my mind to it. I learned that I can publish them in front of what we in the theatre world call ‘a hostile audience,’ and most of them will actually like it. I learned that a great number of you are willing to put in your own time commenting—both the good and the bad—and respectfully sharing your opinions. I’ve found a number of people who are willing to speculate with me, and go down the rabbit-hole hand-in-hand. 

Some of my readers have volunteered to pre-read, and I’m indebted to them. There are countless corrections which they have made, both small and large. I’m greatly indebted to the reader who first posted a link to my story on the SpaceBattles forum. It wasn’t what one would call a flattering review, but it garnered interest. As they say in showbiz, any publicity is good publicity.

Finally, I want to thank Cynewulf. He suggested in a comment that I write something about my experiences writing, and so I did. I hope you enjoyed your peek behind the curtain.

It’s been a wonderful journey with you so far. Won’t you travel with me just a little bit further?

— admiral biscuit





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