1164610
That looks awesome. Thank you so much for doing this for us!

1164907

My pleasure! Like I said to bats last night, gives me something to do between my 4 hour class lectures.

That and sometimes during class. (Shhh)

~Skeeter The Lurker

1169007 That's what I was thinking after I put a bit of thought into it. But I read a couple of other letters and I saw they were dated in real time. It can be changed rather easily, so it isn't that big of a deal.

I actually don't think that it really matters if they're dated, but I don't write letters anymore, so I don't really know.

I'm just going to concern myself in dating letters to correspond to the narratives, both within Twilight's five different correspondences, as well as the over-arching narrative that's being built for Twilight across all the letters. Right now I'm dating them in real time, because real time seems appropriate for the 'story' that I'm telling, but I'm sure there are days that I'll want to write a letter and not be able to, and thus need to date earlier or whatnot.

I think bats has the right of it. I think that if we want to keep this rolling for a little while, we will need to slow down the timeline at some point, or we will run out of summer. That is, unless we want to keep them away from each other longer than that, but that starts getting a little unrealistic at some point. Rarity and Applejack have business to run, after all, and who is taking care of Fluttershy's critters for all that time? Somepony's gotta! So I'm real-timing it for now, but I think I'll be modifying the dates to fit the narrative down the road.

1170611 Oh, don't you worry about that! Spike is taking care of them when he isn't in the library. Oh, he's such a kind dragon. I trust that he'll do the job just fine!

On the other hoof, if he bucks this up, he'll face a wrath unlike anything Pinkie has in her little shop of horrors.

1163831>>1169007>>1169200>>1170611>>1163928

A quick note on writing at your own pace and dating letters and stuff:

Okay, when I said this goes at your own pace, I really meant it. And I still do. We'll all have times when we're busy (I'll be spending next week with my family, for instance) and times when we're bored and want to write dozens of letters back and forth with another bored person.

So how do we work this with dates? How do we keep some folks from falling too far behind?

Back-dating is one solution, and works if both writers have been slow about things. Though if the characters have mentioned each other, or if one character has been moving time ahead in a different exchange, it could get confusing.

Postcards and notes are something to consider if you know your character would be writing more often, but you only have time to answer letters once a week. Just a quick note saying "Hi! Very busy. Wish you were here. Longer letter later. Love, [pony]" can keep you caught up in the timeline if you feel like you're falling too far behind.

We could set up some kind of master timeline, where we enter anything important storywise and when it happens for our character, so post-dated letters know what they're jumping into. (This does not solve the problem of if they give info that would have changed events.)

Finally, there's the option of not letting those of us who are bored get too far ahead. This would be kind of a limit on the number of exchanges per week for any given character set. For example, AJ and Dash already have 6 letters, while Rarity and Pinkie haven't exchanged a letter. We could say that the first week limit is six- AJ and Dash can't write any more to each other until Sunday. They can write to other characters (until those exchanges are at 6) and on Sunday they can start writing again until they reach another six for that week. While it would still be possible to fall behind the story-lines in this model, at least you know there's a limit to how far behind the current story-lines you can fall.

Personally, I'd prefer to leave all of this up to your own common sense. Jake and I can both see we're getting ahead, we should slow down. You can decide, when you sit down to write, where a reasonable place to date your letter would be.

But if people want me to set some guidelines, or a timeline document, or whatever, let me know here, and let me know what might be most helpful.

1163831>>1169007>>1169200>>1170611>>1163928
Look at us! We're trending! (According to the new sidebar on the Groups page.)

I've always wanted to trend...

1189847

Trendin' like a baws.

1189847 We're taking the group world by storm? That can only mean one thing!

It's...

1189847 Does this mean you'll take us out for ice cream?

1191100
Sure! Fancy ice cream! Meet me at the Cold Stone in Ocean City, MD at 1 PM on Wednesday. Anyone who shows up gets all the ice cream you can eat!

1191191
Sorry, my husband is going to have the car that day.

1191100
AJ's letter to Fluttershy is up, and I forgot to tag you in it. So, tag.

1205557 Oh boy oh boy I'm like a child in a shoebox!

1205557 Wait no, that was definitely not right.

1552436 Oops! That's what I get for wanting to get it posted before I cooked lunch. Hunger drives a man to insane things like not locking his post again!

1205580>>1552436>>1552703>>1190053

Okay, this might be a long one, because we have a lot of stuff to cover!

The first thing is end game plans. Now, since none of the mane six need to go back to school, the end of "summer" doesn't need to be labor day or anything. But we'll probably want to finish up in the next month. So if you have story lines you want to start tying up, this is the time to do it, especially with the less active members needing time to respond.

This part may need a little extra communication (Steel-and-Churchy-I'm-looking-at-you) to decide what kind of ending you're writing, so feel free to use this thread or shoot some PMs and lay your cards on the table if you think it'll help bring the story to a satisfying conclusion of some sort.

Alternately, Jake, bats and I have talked about continuing our story through an ongoing collab. If folks have story elements they'd like to wrap up there, or want us to wrap up in the narrative, I'm sure that could be arranged.

I'll also tentatively float the idea of doing a final collab piece with all of us, in the gdoc RP/Collab style that bats, Jake and I were using? (Maybe Pinkie's party?) I have no idea how it would work with so many people, I'm shocked that the ones we did worked with three of us, to be honest. But that would involve all of us being online at a specific day and time, probably for a good chunk of time. So it's just a thought.

Now we come to the question of publishing this as a fic on the site. 1164921, did you have plans for that? I know you've been compiling the gdocs, but I've never been totally clear what the ultimate goal was in terms of publishing on the site with those. If we do publish it, do we want it to be on Steel's/bats'/my account, to reach the largest number of followers? Another option would be the Collab Cage account-- it's not an official Collab Cage collab, but I'm sure if I asked, Peregrine Caged would let us use the account, if we wanted a neutral place to post.

There are some other miscellaneous things to tackle there- making sure we have 1373385 's okay on this, figuring out what to do with the extra material, both SFW and NSFW, and how it should be rated depending on what we do with it, and cover art. But all that can be addressed when we know what we want to do in general.

Um... I think those were the things I wanted to cover. I hope every has gotten at least some enjoyment from this so far. I know I have. Thanks for trying this, you guys! (That includes AcreuBall and Skeeter.)

1585530
I would be fine with that, too, if that's what he wants. He's doing the work of putting it together.

1585499

I already have it prepped under my name, but can easily toss toward one of you, if you'd like.

~Skeeter The Lurker

1586546
Nope, that's just fine with me. I'm sure we'll all blog it.

1586547

Cool.

I, too, will be blogging it. As will a number of others, should I ask. (I hope.)

~Skeeter The Lurker

1585499 Well, it really all depends on Shy at this point. Their storyline can end in a few ways. Right now looks like Sad or even Tragedy.

1588966
Have you and Churchy discussed the issue? Even if he's not interested in shipping, maybe he could bring to the table some kind of apology/heartfelt declaration of friendship that might sooth Rarity's feelings.

That's what I'm suggesting here, why don't you guys set out some ending conditions that would be the best compromise you can reach for the stories you want to tell.

1585499 I've never really done a collab with anyone, other then the chain story that Churchy was doing, so I guess I'd have to know what the process is before I could see whether I'd want to do it or not. My inclination is that I would probably like it, but I'm also pretty busy. I'm not sure that I could devote, say, eight hours to being online bouncing ideas back and forth.

As for Skeeter publishing the entire thing, that's cool with me. Would we just make the threads into individual chapters? That seems like the most logical thing to me, but I'm not sure how Skeeters got it all done up.

1589890
In terms of the collab, what we've been doing is almost roleplaying- on a gdoc, one of us writes our character's actions, dialogue, and/or narration, then the next person jumps in with theirs. We use the chat for suggestions and jokes.

This works for me, bats, and Jake, but I don't know how it would work with more people. As for time, we usually do a two or three hour chunk, with copious bullshitting beforehand.

ATTENTION!!!

I have no opinion.

Rabid dogs won't keep me away from continuing on with the Appledashlight collabing after the summer ends, but other than that, I'm down for a big final party, or skipping that, or doing whatever anyone else wants to do for it.

Well, I suppose I have it set up already for Twilight to visit with 1588966 in Baltimare and 1589384 in Palomino Beach before the summer's out (or conceivably both Pinkie and Fluttershy as well), so that should probably be organized before too long, or not and those could be skipped if there is a lack of time or narrative need for said visits before the end.

In terms of what's going on with Twilight, a visit with Applejack should probably happen. Other than that, I can wrap up the other story elements I want to cover in letters.

1590032
I'm ready whenever you are!

1589021 Hey, I'm just playing it the way the character feels. Are you really surprised that I would over-dramatize? Do you see how I write her in.... oh everything?

1590048

Well, hell, why wait then?

How's your Monday/Tuesday look?

1590866
Looking good so far! Have Twilight get her towel and sunglasses ready for Palomino Beach.

1591019

The sunglasses are so I can stare at your ass while you're surfing, right?!

Erm...I mean...

1591091
Somepony's been spendin' a little too much time with Dash.

1592068 Quite right, even if I did take it in an entirely different path. They should put names to the letters, then everyone can see exactly when Rarity's letters stopped being written by someone competent and began being penned by the rabid shipper.1592075

1591165

Well, I sent the replies. Churchy PMed me and I laid out how things could go, based on Shy. We can have a happy end (which I would prefer) but I can also work with a bittersweet end in which Rarity gets a little mad then slowly works her way to pettyness over being snubbed, to finally acceptance

1600879>>1592075>>1591165>>1591091>>1162087

So I'm thinking we should wrap this thing up pretty soon. The summer's pretty much over and the letters have slowed.

I think getting all of us together for a skype session sounds like it would be a little complicated and probably chaotic for the purposes of getting a story together, so I was wondering how a round robin collab thing might work out. We could each write a couple thousand words from out pony's perspective about what the homecoming is like and then pass it along. People could wrap up their character whenever they wanted to. That would allow us all to read what had come before and riff off of it.

Whatcha think?

1760897 I think Rarity's storyline reached a resolution of sorts. I may want to get together with you, x. it might be fun to write up a night on the town with Pinkie and Rarity.

1771231 Sounds good to me. I'll start noting some ideas down in case you feel like it. I'm sure it's obvious, but I'm deeply into hijinks and absurdity, so that's probably what you'll get from me. Just let me know if it gets too whacked out for your suspension of disbelief. I don't know how helpful I'll be with any romance elements, but I'll try.

1761207 Ol' Churchy is a method actor. He's really playing the 'shy' part of Fluttershy up! I guess Rarity REALLY embarrassed Fluttershy.

1771817 I told you before, romance is not on Rarity's mind, but she probably will still be worried about Pinkie's near miss with Frat Rush. A lady must be able to defend her honor, and she cannot do that if she does not recognize predators!

1771866

Maybe Frat Rush should show up in Ponyville. Perhaps Pinkie has earned herself a stalker! Frat Rush does not like losing!

Whoa, that would have made for some interesting letters. I should have thought of that at the beginning of this whole thing...