Thank you all, again, for your interest. It's been less than four hours since we went live and this is already exploding. I'm looking forward to working with you all.

That said, there's one circle that I'd like to try to square up front; and then I'd like to use this thread to open up discussion.

Aragon, in his blog post introducing the anthology, said it was going to be:

... A series of entries on weird, imaginary beings that live in Equestria. Odd as balls. Be as fucking surreal as possible. Not only that, one step beyond—tell a story through them. Have a metaplot that unfolds through the entries. It’ll be tough to plan, but I’m sure we can do it ...

You'll note that my own blog post, with the official call for submissions, doesn't say anything about that. If anything, it's the opposite: asking a wide variety of authors to chip in self-contained chapters with their own, unique ideas, related to the others only in theme.

What gives?

And the answer to that has a couple of parts — because this is one of those cases where multiple things are true simultaneously, and the devil's in the details.

1. This Is Not Linear Storytelling

I'll start by going back straight to Borges himself, in The Book of Imaginary Beings' (1967 edition) foreword:

Isn't that awesome? When's the last time you picked up a book that explicitly asked you to flip through at random?

And it's a natural outgrowth of the format. You don't use an encyclopedia to tell a story in front-to-back order. You tell a series of tiny, individual stories with it. Those individual stories can, perhaps, build up into something greater — but that's the literary equivalent of the reader assembling a jigsaw puzzle. If you have a larger picture, you give up control of the way that those pieces come together — trusting only that once everything is together, it adds to more than the sum of its parts.

That's ... kind of crazy, if you step back and look at it. It's a huge investment of faith in the reader. We're authors because we like creating; and the tradeoff, usually, is that we get to use our narrative control to frame the reader's experience of the piece, asking them to look at the work in a certain way.

So we're taking quite a high dive here. Performing one heck of an experiment. What narrative can we produce, when we give up that control?

2. There Are Layers

This is NOT to say that that experiment in non-linear storytelling is all the work is going to be.

To the contrary, there is something critical which liberates us to take that experiment: the fact that the work has value entirely aside from that experiment.

If the non-linear storytelling turns out to be a huge nothingburger, then we still end up with something special — a collective encyclopedia of the bizarre by authors from around the pony fanfic community.

The most important job is the one I asked for up front. Write awesome entries. Don't worry about the bigger picture. Because, at the end of the day, if someone clicks through to a single random chapter of the book, we want them to be rewarded. The last thing we want is for them to perceive a fragment whose appreciation requires reading another hundred chapters.

With that said:

3. We Want Authors Going As Deep In With Us As They're Enthusiastic About

Job 1 is writing an entry that stands on its own and creates something cool. That's the only thing we're asking.

But we are trying to build — and build support for — recurring themes that reward readers for connecting the dots across multiple entries. And if you think that sounds awesome — I certainly do! — then the more people we get in on this, the more layered the work can get.

Let me repeat myself: Job 1 is writing an entry that stands on its own and creates something cool. That won't change. But if we all cite the same authors, refer to the same events, and make subtle points about different things each time — and keep the tone consistent enough that it's obvious it's intentional — then we get to tell a collective story above and beyond each of our contributions.

We've got plans for at least one larger theme. Aragon's taking the point on that one: an ongoing examination of Celestia and the cover-up of her sister's banishment. (That's why we've got a few articles marked as reserved on the spreadsheet, and plans for a few more beyond that.) Our theme doesn't need to be a part of every entry, though ... and it doesn't even need to be the only shared story. If anyone else wants to recruit other authors and start their own little sub-jigsaw puzzle, there's room for it!

So one thing I'd like to do is open a conversation about the ways that the entries interlink. It will be entirely optional, and we're gonna have to figure out most of it along the way (mostly based on what sort of buy-in we get), and probably get authors to poke things into otherwise finished articles during the editing process, if they're willing.

I don't have directions for people to follow yet, and I'm not sure I can provide good answers until I know what people's questions are. (Aragon's also got a clearer grasp of that vision; I'm trying to talk from the logistical side.) I'm just trying to be open about that second layer of goal which we'll be working on, both behind the scenes and out in the open.

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I suppose an obvious starting point would be the references and how they parallel their real-world equivalents.

For instance, the real George Cuvier tried to explain the fossils of no-longer-surviving species by proposing that biblical-sized catastrophes regularly destroyed them, making way for new species to be created. His pony equivalent Hoovier could have a similar theory, in which many strange apocryphal species were created by Discord's chaos and then wiped out once he was gone (and the chaos magic that sustained them no longer existed).

More generally, if we're using real-world analogues so closely, I think we might as well go the whole hog and use the real-world historical developments and literary/scholarly themes too, all translated through the pony lens. And through the Borges/Boar Guest style too, of course.

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More generally, if we're using real-world analogues so closely, I think we might as well go the whole hog and use the real-world historical developments and literary/scholarly themes too, all translated through the pony lens. And through the Borges/Boar Guest style too, of course.

Nah.

That's a noble idea, really, to go whole hog -- but I also think it's a pain in the ass. We're already editing a lot, homogenizing the entries so they're all a bit Borgesian at least in theory. I outright refuse to force everybody to limit their creativity or what they're allowed to say even further so we properly follow Darwin's line of thought when we quote Dour Whinny to make a joke about plankton being the natural enemy of sea sponges.

One has to be realistic. Doing that would make writing for this anthology, and editing for it, unbelievably pedantic -- and for the readers, there would be little to no difference.

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Something I was thinking about incorporating into my entry, but would probably be better served as part of a forward for the whole anthology, is a glossary of relevant terms. In MLP, the word 'creature' seems to refer to a sapient races, as evidenced by the frequent use of 'everycreature' in season eight to account for the non-pony members of a group. This is in contrast to animals, which seem to function as they do in real life, but with slightly higher capacity for thought, and monsters, which have some amount of magic at their disposal and are largely malevolent in nature.

Calling something like a Flyder a creature when it's really more of an unusual hybrid animal would just lead to confusion.

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a coincidental example of non-linear story I just remembered: the original set of Magic the Gathering threw in flavor text to fill space on otherwise blank cards, and many of them were written in a style obviously inspired by Borges (ex am ples). None of them are connected though. Then in the Antiquities expansion, there was a meta-plot about some great war connected through the flavor text, and one could piece together the characters and their relationships (exa mp les). I think it works because it's still written in a dry scholarly tone. It's not interested in telling you the actual narrative, it's more like an archeologist studying a rediscovered relic and explaining how this fits into that narrative which you are already assumed to know.

Dark Souls also plays with this to strong effect. To reinforce Horizon's point #2 above, both these examples only work because none of the narrative is required to enjoy these games. Each creature entry should stand on its own. And it's okay that some readers will see the trees and not notice the forest, those who get really absorbed will use those trees to map out the forest on their own volition.

That said, from experience I've noticed there's a pitfall where putting the mystery itself in the spotlight can backfire. Readers feel disappointed because you didn't provide the payoff in the same way. Don't call too much direct attention to it! It's much more effective when the reader has to discover the unexplained mystery on their own, as now they're put in a certain mindset where they're the ones creating the story, so they must dive in to answer their own riddles. Instead of sitting back and waiting for the revelation.

So anyway. I think it's a fun challenge, but I'm still not sure what kinds of themes the organizers are looking for. The spoiler-texted story plan is CLASSIFIED INFORMATION for now, so writers might be too scared to accidentally trespass on that theme. I wish we had more examples to get started. But I guess I'll throw out some broad ideas and see if it gets anyone talking?

1. The Pillars of Old Equestria - these seem perfect for this anthology. 4 of the 6 are popular in folktales, yet still regarded as legends with no evidence of historical basis. Meadowbrook and Starswirl are the opposite: accepted as ancient scholars, but not popularly known.

The problem is, what happened to them isn't a very interesting mystery, since it's already explained in the show. Until then, ponies had no idea that they all joined forces to fight evil. Perhaps it doesn't have to be a mystery at all, but just some meta-story about one pillar's epic quest or something. Like the Magic example from above, if you already have the basic narrative planned out, you can use entries to point at the narrative without having to fill in the gaps.

2. The Crystal Empire, or Kathman-Dew or Pegasopolis - pulled these from the Author's Guide. I think there's a lot of potential here. Again, the what isn't as intriguing as the why. It's fairly obvious they're not around anymore, but maybe the truth is more complicated? Perhaps Peony was hasty to assume the Air Rays devoured Kathman-Dew, and instead someone (Commander Hurricane perhaps?) caused an ecological chain reaction that led to some other monster destroying it. With some coordination along that chain, it can lead to the true culprit.

3. The seperated lovers - this is just off the top of my head to give an example of a really simple 3-part structure. Let's say there's the same romantic myth referenced in 2 entries. They seem identical, except for one haunting inconsistency if you read carefully enough. Then there's a 3rd entry about a strange creature that would reconcile the inconsistency, but without referencing that myth or the other 2 stories. This might be really subtle and easily missed. But I think if all 3 parts are enjoyable on their own, it won't go as unappreciated as you'd expect.

Some of these can be assembled accidentally from one author reading a few other entries and figuring out how to connect them together. But others might take some careful planning so everyone knows what to do, and anyone can jump in and contribute. Anyone feel inspired?

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Longer response later hopefully, but these are all great points, especially with the Magic example. We're definitely taking these ideas into account with our own "plotline".

Aragon and I both love your sample ideas, especially #3. Are you willing to maybe take point on it? Poke some of the authors working on entries that seem relevant, and see if they want to work in that romantic myth, and write the third entry (which requires a little more finesse to square the circle) yourself? Just let us know your plans if you do, so we can greenlight you right away and ensure all three of those things survive the editing process.