TInterruption and Intervention

• MLP: FiM
• Romance
• Drama
• Slice of Life

During his downtime, Royal Scribe to Princess Luna, Astral Ink, receives some timely advice. Sometimes the right words from the right pony makes all the difference in the world.

• Profanity
• Luna
• OC
• Raven Inkwell

Scribe of the Nightwings · 7k words  ·  99  3 · 1.7k views

Interruption and Intervention

by Scribe of the Nightwings

Summary

Astral Ink, the Royal Scribe assigned Princess Luna, was relaxing in his quarters when he was then visited by Raven Inkwell. A few disagreements here and there eventually lead to some uncomfortable revelations that may put Astral's position in Canterlot in jeopardy. All leading up to an unexpected visitor to appear to give some advice and a few personal thoughts that push the scribe in the right direction once again.

Initial Thoughts

Well, that’s certainly a summary. I very much don’t care for OC stories, in principle, so I was initially going to pass this one over… except for the next line in the long description.

A (sorta) vent fic that covers topics such as stress, procrastination and self doubt over one's abilities that may be a denial over laziness.

That’s gonna be a MOOD from me. So, a story dealing with two characters I really like to see in fanfic stories (Luna and Raven), plus a writer-character dealing with horrid writer’s block and self-esteem stuff? Well… crap, now I gotta give it a shot.

My General Reaction

So, the story bills itself as a bit of a rant/vent, and I think that’s mostly accurate. Astral Ink will feel very real for anyone here who’s dealt with similar levels of self-doubt and procrastination. I know I’ve done the thing where you spend most of a month screwing around before you rush to finish a project at the last second. And it’s bitten me as often as it’s worked out, so the main OC is probably the story’s best part.

Which is good, because there are a lot of problems that would drag this thing down into the mud in the hands of a lesser writer or in a story with a less interesting protagonist.

Interruption and Intervention isn’t that simple of a story, but it’s timeline is. Astral is napping/reading in his room, when Raven Inkwell, his Day Court counterpart, comes in to tell him to get off his lazy butt and finish the reports he was supposed to do a week past. It turns into an argument as Raven seems concerned about his drop-off in productivity, and then it turns into a disaster when Luna walks in on the resulting shouting match.

Happily (assuming you’re rooting for Astral to get back in the game), Luna is able to talk with Astral and help him push past some rather realistic insecurities and emotional hang-ups, leading to him getting back to work… and her silently admitting to a crush on him?

Okay… huh? Did not see that particular combination going down, though maybe I should?

Regardless, I think I liked the story, overall. It’s pleasant, in the all the right ways. Despite that, the problems aren’t something to completely ignore.

First, the story is a bit of a grammatical mess. This is a case of “death by a thousand cuts”, meaning that while there are a lot of little mistakes and errors throughout the text, most of them are tiny. It’s just that I’m a grammar-fanatic, and grammar is important for story flow. Most mistakes are tiny, as I said. Missing commas at the end of quotations – or periods being put in their places – as well as the occasional missing word are the most common things I noticed, but they can lead to my brain skipping lines or faltering while reading, so they deserve a mention.

Really, it’s the Purple Pony Prose that hurts more. The flow of the story gets bogged down with pronoun replacements, which are very commonly strewn throughout the text. This might not be too bad, except for two other problems. First, that the paragraphs are padded. They are all large blocks of text, and most are of uniform length. This makes it hard to look at the page, since the sameness actually does start to bore the readers’ eyes. Breaking up big bloc paragraphs is a very good idea for most writers, and it would be good here.

Second, the text itself is very Tell vs Show. There are some good details here and there, but for the most part it reads like a constant internal monologue from the viewpoint characters, full of ‘as you know’s and outright explanations for characterizations and histories that could have better been presented in other ways, using concrete details and descriptions of how the characters act around each other.

Grammar and Word Things

7/10 – A bit stiff, missing punctuation and key words
This story suffers from having many, many tiny grammatical errors lightly sprinkled throughout. The dreaded “Purple Pony” stuff is awkward-looking with how frequent it’s used, but the occasional misused tense or sentence structure also hampers legibility at times. The following were right at the beginning, and caused my brain to skip a beat, which told me something was wrong.

Unfortunately, that prospect was cut short as a third set of knocks were followed by a voice that he knew all too well.

So, it was with great frustration that he had to leave his ever-soft bed.

Finally, most of the dialogue used periods instead of commas. If they are truly different sentences, this is fine, but there were many instances of a full period stop, followed by: “she said”, no capitalization. This is, admittedly, more a pet peeve than some issues.

Story/Plot/Pacing

7/10 – Padded paragraphs complicate an otherwise fine structure
The story is much slower and more bloated than it had to be. Every paragraph looks like a wall of text, and this leads to the feeling that the story is taking much longer than it really is. Breaking up the paragraphs would help somewhat, but the story’s overuse of Tell over Show also drags the pacing down a bit.

Characters

7/10 – Good emotion, lacking in details
Obviously, Astral is an OC and Raven is a background pony at best. There’s not much to screw up there. Princess Luna is well-represented, and I appreciated her depiction as being a wise and understanding pony. I feel like her essence was presented well, here. It’s just that the odd romance is hard to justify, and the general wordiness and padding on display causes Luna to come across as too chatty, for lack of a better term.

Final Word and Rating

7/10
Interruption and Intervention is a story about some uncomfortably familiar topics to anyone who’s ever tried to write or create something of their own, or anyone who’s felt themselves being buried in stress and work. It hits a very real chord that should resonate with most people who read it, only held back by some small grammar issues and some padding.

To the author: My two biggest pieces of advice for you with regards to this story would be:

1) Break up paragraphs. Paragraphs of differing lengths are more visually interesting, and will hold your readers’ interest longer.

2) Show more, tell less. While Show Don’t Tell is sort of a meme at this point, it’s true that readers like to know what things look like. So, it stands to reason that describing more physical aspects of characters, instead of just telling the reader how a character feels, will illicit a stronger response. How does Astral show he is sad or reflective? What does his face look like? What actions does he take or make to show his frustration at a situation?

As for catching more grammar mistakes, I like to read through my stories once more before publishing, but out loud. That usually makes it harder for me to skip over a dropped word or bad punctuation, since I’m using more brain processes to check the text.

Feel free to comment below.

<For Archive Purposes: 7/10>

Hey there, just wanted to say thank you very much for finding the time for giving my story a read and giving a review.

Going in to writing this story, I knew that it would be a challenge writing a compelling OC-centered story (especially one that has interaction with canon characters) would be difficult. So I made sure to try to hone in on the personal struggles Astral is going through so that readers could relate to him and would have a reason to care about what happens to him. I'm happy that you found this aspect that I worked so hard on interesting to the point where it convinced you to check out the story.

I think you offer up some very accurate criticisms with my grammar and padding. I'm not sure if you noticed from my low story count, but I'm kind of a new writer here on the site. I especially need to watch myself with the Purple Pony Prose in the future, which I think is my main kryptonite. I'll also try to put in heavier grammar checks in my stories before I publish them.

In any case, I'm very satisfied with this review score and I'm grateful for the helpful criticism you gave me to help improve my writing. Thank you very much!

P.S.
Here some artwork of one of the scenes from the story from Little Tigress. She did a fantastic job with it!