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I’m continuing my critiques of the entrants into the Imposing Sovereigns II contest. We continue down my list of “finalists”: stories which I considered awarding points to. I would like to stress, however, that I only ranked them because FanOfMostEverything made me; they are all excellent.

I must also point out, I never read the comic involving Princess Amore.

Title: The Heart Beats Still

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WARNING: The following blog posts contains some minor spoilers for Amending Fences. If you have not yet watched today’s episode, you might want to do so before you read this post.

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Many moons ago, I saw all those Multi-story-spanning alternate universes rampant at the time. I thought to myself, “I could do that.” As the title of this blog series may hint, it never truly congealed into a good story, let alone multiple stories. For today’s idea graveyard, I’d like to share the meandering process with you all. After all, as John Dewey said, “Failure is instructive. The person who really thinks learns quite as much from his failures as from his successes.”

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Review Index

Format Breakdown

I have reviewed some things that don’t traditionally receive deep criticism. I’ve done full length reviews of porn and a webcomic, for instance. Today, we add a Pony Music Video (PMV) to that list.

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I've wanted to write this one for a while, but a recent discussion in #writing-help (yes, that #writing-help) got me thinking about it again.

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[Found this sticky note at my departure gate at SeaTac, leaving EFNW. I do not believe in coincidences. 😌]

Dear Readers (including and especially all those enjoying the Autumn and the Autumn):

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Well, I'll say this: I'm less dead than I look.

Anyway, today I'd like to take a moment to talk about opening lines. We've got an Original Short Story Writeoff finishing up this evening.[1] I've spent a lot of the last week reading and reviewing, and beginning some revisions on an original story of my own. Going through this month's Writeoff entries, though, got me thinking about one of my favorite topics in fiction—and one it seems I've never blogged about before—opening lines.

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What do you guys think about working on more than one story at a time? Is it more productive or is it too distracting? Let me know in the comments!

I've got so many ideas for stories, but I really want to make sure the one I'm working on now gets updated regularly, whats a pony to do?

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Disclaimer

The purpose of this guide is to teach you, the writer, what you should and shouldn’t do to assure the quality of your stories, and to show you how to best communicate with other authors as well as your audience. We, the authors of this guide, understand this will come across as telling you what to do, but that is the point of any style guide or anyone offering advice. There are many ways of creating and viewing storytelling. We are merely providing our viewpoints on it.

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Through a combination of getting really sick of seeing people butcher Luna's archaic speech in their fics and happening to be studying the subject at the time, a few months ago I decided to make a simple guide to writing Luna dialogue correctly. I put it off way too long, and I'm not even sure it's relevant anymore, since Luna's rehabilitation has kinda passed as a fad in the fimfiction community, but here it is anyway:

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So my local Brony group is really active and organized, and one of the things we do is a free, weekly, hour-long writing class with volunteer teachers. I've taught two lessons in it so far, and my non-Brony roommate wanted me to film it this last time because he was interested in the lesson but didn't want to come to the group meeting. So I took about eight hours to get the whole thing into good shape on YouTube, and you can watch it there. And now you can watch it here, if you have a spare

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A while ago, back when I first started writing MLP fan fiction and posting it here, I wrote a fanfiction called "Nightmares Never Cease". It was my first multi-chapter fan fiction and I was, for a while, very proud of it. I had a lot of excellent ideas for future chapters, or so I thought at the time. However, one day, I started losing interest in it. It happened gradually. I got used to writing one chapter or at least a significant amount of a chapter once a day. Then it was once every

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Review Index

Format Breakdown

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Another year, another in my series of Idea Graveyard posts, where I discuss an idea of mine that failed to get off the ground for one reason or another. What made me discard the idea, and why haven’t I tried again. Today’s subject is different from my previous failures: its shortcomings are more narrow and simple, but in some ways that makes them harder to fix.

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Disclaimer

The purpose of this guide is to teach you, the writer, what you should and shouldn’t do to assure the quality of your stories, and to show you how to best communicate with other authors as well as your audience. We, the authors of this guide, understand this will come across as telling you what to do, but that is the point of any style guide or anyone offering advice. There are many ways of creating and viewing storytelling. We are merely providing our viewpoints on it.

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Note: I'm cross-posting this from my blog. You may want to read it there since WordPress allows me to use fancier markup like proper section headers, definition lists, and tables.

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I got 2700 words into the SYS-TER Chapter of "Equus Metamorphosis" and realized something wasn't working. I've been making notes for this chapter for about a week and revising the approach several times until I got to the point I'm at today. I had to stop and just step back.

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