Sleep Walking

by Mercury Zero

Side Story: Just Like Me

[Excerpt from Just Like Me]

That little purple bean had become my best friend. I was looking at it just before dawn on the morning of the day I met you.

It was quiet. We knew that if there was any indication that we were awake, then our commanding officer would lay into us, especially on the morning of a battle. Naturally that meant it was going to be quiet, but, if anything, the quiet was an indication that most of us weren't asleep at all.

There were a lot of things going through my mind. Most of it was just random stuff that I was trying to bring up just to avoid having to think about what was going to happen that day. I thought about how cramped my bunk was. I thought about how there wasn't a lick of privacy in the whole damn barracks, and how it always seemed to smell like old socks in there.

I thought about how we would all tease my friend, Pepper... [more]

Author's Note:

I was working on a piece of history that was going to become a dream sequence in this story, but I felt it deserved a story of its own, so I reworked it put it out as its own story. You don't have to read it to enjoy Sleep Walking, but it may inform an upcoming dream sequence.

Comments

[Mel]

Personally, I love things that start with a quote. But that's just me. So here's a return review for looking at Changelings Don't Get Cutie Marks.

Name of Story:
Sleep Walking
Grammar score: 9, for the reason described in cons.
Pros:
Let's start off with your greatest strength in this story, and something I enjoyed immensely: your awkward Luna. I understand what you mean by hard-to-write, but you certainly pulled off this aspect of her character perfectly. It's not just being misplaced in time (which you do well) but also a very clear and lingering social awkwardness that has obviously been central to her for a long time. Well done.
While I liked the format you were setting up, it was a good idea to split the chapters where you did. (Really looking forward to the next one, by the way)
Okay, maybe this is just an extension on the first thing, but the personality touches on Luna that you go through in the evenings (attached to routine and getting progressively intellectually rigid) are accurate portrayals of some wide-reaching fears that should honestly appeal to a very broad audience. Certainly it should earn more attention than this story's gotten so far. I know that I got all sorts of empathetic twinges through most of those segments, and I don't recall having those particular strings tugged by fiction in a while.
Cons:
Semicolon cancer. In the first chapter, mostly. If I'm being honest, I'm not actually very familiar with proper semicolon use. But as a reader, seeing those things breed out of control was VERY conspicuous and took me right out of the story. There were a few moments of excessive commas as well.
The omniscient perspective can be jarring at times, especially if you take us into multiple heads in the same paragraph. In the third chapter, I had to take some time to process that we had moved on to Celestia's opinions and were out of Luna's head for a moment.
The name Flashy in several serious moments was kind of... unserious. A little silly next to all that. But that's more a risk of the medium than anything.
Notes Section:
"That's why I'm a Princess!" made me laugh way more than it should have.
Pamf! That whole party thing, actually. One of those perfect, hands-to-your-mouth, "Oh, noooo," moments. When people start jumping on tables and you just think, "What have we gotten ourselves into?"
I like this story, I'm intrigued, and I eagerly await future installments.

[Mercury Zero]

3290868

Wow, I'm really surprised how easily correctable those cons are. I actually picked out the highest rated stuff in Authors Helping Authors because I wanted to hear some opinions from authors who are really good. Normally I'm pretty scathing with my reviews, but your story was a bit of a breath of fresh air that I couldn't find fault in, so I just complained about how it doesn't suit my personal taste.

Turns out talented authors like my stuff too, by and large? Fancy that.

I already figured those things out about semicolons and excessive omniscience in the time between writing this, and now, so that really narrows down the cons side for me, which is really surprising.

I'm also delighted that you thought Flashy's name was absurdly silly. I'm always fascinated with how silly same of the names on the show are. (Flashy is less silly than Mayor Mare, for example, and honestly possibly even less silly than Spearmint.), and I enjoy contrasting the plucky, upbeat way that ponies are named, with the more serious, gritty elements of my stories.

Thanks a lot for helping me out!

[Mercury Zero]

3939113

I'm not sure where this story is going...

Is that a good thing, or a bad thing? Are you saying that the story seems meandering and without direction, or that it seems mysterious and you're curious where it will end up?