Even athletes know when they have to go into beauty works for the sake of their health. Rainbow Dash knows this and yet she has to confront her fears in some way.
Lotus Blossom and Aloe have been treating Rainbow Dash for weeks now, and a few weeks after the events of The Throne of Tirek, Rainbow comes in long overdue for a treatment. Maybe it isn't so bad sometimes to do this whole girly stuff, but it certainly is wince-inducing.
Set in the Somepony Universe, at the same time as Road Trip
Chapters (1)
It's silly and cute.
One bit of advice, though: Don't be afraid to just use "_(name)_ said" when attributing dialogue. "Said" is one of those "invisible" words that your reader will never really notice... but they will notice you going out of your way to avoid it by constantly using other attributions like "inquired", "grit out", "soothed", etc., and too much of that gets distracting. (It's an offshoot of the "don't swallow a thesaurus" principle.
) If it's necessary to indicate tone of voice, "___ said soothingly" (for example) usually reads less jarringly than "___ soothed."
>>EquesTRON
Yeah old habits die hard. My old English teacher would give me dirty looks and low marks if I used said more than once a paragraph and I just slipped into the habit of substituting said with anything else. But thanks for the advice and I'm glad you liked it.
3738318
Well... technically, each line of dialogue is a separate paragraph, so if your English teacher was dinging you down for using it twice in succession for two different speakers, he's the one who needs to go back to school, I think!
>> EquesTRON
I sometimes wonder about that. My High School was running on extremely old curriculum but I digress. Anyway, I appreciate the suggestions after all, and I'll try to break the habit slowly of using more than just said at any given time.
3738373 ...you have no idea how to reply to comments do you?
Look at the top right corner of this comment, see those two arrows? click them, it should add a set of numbers to your comment box. Type in your comment after them and add the comment, the person should get a notification of the reply.
3738477
Ah there we go. I'm fairly new to this reply system so it was giving me some grief. Thanks!
3738484 you're welcome
The description caught my interest. The story structure held my interest. The last line made me laugh.
3739197
Glad you liked it. I'm a humor writer by heart so I like throwing in something to make people smile in any fic.
3738305
Believe it or not I don't usually mind when people write things like:
"To stop you waving your ass in my face, Rainy." Rhea replied, getting a grimace from the other girl. "I figured since that was the fifth time this morning that you've done that, you wanted me to do something to your butt." She watched as Rainbow opened and closed her mouth a couple of times before being distracted by the door opening. Her eyes narrowed as she spotted Sunset Shimmer making her way into the room a lot more timidly than she had acted the previous day. Had the visit last night scared her that much?
"One — ow! — no I didn't want you to hit me, Kestrel! Your hand is hard." Rainbow said, rubbing her rear through the pink and white skirt and black biking shorts she was wearing. "And two, it's Rainbow or Dash, or hell, Rayne, not Rainy, just… ugh!" She grumbled, grabbing her chair and finally sitting in it, flinching a couple of times before spotting Sunset. "What the heck happened to you, Shimmer?"
It's when someone puts the descriptive for how they're saying something in front of the word 'said' that irritates me for some reason, such as if I had written this paragraph this way:
"Don't just hover there, get that thing!" Shimmer loudly yelled before whimpering in pain. Apparently the transformation hadn't taken away her ability to feel pain, though given it sounded like her ribs had been broken that wasn't a surprise.
The real version just has her yelling, it doesn't say it's loudly since I figure most people can work that out, but every time I see someone write that way it bugs me.
I know about the whole 'thesaurus abuse' thing, but I'll honestly take someone writing that someone yelled or soothed over someone writing that a person ______ said where the blank is how they're saying it rather than who is saying it.
3743297
That's because in English grammar, adverbs should normally come after the verb they're modifying, not before, so "Shining Armor loudly said" is incorrect no matter how you look at it.
The correct form is "Shining Armor said loudly" – although generally, it's better to dispense with the single adverb and replace it with an adverb clause that conveys the same thing in a more descriptive manner, such as "Shining Armor said, raising his voice to interrupt the other stallion."
Trust me – I spent 4th through 7th grade under English teachers who still made everyone do sentence-diagramming drills several times a week; I know far more about this than is probably good for me.
(You're bein' pedantic again, sugarcube.)
(That's your new favorite word, isn't it.)
(Eeeyup.)
Anyway, I don't mean to suggest one should never use attributions other than "said"; just that they should be used sparingly, so that they retain their full effect when used. Using them constantly wears them out; the reader eventually quits paying attention to them at all, and then you don't get the impact when you really do use one to convey a specific emotional state at a crucial moment in the story.
3743410 For me it depends on the speech in question. Generally I have three 'go to' words for speaking, "said", "asked" and "replied".
Said is generally the default unless I feel the person is doing something a specific way or I'm just skipping that bit entirely to describe what else is happening.
Asked is what I tend to use when someone has a question since it makes more sense to have someone ask a question than say one.
Replied generally only comes out on the first response to a question, though sometimes I'll use responded in its place, depends on how I write things.
Anything else, I tend to use when I feel they're needed since obviously text is a bit hard to tell how a person sounds through without the occasional addition or change up. Of course this is coming from someone that's not done English lessons in fifteen years and has probably forgotten most of it.
3743479
I usually focus on "said" just because writers seem to go out of their way to avoid it a lot more often than the other two.
I'll go along with that, yes; "asked" and "replied" are pretty much in the same category as "said", in that they're relatively "invisible" to the reader and don't draw attention to themselves in the way that words like "queried", "stated", "inquired", "declared", etc. do. I suppose I should include all three of them when pointing out this sort of thing.
3743504 Sounds like said being tortured with a thesaurus is one of your pet peeves there, of course, I think we've all got them when it comes to at least one set of mis-ordered, misused or abused words, or the good old set of words that either sound the same but mean different things or ones that are close enough in spelling that people constantly get them mixed up… I know there's at least a few of the last that bug me.
3743563
In regards to not having done English lessons in 15 years, you're pretty much spot on. My last English course was back in 1998 or so and my teacher drummed the use of said out of the entire class. It was a different time back then when you had to get fancy, and then by now in this date and age, it's back to said again. So I'm sticking with the Mark Twain style of writing as much as possible which can be found over here and has helped me for a long time in my writing process.
And EquesTRON Glad you two are having such a good conversation and thanks for keeping it civil in the comments. I'm looking over the first bit of Prime before classes today and there's a lot of use of said now that it's been brought to my attention. Thanks.
3743757
"Back then"...?
That must've been something that became fashionable (or at least wormed its way into school curriculums) during the 90s, then, because I went to school from 1974 - 1986, and I don't recall any of my teachers ever twisting our arms to eliminate "said" from written dialogue...
3743563
I really wonder sometimes if they even teach any of this stuff in school anymore!
Oh, believe me, I have many pet peeves –
(Ain't that the truth...)
(Quiet, you.)
– about the way English is misused and mangled these days. People typing "loose" when they mean "lose", using "it's" as the possessive, not punctuating their dialogue correctly, using 's to make plurals...
3744077
Dose and does, lightening and lightning — that one really gets me, particularly given how many do make the mistake when we've got a character called Lightning Dust in the series now.
1987-2004 was the entirety of my school years, gods know when I learned most of the grammar stuff, probably parents or primary school which was 88-95 I believe.
As to the schools teaching… I don't think many of the so-called teachers know it, much less teach it.
3744077
Yeah it was a thing back then. Temporary but the damage had been done and I always had to instinctively find more things than "said" all the time. Even my pre-reader dealt with it. My English Teacher was kind of odd too in any case.
3744119
3744149
Yeah, I guess I was more fortunate than many, in that not only did I go to school back when the curriculum still emphasized these things, but my parents took an interest in teaching me how to read even before the schools had a chance to screw things up. The ideographic "whole word" method of teaching reading was gaining traction back then; mom and dad taught me using the "old-fashioned" phonics method – with the happy result that I was reading (and comprehending!) Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Alan Dean Foster, Ray Bradbury, and Anne McCaffrey novels by the age of 10.
Odd teachers aren't necessarily bad, though; some of my most memorable classes were taught by "eccentric" teachers.
3744237
Yeah I spent a childhood growing up on older books, Gordon Korman mostly, although my English teacher would pick the most horrendously written books and literature for our reports and stuff. She was odd in a good way, but her teaching style was wildly out of date and when she tried to update it, the whole 'said' thing happened. But in any case, some good came out of it. I came out of it with a love for writing even though English wasn't my best subject and Grammar is my omnipresent nemesis, and even though I had a long and rocky start, I've improved dramatically in the 15 years I've spent writing stories. I just hope people are entertained by the tidbits I share on this site later on.
3744237
3744279
I don't even remember what age I was reading books up to, I know I started reading at 2 and I'd read pretty much all of Blyton's Famous Five and Adventure sets by 10, along with Dragonlance Chronicles in my early teens at the latest. Beyond them, I've gone through gods know how many books over the years, but McCaffery, Moon and others were in there, along with quite a few more Dragonlance, several Forgotten Realms, primarily Salvatore's lot and other sci-fi/fantasy. I don't think I've ever really gone for some genres, though I do remember reading various true crime books by… Dunn, I think. *checks* No, Dunning. And some horror, though interestingly not King, despite us having quite a collection of his.
As for school, I think the most eccentric English teacher I had was my last two years of Secondary and that was because he also did drama at one point or another. I do remember reading Dragonlance and Pern books while waiting for lessons and/or teachers several times and gods know how many books I rented from the school library over the five years there.
I think it would be interesting if the show had an episode like this, where Rainbow starts to enjoy going to the spa a bit, but tries to keep it a secret from the others.
So..episode 100 had bug bears..second i heard that i remembered this story and had a mini freak out from you some how calling that from 2014 nice prediction.
6263011
Bugbears have been a long running joke for me in the MLP fanfic circles, it started with the main crossover and now it's basically a thing. I did have to admit I didn't expect the whole panda-bug-bear thing.
Short but sweet, nice read!
Line of the day everypony.