Dear Journal,
Eureka! Huge discoveries have been made today, the likes of which nobody has ever seen! The things I've learned could change the world! Well, whatever's left of the world... okay, that statement brought me back down to Earth. Give me a moment to calm down...
Okay, I'm good. I suppose I should start out at the beginning.
Waking up today was a strange experience. It was my first day out of the house. Well, the first day where I wasn't having explosive diarrhea. That could only mean good things for today, and what a day it was! It was... sorry, getting ahead of myself. Anyway, I had some canned beans for breakfast. They were cold. There wasn't really a microwave, and with my hooves I didn't want to risk using an oven. Oh, right, this is one of those grocery stores with a bread place in it. It has an oven.
Anyway, back on point. I believe I mentioned feeling a little flow within me in my last post. If not, you'll get what I mean pretty soon. After eating the beans, I thought to myself, "Wouldn't it have been great to have heated it?" Then I remembered my schedule. Today was the day to work on my magic. I thought the energy flow would be a good place to start. So, I focused on it. I did some meditation, drew pentagrams around myself, whatever it took. For awhile, nothing happened. The closest thing I got was feeling a little bit tired at one point, and feeling a wave of energy wash over me at another point or two. Both were so insignificant of a change, it hardly warranted anything.
My grand success came later. My eyes were closed in meditation. I had been meditating for... what? Somewhere between five minutes and an hour. I know that's a large time frame, but during meditation you lose track of time — if you're doing it right that is. Anyways, at some point I began to feel a wave of energy again, but there were two things that separated it from the other times. One was that it felt concentrated. Unlike the other times, where I just felt it everywhere, this time I felt it more in my head. Particularly near my alicorn. Second was that it was much more significant. It felt like if you drank five sodas, some coffee, and threw an energy drink in there for good measure, but different. I can't even describe it. It was like a tranquil energy.
Anyway, I felt that hit me quickly, and in shock I opened my eyes. As soon as I did, a soda can fell to the floor in front of me. From in the air. I levitated it!
That's proof enough for me, anyway. So I do have magic, but I can't quite control it. That isn't useful in a cinch. Not to complain though. If anything good came out of being transformed into this pony monstrosity, it was magic. In wake of this confirmation, I have created a new schedule. Everything is to remain the same, excepting that one hour a day, at minimum, is to be allocated to studying my newfound magical abilities. If I can learn more spells, particularly magic, I could easily make survival missions a leisurely "one hour a day," type thing. But, until then, I'll have to rely on this new body to help me.
Also, I forgot to make the food reserve. I wish I could talk more about what happened today, but not much actually HAPPENED.
On a different note, tomorrow is the day when I look for a radio. I'll be perfectly honest, I don't know how they work. Not REALLY, anyway. I know they transmit waves... but that's about it. I could change a frequency, but even I don't know what that means or how it works. Ask me a question about math, I'll give it. Ask me a question about physics, you'll get an answer. I can comprehend the foundations of the universe on a scale most normal people don't even know exists... and for the life of me, I can't figure out how a radio works. I tried looking it up on the computer at the store, but I had forgotten that the internet's down. There aren't any guides to it.
I can only hope operating one is as easy as it looks in those apocalypse movies. That'd certainly be nice. Otherwise, I'll have to find a book on it. There's a bookstore about five blocks down, and a library maybe half a mile away. If I find one tomorrow, and can't figure out how to operate it, maybe I'll find a book on it. I only hope I can find one with a transceiver. I can only hope transceiver means what I think it means...
Now I'm off to make my nightly broadcast to the city of Dallas, or at least a 25π block chunk of it. I don't know that was the right way to state it. Anyway, this time I'll bring the mic here, so that I don't have to come back and quote myself.
I'm back, after about twenty minutes. A mic is hard to hold with hooves. I'll grasp levitation yet! Anyway, here we go.
"Dear Dallas, Texas,
"Amazing things have been happening here... I've learned so much. I can only hope that there are still people out there to share my new knowledge with.
"If you can hear this, know you can trust me. I'm in the same predicament as you. Very possibly worse. I'm here for you.
"Dearly hoping there is a 'you' to be here for,
"Leon."
Huzzah, you get the honor of first side fic
I plan on having mine set down in the county below
6037825
Texas is the second most populace state my Canadian friend
6038264 Nope! I thought that too. The first chapter was on the 23rd, but it opens with "two days ago, something strange happened." Or something like that.
6038275 Thursdays are bad days. Everyone knows that.
So he's starting to learn about his magic? Cool beans. And wow... I just realized that was a pun. A horrible pun.
6038275
Ahh
Yay, you seem off to a pretty good start here. Still, when there's a story I really like (or I'm just really interested to see where it will go) I feel obligated to give a little constructive criticism. The sort of input I would give to myself if I read my own stories (though obviously if I knew what to tell myself in my criticism, I would've already started working on fixing those things so my complaints would have to change.
I like to start off with the good things, and the things I think you're doing really, really well. For you, the first on that list is the writing itself. The spelling and grammar in general is great. That already puts this stories light-years ahead of many other stories here. It's well-constructed, like a sturdy public building.
What's my main complaint? I feel like this story hasn't found the magic yet. It's fun, and I'm personally excited to see the different ways someone will take a concept I spawned. See how unique and different the lives of this character might be. What do I mean, then?
I guess I'm yet to see what new awesome this story will bring to the "Last Pony on Earth" genre (eeek, is that a thing?). You've got the first unicorn for a protagonist, and it seems some of the very first things he discovers and talks about are magic-related. This seems to have the potential for something great.
Yet I don't think it's quite arrived at something great yet. For one, discovering your "magic" took only two entries. Even if a week or more took place between them, it doesn't feel like a week when they're the very beginning of the story. I feel like when characters "get something" in a story, they have to "earn" that something, or it doesn't feel deserved. It doesn't feel like Leon really "earned" his discover of magic so quickly. I'm not sure if that makes any sense. It's not like life is fair or makes you earn things (it often does, but not always). Sometimes fate or chance get involved, as seems to be the case here. Such situations are hardly satisfying from a literary perspective, though.
I feel like I want to know Leon better. I know very little about him right now, except that he was the sort of person to know one of the proper meanings for the word "Alicorn" (a confusing word choice for this site, considering the meaning of that word in the fandom). I know how Leon is trying to survive, but I don't know who he was before or what his goals were. Investment in the main character is presently weaker (at least for me) than you would want for a story so heavily driven by the narrative of a single voice (like the journal format).
Along those same lines, I feel like Leon is making leaps of logic that don't quite follow from the facts. (he's not wrong, and that's the problem. All his guesses seem to be right). Even geniuses make mistakes, and when they do they become endearing to us.
I don't understand why he's dictating what seems to be his journal to the nearby city. Writing down what happened that day seems useful, and plenty of people use broadcasting mediums (like social media) just to talk about themselves. It just strikes me as strange, since he seems to be riding the line between emergency broadcast and a lifestyle blog.
I think this story's great so far. I think it has potential. I wouldn't have taken the time to say all this otherwise. I just cross my fingers to see it going somewhere new. The newer and further apart from the story in The Last Pony On Earth, the further you'll go from clone and the more readers you'll be able to attract. Having a unicorn main character somewhere else is an excellent start, but just being a different species isn't enough.
TLDR:
1. You're doing great, keep going!
2. Think of what new stuff you can bring to the table besides Leon being a unicorn. Don't feel trapped by Last Pony, take the story in bold new directions!
3. Do the unicorn stuff and the magic really, really well.
4. Help us as an audience get to know Leon much better so we can care about what happens to him
5. The more bad things that happen to your main character, the better
Do all that, and you can make a good story great.
6039235 Thank you! I feel obligated to respond to this with a few thoughts of my own, though I recognize if I can't get it across in story, then I have a problem. I want to mention two things: The magic and the personality.
This one's less of a problem. Sure he "discovered," his magic, but that's all it is. He KNOW FOR A FACT it exists, but hell if he knows how to use it. I imagine a unicorn would pretty quickly know their magic is there, he just has to learn how to harness it. That's where a lot of the magic related stuff is heading.
The second is the personality, and this one's a bigger concern. Leon is a sort of "survive now, feel emotions later," kind of guy. He has a mind that's always focused on survival. He's logical, calculating, and introverted. That's why we know so little about him.
However, I will reveal more about him. I won't tell you exactly how though.
Not yet.
On another note, I laughed about the blog kind of broadcasts. He doesn't REALLY need to call for help (he doesn't need it,) he just wants people to come to him. They'll do that if they know he's there. So if he doesn't have much to say, he'll just talk about his day.
I can't help but feel he's got magic down too easily.
6040645 I was afraid of that. I'd like to stresss he can hardly use it. Sure, he can DO magic, but he can't choose when to do it, what he uses it on, and WHAT he uses. He can draw a line on paper, and what he wants to be able to do is write an essay (Metaphorically and physically)
6040653 He knocked over a bin. Filly Twilight could hardly lift a page of a book without practice. I don't care of he was pissed. Being angry doesn't make your punches better at the time - especially if you've never punched before. You should have had him feel dissy - maybe pass out. And I wouldn't have had him lift more than a pencil. And be under a lot of strain doing that. Stretched it over multiple days with his horn not always working (I'd also call it a horn rather than use the special term) when he wanted it to. Not just some meditation. Telling the reader 20 minutes happened and filling that space are different things - if you fill the time jumps between magic usage and practice it seems longer (in this case it actually would be because if you did it over multiple entries).
Just my piece.
TL;DR: Spread it out and limit his powers. Don't always allow his magic to work when he wants it to.
6040708 I see what you're saying, and you're right. But also remember Leon is no colt. I did have him be "inexplicably tired." He returned home and slept through an entire day. But I do need to work on my magic balance.