Prereader, Editor, Cowriter, and Writer. My background is philosophy and accounting. My stories include heavy use of allusions, drama, and foolish ponies.
I am sure we all written stories which have gotten likes and dislikes without comments to explain them. With only those for feedback, you become uncertain as what you did to deserve either. The longer the story becomes, the greater the frustration becomes of what has earned the respect or ire of your readers. This is doubly confusing if you are rewriting your story from the ground up and start getting dislikes for what you assumed were improvements.
This chapter provides the basic information about the world of The Pony Dialogues to make reading and understanding the story easier. That being said, you don't have to read this to understand what is going on. The Prologue also repeats a significant portion of this information.
Main Continent Time Line before the Cataclysm
Years before Present
1500 Ever Ruler, a changeling disguised as a sheep, is born in Fleece.
Tragedy is about making a mistake that leads to great misfortune in the end. The misfortune must be a direct consequence of the hero making the wrong decision. We also should be able to humanize the reason why the hero made the wrong choice. When a hero kills the princess to take the throne, we should sympathize with the ambition that drives with the hero, but also recognize what they did was wrong, that ambition taken to the extreme can make us do horrible things.
As I mentioned in my news post, I am doing a blog series addressing my favorite genres. Today, I will address sad.
The Sad Genre in General:
Sad stories are rare on Fimfiction from my experience. Most of them are short, but the few that are long tend to be very good. I recommend doing a long sad story if you want a low competition genre.
There are three elements I consider essential to sad stories. I will list them in descending order of their obviousness.
I graduated college, I got a non-minimum wage paying job after weeks of job searching for people willing to hire philosophy majors, and I got all caught up in the fun things in the world (i.e. family, games, and food.) That means I can work on Pony Dialogues again and you people can complain more about how it isn't completely edited. Yeah.
If you are wondering why my next chapter of never acclaimed un-pop hit The Pony Dialogues hasn't updated recently, it is because I got to graduate soon and that means papers on top of papers mixed with job interviews falling into the inevitable despair. The next chapter is almost finished, so I should have it out after the semester ends just when I graduate and get my BA in Philosophy.