SWEET CELESTIA, THE CRYSTAL EMPIRE IS GOING TO HOST THE EQUESTRIAN GAMES

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Actually, there's a purpose to this post beyond the stupid joke. Firstly, be aware: I've been away all weekend and haven't actually gotten to watch the season finale yet, so I'm not going to be able to read any of the eight billion blog posts on it until I've caught up.

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Why don't conversations come with prereaders?

(Unrelated but important: Bad Horse is trying to assemble a scholarship for FIMFiction authors to attend the Clarion writing conference. If you're interested in going, or want to encourage more quality in your ponyfic, make the clicky.)

I wrote 500 words that you might like! But I'm cheating a little here: They're a reader epilogue for another author's story.

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So I just picked up Scribblenauts Remix for my iPad. It was only 99 cents, and I've heard a lot of good things about the Scribblenauts franchise. If you've been living under a rock for the last decade or so, the point of the game is to summon arbitrary objects so your character can solve puzzles. Literally arbitrary — the game's got an insane object dictionary, and you can create anything from chainsaws to magnets to

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Well. This has been a week.

I spent Monday recovering our car from police impound (for an incident that we didn't even have anything to do with). As I was at the impound lot, my phone lit up with text messages from work's server monitoring. Came back to the office to find a hard drive crash. Worked two 12-hour days, scrambling to shift services temporarily onto backup servers and then restoring the drive from backup.

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This one's for you, Skywriter.

(TTTO Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Californication." I know, that's already been done, but mine's topical.)

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This one might require a little bit of homework if you haven't read the story below -- but it deserves all of its accolades, and it's well worth your 15-45 minutes (it's about 9,000 words).

So:

Cold in Gardez's The Glass Blower as a metaphor for the writing of fanfiction. Discuss.

(My own thoughts have light story spoilers, so I'm leaving them in comments below.)

Let's get one thing straight before I start: Not to put too fine a point on it, I think that the Victorian era is the ass end of the body of English-language novels.[1]

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Well past dark. My heater valiantly struggling to defog the windshield. And yet, there at the highway entrance: Thumb out, huddled inside the artificial paunch of a winter coat.

He paused at the door in a familiar dance of deference, not certain whether to get in the front or the back, but as soon as I opened the door for him he gratefully lunged inside. "James," he said, sticking out an ungloved hand once he'd slammed the door against the cold.

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So: I just posted the most recent chapter of Princess Luna Picks Up Hitchhikers. Like the first chapter, it's very funny (if I do say so myself). But I found myself defensively saying to a prereader last night, in response to a criticism that never even existed: "PLPUH is not a comedy."

Whoo! Touchy subject, apparently.

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