Haitus?

It may never complete.

Oh, but it ends on such a beautiful cliffhanger right now, and I have a love/hate relationship with that cliffhanger. I had to love it enough to leave it alone for a prolonged period of time. At the same time, I've hated it enough to squirm about it. Maybe it's time to decide that love is stronger than hate.

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I've been combing through the recent hailstorm of comments produced on Equestria Daily when they linked to a feminist blog commenting on My Little Pony.

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I keep it checked. It's difficult, sometimes. The vast majority of everything that is published as Mature is direly awful. The remaining few items are some of the best. Mature-category stories seem to have an explosive quality curve. The middle ground of quality is absent. They can be great or terrible, but they are almost never "meh".

I want to filter off the bad ones, but I don't want to lose the good ones.

This blog brought to you courtesy of Mother's Day clopfics.

622 views, 19 upvotes, 0 downvotes

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I'm doing my part to promote Equestria Daily's Fanfiction Survey while it's still open. If you haven't taken it already, beware that time is running out. A deadline has been announced at 5PM blog time. Given that I don't know EqD's timezone, I don't know when that deadline ends. It's best not to wait.

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I see authors talk about how it's too painful not to write. I see, somewhat more often, talk about how writers are desperately trying not to be numb. I see, rarely but present, talk about how writing is somehow the expression or product of pain.

I don't understand that.

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I just ended up thrust out of a story and downvoting it because the author had too many unnecessary qualifiers. This isn't even "show don't tell" or an adverb hate-on. If you don't need to clarify something, don't. The worst phrase in the fic (before I stopped reading) was "just recently realized". The word recently adds nothing to the meaning of the sentence. It screams 'edit me for brevity' about as loudly as anything can. If it was a vocal disfluency as part of a character's voice,

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A Troll Through the Park updated! I'm pretty excited about it. I've already read the update, since I helped edit it. I consider it a great one.
I do have to give a warning for a reference it uses.
It uses it well, I swear.

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There is a song I occasionally use for reassurance. It's called 'Not That Bad' and it's by Matt & Kim. The song is comedic. I recommend it. I have no idea about any other tracks by the same duo. I've never listened to any, and I'm not sure how I found this one. It has a neat kinetic typography official video. Go watch!

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Almost every bit of successful writing I've ever done - inclusive of more than just Whispering Stars - was written linearly. I start at the beginning of what I'm writing and write without any kind of jumping ahead. I can safely skip about one paragraph per 1,500 words by using <stage directions> to quickly note what was going to happen during that paragraph. Even doing that too often is likely to lead to me just... faulting.

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