I need to stash a batpony for a couple hours until the heat's off, man.

So, I've been leaning hard on certain models while laying out my story, and cheating as the needs of the narrative dictate for the details. Nobody needs to get the exact layout of, say, Bison Country, or how much of a Western Sea there is out past the far west. Especially since the way the story's been breaking, we're never going to lay eyes on an actual bison.

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So, I'm trying something new, a layered story-within-a-story, narrator-within-external-narration sort of affair. Trying to see if I can't get some good old fashioned Equestrian harmonic ideology injected into the rebellious heart of my little war-epic. Via allegorical foal-stories told in the kitchen by a captive baker.

So, one part Scheherazade of Tambelon, one part Pony St. Patrick.

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It's like Black Lagoon and Gundam Wing had a drunken one-night stand and nine months later Black Lagoon gave birth to a pretty, pretty little bishounen. And then dumped it on the front steps of the Rip-off Church to be sort-of-raised by mercenary nuns. ("Oh, stop bitching, kid. At least I didn't abort you.") I haven't watched all of the Gundams - Sunrise craps out one every other year like clockwork - but as of the first half-dozen episodes, this is the best one I've

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What are folks' opinion on what the Equestrian equivalent of the Central Intelligence Agency is named? I'm going to go ahead and say that SMILE is a more pugnacious variant of the FBI crossed with the Marshall's Service, if only because I loathe the name and the general attitude as described in canon. Not a great fan of what they did with "Agent Sweetie Drops". So, rival agency for foreign service and proper intelligence-work. Chengar Qordath calls them "EIS", or the "Equestrian

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So, I've been calling Dance Hall a 'star fortress', which isn't strictly accurate. Star forts are massive post-gunpowder fortifications which hide their low curtain walls behind heavy sloped masonry and earthwork glacis to keep siege artillery from knocking over the vulnerable walls. Dance Hall, despite its glacis and (not yet described, but totally implied by the term I've been mis-using) projecting bastions, is explicitly not designed to withstand artillery fire, but rather, to provide

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About thirty-forty chapters back. This story really needed a Corporal Carrot, and the lack of one has made my narrator and protagonist far too action-hero for his role. I now have a better idea of how Marty Stus develop - conservation of characterization can pull you over cliffs if you're not careful, and I wasn't, not sufficiently.

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I'm suffering under the nagging suspicion that I re-used a name on that new corporal I introduced in this morning's chapter, so it's time to take character inventory and make sure I have a full listing of the quick and the dead. I've come across a number of errors and problems in the first twenty-some chapters, including a *third* name for Tonnerre, and the fact that Rime started out being called Rame. D'oh!

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So, I made some trouble for myself in a recent chapter by mentioning, in the course of a discussion of the dubious characteristics of thestral genetics, that the natural reproduction of ponies within the Company caused the recessive-gene thestrals to disappear from the rosters by the operation of bizarro Mendelian genetics. This means that there *is* natural reproduction within the Company, which presents me the problem that these are mixed-sex ponies of peak physical condition and a culture

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Second time this season the bootleg stream I use crashed my computer partway into the new episode. I will have to wait until morning to catch the rest of it on Amazon. Damnit. I'm going to have to avoid half my follows until morning unless I want to be spoiled, or track down a youtube bootleg.

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