If you can't read this, good news! I've done some readings. Here are links:

Pony Tales: "Mare of the Rings." I recorded this because I wanted to do Gandalf's voice. Fluttershy is a bit of a reach for me.
Pony Tales: "The Pony." I recorded this because I heard a recording of James Earl Jones doing "The Raven".

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I didn't watch most of this fall's episodes, saving them for Thanksgiving and Christmas, when I visit most of my nieces and nephews. My family is anti-pony, and makes fun of MLP when we get together and I watch the show with the kids. Well, their regular bad-mouthing of the show persuaded the little girls that they, too, were too grown-up and sophisticated for My Little Pony, and the same girls who were eager to watch it a month ago wouldn't watch it with me anymore.

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This is GhostOfHeraclitus' account of me and him doing a joint pre-reading. Not exactly how I remember it, but sometimes I forget things. Occupational hazard.

GOH: So, Mr. Author, mind if I call you author?
A: No, uh, not at all. Why...uh...why is he looking at me like that?
BH: *glare*

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A friend who's into name meanings, but knows nothing of pony, just told me my name means "peaceful god, lover of horses".

[Updated 2021: ... and my Chinese zodiac sign is the fire horse.]

I'm going to do something terrible. I'm going to "review" a book by a brilliant writer without finishing it, because I don't think I'll ever finish it. But my purpose isn't to review the book; it's to make a point about writing.

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I'm stealing bookplayer's Year in Review questions. This is mostly for my own benefit.

Fic total:
29 stories and about 90,000 words, depending how you count.

Overall impressions:

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I will critique the first 1000 words of one story for anyone who is currently watching me and whom I haven't already reviewed a story for. Comment on this blog post with your watcher # in my list of watchers (#1 = Scatterbrain), and a link to a story. Fimfiction stories don't need to have been submitted; links work before submission. You can also link to a ponyfictionarchive.net story, a deviantart page, or a google docs document (with "share" set to "anyone with the link can comment"). If

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When you read GhostOfHeraclitus' new story, "A Canterlot Carol", you might imagine that he wrote it in a mad dash of inspiration, like Coleridge writing the opening to "Kubla Khan". He did in fact write almost all of "Twilight Sparkle Makes a Cup of Tea" that way, only (I assume) under the influence of some particularly-aromatic tea rather than of opium. But I have an inside line on ACC, so I can point out some

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Skywriter blogged about a new one-shot by TheVulpineHero1 called "Kaleidoscope". It is one of those damnably-perfect stories that I can't quite appreciate, because it gives me more jealousy than pleasure. It's displaced "The Vinyl Scratch Tapes" on my user page Top 5 for now. Soon after starting it, you'll come across some things in the story that don't make

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I was pretty pleased with myself when I wrote "Big Mac Reads Something Purple." And it was pretty popular. So I was indignant when EqD rejected it, saying, "The writing seems very flat, where character does this, character does that, character said, etc."

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