Everyone, look at this. Now.

I've been dying to break the news all week. "The Savage Way" is now the fifty-first entry in the Pony Fiction Vault. Of those, it's only the fourth in the Human genre. The other three got in for being popular, for launching lots of spinoffs, and for being "Arddun Lleuad," respectively. It's also the shortest of the Vault's Human stories by a wide margin.

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Would you believe "The Writing on the Wall" was inspired by porn?
I refer to John Joseco's "Adventures of Human Daring Do." It was a sort of deliberately silly, modern-day version of a Tijuana bible, ending with the heroine beneath a pile of naked bodies. And as I considered that mass of nubile black-and-white flesh, I thought, "I should write the thematic opposite of this."

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This is a special day for me, because an enterprising reader, Duplex Fields, wrote an epilogue to my new story. And here it is.

Rainbow Dash looked up from the cornuscript, puzzled. "I don't get it."
Twilight Sparkle sighed. "The tomb wasn't a tomb, except for those who invaded it. Her crew dies of radiation sickness over the next month."
"Woah, woah," said Rainbow, taking to the air, "You're telling me this isn't a curse?"

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"The Writing on the Wall" goes up on EqD some time over the next few days. Would you believe I had more trouble getting it past the pre-readers, than I had with the "Human" one?

Anyway, some people dismissed "The Savage Way" because of the "Human" tag. It will be nice to get dismissed for having the "Dark" tag for a change.

Anyway, I'd like to give a warm welcome to the Equestria Daily readers when they arrive.

Well, this is embarrassing.

If the sayings of the advice animal "Fanfic Flamingo" are accurate, fic readers are patient people, sometimes to a fault, waiting months or years for an update from an author who hasn't been heard from since the last update. But it still irks me that I have to sacrifice speed for quality.

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Okay, so I seem to be working on Blizzard time. I can't rush my next story, or it will end up slipshod, and I'll come across as having peaked too early. In case anyone cares, here's the current lowdown.

Research: done.
Outline: done.
Body text: in "sketchy bits and pieces" form.

This is better than it sounds. I tend to write things in disparate parts, then stitch them together, piece by piece. (Damn it, now that song is stuck in my head.)

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Originally, The Savage Way would have ended quite differently.
The second-to-last scene would have begun much like it turned out, but after trying to fool Caramel for a while, Alex would have yelled, "You're making this a lot harder than it has to be!" A cat-and-mouse game would follow, with a progressively more desperate Alex promising a quick death, if only Caramel would stop delaying the inevitable. Caramel would then overpower Alex and feed him to the fish.

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