Today marks the publication of Ponyfic Roundup 40, the latest edition of my (mostly) weekly reviews posts. I publish them off-site rather than here as I prefer the extra freedom I have with my own blog, but I do mention PR here every so often. This time, the theme was "Quick Laughs", ie Comedy-tagged fics of under 2,000 words. My selection was as follows:

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I'm not going to be entering the "Most Dangerous Game 2" contest over on EqD. I haven't read all the original fics, and I can't think of a good idea for the ones I have read. I'm still kicking myself for not noticing the first version of this contest: I assuredly would have entered that one. But that's the price I pay for being semi-detached from the fandom mainstream, I suppose. :P

The Light that Ignites in the Dark got an Honourable Mention in The MLP Fan Club!!!!'s Hearth's Warming Heart-Warming contest. Which sounds quite nice... until you realise that the top seven fics got a specific placing and there were only nine entries! In other words, "Honourable Mention" is a nicer way of saying "in the bottom two". :P

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It's the 6th here in the UK now, so the Santa hat is no more. Being able to use my horn should make it easier to write, too!

One or two people have asked, so: I'm a bit of a traditionalist, and my Christmas decorations come down on Twelfth Night. So the Santa hat on my avatar will likewise disappear after 6 January!

Thank you to everyone who's helped make Fimfiction this year an interesting and enjoyable experience. Have a good one!

The Twilight's Library group, at least in the form we've known it, would appear to have shuffled off this mortal coil. Perhaps it will return in some other guise; perhaps it won't. Reading the closure announcement, it seems there was a lot of drama in its last days -- about which I, as befits my status as anything but an insider, was pretty much entirely unaware. I did post a

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Last week, I mentioned that one July 2011 story stood out for me. It was, as some of you probably expected, Celestia's Teeth by Abalidoth. I gave it 8/10, and may actually have been half a mark too harsh. The five other stories I reviewed for Ponyfic Roundup 35 scored very

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That's in terms of stories, not writers! For my blog fanfic reviews, I usually just pick out five or six stories that look interesting and review those. Next week, though, I'll be reviewing a handful of stories plucked from July 2011, Fimfiction's earliest youth. I won't give away which fics, but having done some reading, it seems that the received wisdom is right: most stories that old aren't very good. There's one

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I'm happy to say that It Doesn't Matter Now has become my fifth story to be accepted into Twilight's Library. As both a Staff Pick and a Featured story, at that, a double I've never managed before. I have

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