I said early on that I had "no gift for fiction." Over the next week, I will prove it to you - or I will prove myself wrong and will be shocked out of my socks.

Right now, matters are in the hands of the mods.

I have finished, or at least quit typing for the moment, my first-ever fic. I need to give it a once-over before it's ready for everyone's thumbs, so you probably won't see it until this weekend.

(Force of habit led me to type "everypony's thumbs," which makes no sense, since ponies generally don't have thumbs, except maybe for Lyra, and she's not in this one.)

Oh, and "self-insert" has some unfortunate connotations, doesn't it?

It's not particularly surprising to me that so many here write so much better than I do; what caught me off-guard was discovering that it was even more work than I imagined to write as poorly as I do.

This just came to me in a burst of - well, whatever it was, it wasn't inspiration.

"So how do we get to your place in Manehattan?"

"Get off the train at Sixth Street, go two blocks west to Bad Gateway, and hang a left. I'm at 502."

Which is a suitably vague phrase, when you think about it.

Be that as it may, I am going to work on a story idea. From the looks of the first 2,000 words, I think I can safely say that it's written in First Person Oblivious. Then again, I'm only a tenth of the way through, and I'm not entirely sure it's going to work.

The first-anniversary banner (featuring The Great and Powerful Trixie) notes that 220 million words have been posted here, presumably in the form of stories. This means that I have read ... wait for it ... one percent of the entire site!

At this rate, I'll have read it all in four years, assuming nopony posts any more stories. (Please ignore that last remark.)

One phrase that occurs entirely too often in human writings - because there's entirely too much of it in real life - is "man's inhumanity to man." It may be that the comparable concept does not exist in Equestria, though any number of stories tagged "grimdark" might suggest otherwise - but assuming that it does exist, how would you phrase it? Ponies clearly have their own ethics and morals, but they know nothing of "inhumane" and variations thereupon.

I confess - no, I'm not copying this over to Pony Confessions - that the storylines and concepts I planned to pursue while digging into fanfic do not necessarily equal the storylines and concepts I have actually been reading over the last week or so. For one thing, I have found that I have more appetite for shipping than I thought: shipping, in my mental calculation, has gone from "Avoid it" to "Maybe if it looks interesting" to simply "Hmmm. How would this pairing work?"

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I swore I would not get involved with fanfic, period. I admit that this particular fandom has drawn more of my attention than any other in recent years, and that these characters mean a lot to me in many ways, but still: No Fanfic.

And then I read one, because a friend suggested it. One can't hurt, right? And then I read another, and it turned out to be My Little Dashie.

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