I am always fascinated by Bad Horse's blog posts, and this one is no exception. I zeroed in on this particular statistic:

The number of people who read chapter 2 is usually 40% to 70% of the number who read chapter 1. The exceptions to this rule are not good stories, but very, very bad stories. For this gem, for instance, it's 93%.

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After knocking out the introduction to Chapter 8 of The Life That Late He Led, I realized that hey, we're half a week into their married life, and I'm on Chapter 8? At this rate, by the time we get to the final unwinding of this thing, it's going to be the size of -- well, okay, not Fallout: Equestria, but still fairly huge.

And it will drain us all if we let it.

Let's assume that everything on that fabled Official Map of Equestria was put there for a reason other than to fill up space. How worried should I be that something in Season Five will wholly undercut a scene set in Hollow Shades?

It is pretty much de rigueur these days for the storyteller to throw in an occasional literary or pop-culture reference. (One could argue, I suppose, that the ultimate crossover story would be nothing but references, but if that's been written, I missed it.) Authors, I suspect, are delighted when a reader picks up on a relatively obscure reference, and perhaps are disappointed when it goes unnoticed. I recall one particular incident when an author did the equivalent of Marv

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As I write this, approximately one-third of a deceased sweetgum tree is leaning on my telephone line. How much leaning, you ask? The line is less than 19 inches off the ground.

(Hey, at least it wasn't the electrical line. I had them come out and check, just to be sure.)

At long last, there is an update to The Life That Late He Led. The fact that it was completed within 24 hours of the conclusion of the NBA Western Conference Finals is purely coincidental.

Potential trigger warning: You might want to skip this if the word "sperm" makes you queasy.

Do you ever find yourself idly daydreaming -- as distinguished from actual story contemplation and research -- about these characters, the ones in canon or your own? And if so, do those daydreams ever result in material you can incorporate into a story?

(My own answers: yes, and entirely too much so; a few lines of dialogue here and there, but not much else.)

Still they come, the dreams, brief glimpses of what might have been.

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EqD's Calpain seemed awfully impressed with the fact that seven girls born in the USA last year were named Rarity, though he conceded that this phenomenon was "probably not influenced by ponies."

I didn't have the heart to tell him that there were eleven Celestias, fourteen Trixies, and 1,725 Lunas. (Really.)