New story by me: The Shoreline Shape Up

I had an important family commitment at the weekend, so my review of episode 14 will now appear tomorrow. In its place, you get this.

Cover pic is my crop and edit of this public domain image from Pixabay.

The Shoreline Shape Up by Loganberry
Applejack and OCs
Comedy/Slice of Life; 2k words; Jul 2019; Teen

Applejack arrives on the Dream Coast to help with the Shoreline Shape Up.

Applejack isn't a mare who's afraid of hard graft, so joining the Dream Coast's latest Shoreline Shape Up seems like the perfect working holiday. It may be a rocky assignment, though...

Yes, for the first time since The Book of Ended Lives more than two years ago, I've actually published a full story on Fimfiction! In between have come only The Danger Within (on long-term hiatus) and Custard Repeatedly Teleports into Starlight (a frankly rather meh sequel), so it's The Shoreline Shape Up that can properly said to mark my return to actually writing and publishing ponyfic from scratch. Regardless of anything else, that makes the story pretty meaningful to me.

What I really needed was a push to get me to do something, and that arrived in the shape of Super Trampoline's FimFiction Feghoot Festival with its firm closing date (actually not very firm, but that's another story!) and low word-count requirements. I thought of the last line of The Shoreline Shape Up and worked backwards from there. The result is what you see now – not, I think, a story anyone would put in the same class as The Book of Ended Lives, but nevertheless a finished story.

My original intention was to wait to post this until after the contest results had been announced at BronyCon yesterday. Not because I thought this fic was at all likely to win it – have you seen some of the authors who entered? – but so that I could link the two in a single post. Unfortunately, Super Trampoline has announced that various technical difficulties mean that there'd be a delay, though for the moment exactly how long a delay remains vague. It's unfortunately fairly clear it's going to be longer than just a day or two, though – a week or two seems more likely.

Given this uncertainty, I decided that actually I didn't want to wait any longer to post anything about The Shoreline Shape Up, so here we are. The story has crawled to 108 views, which maintains my record of making it to three figures for everything I've published. (This is not just small beer but minuscule beer for many authors, I appreciate, but it isn't for me!) I do like some things about it, such as the nods to G1, but I think what's most important is – as I said a minute ago – that I'm now writing again. Every day, too, even if for just 100 words of rubbish nobody but me will ever see.

Related to that, writing The Shoreline Shape Up (and more, but that can wait for another post) has convinced me that I'm not going anywhere soon. Clearly the ponyfic scene will gradually fade away as the show itself ends, but I think and hope that it won't fade entirely to black; that there'll be enough interest in reading it to maintain my interest in writing it for quite some while beyond this autumn. I've said a few times that I still have ideas I want to turn into fics: the key thing now is that I'm more likely actually to do so.