The long and the short of it

Pointless factoid of the day: according to the nallar.me list of ponyfics, a story called Tales of the Winter Magic Academy has 179,999 words. Given that it hasn't been updated in years and only even seems to exist online in about two places (barring a few even more incomplete versions) I fear that it will be stuck forever at this slightly irritating level. :P I suppose its companion piece would be Through the Eyes of Another Pony (listed as 310,001 words) although a rewritten version of that does seem to be in progress still, albeit glacially slowly. And no, I haven't read either one!

All this serves as introduction to the fact that, as you'll know if you follow Ponyfic Roundup, my preference is generally for shorter works: the considerable majority of the stories I review are under the 10K-word mark. Part of that is simple practicality: I can't read five or six long stories in a week. Part of it is that a lot of old and overlooked fics are short, and I like to give some of them a moment in the sun. But partly it's that I like short stories. I write them for that reason, too. The art of telling an interesting tale in a couple of thousand words is, I think, sometimes undervalued.

It is of course true that I've read some long ponyfics in my time, most notably the behemoth that is Fallout: Equestria, which weighs in at 620,000 words, famously more than War and Peace. Calibre tells me, though, that I've only read five other fics with word counts in six figures: Austraeoh; It's a Dangerous Business, Going Out Your Door; The Games We Play; Shipping and Handling and Integration. (You could make a case for the Hard Reset trilogy being one story, in which case that would join this select group.) That's not a huge number for an avid reader closing in on three years in the fandom.

I may try to read a few more longer stories in 2015: among those on my Read it Later list are Anthropology; The Immortal Game; Mother of Invention; Flash Fog... and Past Sins. Yes. There's always Past Sins. All of those are over the 100K-word mark, so I may not get through the whole lot of them this year, but I'll see how things go. And of course there are plenty of stories in the intermediate-length category to consider, too: some of those have been in RiL-limbo for months, come to that. Maybe I'll do a PR at some point focusing on those mid-length tales.

What I think is unlikely is for me to move away from reviewing mainly short fics. I enjoy it, it means there's a lot of variety, I can get through several in a week and the really bad ones don't become a terrible slog. I haven't DNF'd a single PR story yet, though one of these days I expect it will happen. As ever, I'm open to recommendations: most of you know the sort of things I prefer (and if you don't, here's a summary) but there aren't many things I'll rule out entirely. In the meantime, I need to finish writing up the PR I have planned for tomorrow!