Adventure! With Ponies!

A few days too late, really, but over the last week I've been watching the 1984 BBC adaptation of The Box of Delights. Not just because the railway scenes were filmed down the road from me, either! Obviously the effects are showing their age (though they were almost cutting-edge at the time) and John Masefield should be ashamed of himself for the final scene, but the whole thing has such a seasonal atmosphere to it.

Anyway, on to the main topic of this post:

I am damned if I am going to go a year without publishing anything on Fimfiction, so I am going to write a story. I was originally going to push myself into something and just keep it for myself, but a couple of friends convinced me that someone might enjoy my even-worse-than-usual ramblings, so it'll be published for the world to see and frighten their kids with. (Even if they don't have kids, yes. Don't argue.)

This won't work like an ordinary story. Even mine usually get looked at a bit by other people before they go up, but this is going out as quickly as I can get it down. We're not talking Austraeoh pace or anything, but still, pretty fast. I think I can trust myself not to write anything that actually breaks Fimfiction rules, but this does obviously open me up to the risk of making silly blunders with the story itself. Worth the risk.

Because I couldn't bear the thought of saving a document called Unsaved Document 1,* the story file was first called Adventure! With Ponies!, but a quick skim through a few possibilities to see whether they'd been used for ponyfic before and I settled on The Danger Within. There is a reason, which I'll keep quiet for now. As that title suggests, it will be an adventure story, and one of the old school: a small group of characters making their way through—well, that bit I will also leave unexplained for a while.

* Turns out I'd misremembered and that LibreOffice would have called it Untitled Document 1, which may or may not be any better.

Oh, and the main protagonist will be Fancy Pants. Why? Because I like him and enjoyed writing him in Ever Let the Fancy Roam. Don't worry, he'll have a few other ponies with him so it won't be a monologue. Actually, in keeping with the old-fashioned approach, it will use that somewhat antiquated device known as third-person narration. It won't use coloured text, either, or be written in iambic trimeter. Sorry.

The Danger Within may well be a total mess. But if it's a total mess that gets me writing again and leads to my producing something down the road that's not a total disaster, I think it will be a decent trade-off.