Hey, would you look at that! My RiL list is down below 200, for the first time since... ooh, I don't know, but it must be 2014 at least since it was this small. Maybe I will eventually reach my long-term goal of having the number reasonably stable around the 100 mark. Anyway, here are this week's three fics:
Beyond the Herd by Impossible Numbers
never forever by The Red Parade
Somepony Tries to Sell Twilight Insurance by The Minister of Scones
★: 0 | ★★: 0 | ★★★: 1 | ★★★★: 2 | ★★★★★: 0
Note: I use a skewed rating system. A fic I find average scores two stars.
Beyond the Herd by Impossible Numbers
Fluttershy and Apple Bloom
Slice of Life; 9k words; June 2020; Everyone
Why would an apple fall far from her tree? Just ask the butterfly.A coming-of-age story first, and one with an interesting pair of main characters. Apple Bloom, as part of the "becoming an Apple" thing, is doing a whole heap of chores. Is this her future, or is there something more out there? Fluttershy, she thinks, is an odd pony: even now timid to a considerable extent, yet content to live on the edge of the Everfree Forest. Oh, and then there's Diamond Tiara: not quite sure what her role is now after her reformation. (You had this problem too, Hasbro...) Plus a timberwolf, who naturally encounters 'Shy. As often happens with IN's stories, I really liked this but had just the shadow of a feeling I wasn't doing it justice. Of course it's excellently written with extremely well observed character writing – but I can't quite shake the feeling that I'm not clever enough to pick up on all the currents and parallels and nods and winks. Nevertheless this is so... crafted is probably the word I want here, that it can't help but be satisfying, not least because it showed me how Apple Bloom and Fluttershy have rather more in common than I might have imagined. ★★★★
never forever by The Red Parade
Lightning Dust and Other
Sad/Slice of Life; 1k words; Apr 2020; Everyone
Lightning Dust will never be a Wonderbolt.Stories with all-lower-case titles tend to be pretty bad. This is one of the rare exceptions, so much so that it's even in the RCL. We know Dusty was drummed out of the Wonderbolts back in S3, but this story is set when even her Washouts career is over. At least she has Fiddlesticks in her life now. Why is she watching a Wonderbolts show, though? As you'd expect from the word count, there's much about Lightning's new life that is skimmed over in a sentence at most, but the author manages to pack a lot of context and meaning into those spaces. This was a speedwriting contest entry, and there are one or two places where that shows – but it is ridiculously good for a fic produced from scratch in half an hour. ★★★★
Somepony Tries to Sell Twilight Insurance by The Minister of Scones
Twilight, Spike and OC
Comedy/Random/Slice of Life; 6k words; Jun 2016; Everyone
It goes predictably badly.Ballpoint Smudge has been given an ultimatum by his boss: succeed in your next job and you get promotion. Stuff it up and you get the sack. The job in question? Getting the Princess of Friendship to have her castle insured. There's some funny stuff in here, such as Ballpoint's interactions with his boss and Spike in mildly rebellious mode. Also a wonderful paragraph in which Twilight objects to the phrase "act of Celestia" for perfectly logical reasons. The comedy flags a bit in the second half, with a too-long scene in which Twi goes through a thinly disguised version of the entire Devil's Dictionary entry on insurance. That gets a bit tedious. At least there's a letter to Celestia to end on – albeit one with certain changes from Twilight's unicorn days. ★★★
Next time on Ponyfic Roundup: stories reviewed should include Eakin's First Contact is Magic.
The Red Parade has said he often prefers lower-case titles because of the aesthetic they create, but I'm with you: until you have really good name recognition so that most readers will give you the benefit of the doubt that you did it for a calculated reason (or is just your schtick, I guess), it's just going to get the same reaction you had—namely that all-lower-case titles don't bode well for the story's quality. I would bet there is a nonzero number of readers who decided not to read this story for exactly that reason. As an author, why would you do that to yourself?
ReplyDeleteI've noticed TRP doing that in the flashfic contests, but I hadn't realised until now that he did it for full-length fics as well. It does seem slightly odd, though I do vaguely recall encountering an author long ago who refused to use cover art for a reason along the lines of "I don't want readers to have preconceptions." I can't remember who it was, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't anyone prominent.
DeleteI don't consider it to be handicapping myself, but if that's how you want to see it then sure. People are going to not read stuff for a variety of reasons and if you see this as a reason to skip a story then more power to you. But I do like challenging preconceptions and doing things that go against the grain, which is why I've written stories without capitalization, in reverse, and other weird ways that don't conform to the norm. I like the challenge.
DeleteWriting stories in reverse and such is a known gimmick. People may not like it, but they're not going to make assumptions about the story's quality from it. Say you decided to challenge people by misspelling a word in every sentence, including in the front-page synopsis. It's sure going to look to prospective readers like it's a story full of mistakes. That's really the key. Challenging readers in a way that makes your story look like it's probably full of mistakes isn't a good idea until you've well known enough that readers will assume they're not mistakes.
DeleteMeh. Sounds a bit backwards to me. It sounds more like "don't be creative or do what you want until you're famous, then do whatever you want because hey, you're famous!" and I just don't agree with that. It sounds like I'd be limiting and confining myself just for the sake of popularity and that I'm only doing it for the fame. And even then if I "waited until I was well known" then readers would probably still assume it was a mistake anyways. That being said if you look at a story and see lower case titles, say "this is a story full of mistakes" and refuse to touch it then all the more power to you. And if you think I'm intentionally shooting myself in the foot by doing so, then again, more power to you.
DeleteI once wrote a story sideways... sort of, so more power to you! Even if you try something new and it turns out to be an utter and complete failure, you have still learned something and grown as an artist.
DeleteIf you stick to the safe stuff and follow all the accumulated wisdom on exactly how to craft and promote your story... that's when I'll be uninterested in what you write.
Will admit I saw the announcement for this review last week and thought, Ah, Loganberry's reviewing one of my Fluttershy fics. This I've got to see!
ReplyDeleteAnd...
Yes! That makes six 4-star ratings out of eight reviews, and the other two were respectable 3-stars as well! (For the love of God, please never read my early stuff).
It's a... curious reaction, though, and oddly not one I'm unfamiliar with. People have said sometimes they've felt they didn't get particular stories of mine, all the more baffling to me because these days I try to be as up-front about my intention as I can (due to one too many failures of the "be clear what's going on" variety). I don't know why it happens, either. When they describe it, they seem to get the gist spot-on.
I don't even know if it's a good thing (implies I've put enough depth into the story) or a bad thing (implies I'm not getting most of my points across properly).
That aside, I love those last two sentences in your review. If I ever suffer another crummy day of writing - which probably won't need a long wait, as I've been up and down lately - I will come back and read these sentences to cheer myself up. Thank you so much.
Thing is, I can never really tell how these things will go down. When I wrote Beyond the Herd, I saw it as just another project on my fic-writing bucket list, so the attention it got caught me completely off-guard. I honestly thought Calendar Chaos had a few years yet before it got supplanted as my highest rated fic, but boy the readers sure showed me. (Also, I'm unduly chuffed my two highest-rated stories both have Fluttershy in them.)
And yes, Diamond Tiara's absence after Season Five was a wasted opportunity. What I particularly wanted to play around with in this one was how difficult it must have been for DT to reintegrate with her newfound attitude. Old habits to unlearn, some relationships to rebuild, all that good stuff.
My favourite idea was that she'd genuinely try to be nice with her family connections, but Apple Bloom would misconstrue it as more bullying, only to realize her mistake not long after. It seemed a nicely ironic role-reversal, and another example of how trying to move out of an established community "role" - even a negative one - can be hard even when everyone involved sincerely wants the best (of course, Apple Bloom got herself overworked to frustration trying to fit into her own established community "role", giving the sting some extra twist).
You mention the parallels between AB and Fluttershy, and they were fun to write, but FanOfMostEverything drew a parallel between AB and Twilight right in the comments, and it's some juicy stuff. That's what I love about fanfic ideas: they provide opportunities for yet more ideas, more unnoticed parallels, more exploration and scope. I honestly had a blast writing this one, and it's a treat to see people get so much out of it in turn.
Lastly... wow, good work reducing your RiL list. Others have truly massive lists in the multi-thousands range, so you're showing some impressive discipline all right. Is 100 an "official" target, or simply an illustrative way of saying "as low as seems reasonable"?
Thanks again. A pleasure and a privilege, as always. n.n
Oh, also, something else I forgot to ask: did you read the version before or after I restored the quotation marks?
DeleteThere was an earlier version of Beyond the Herd with the marks completely/mostly missing, but some of my readers said it didn't read cleanly, so I edited them back in, along with one or two minor edits.
That was... 18th of June when I made the change. I'm assuming after, but I'd like to check.
You are, as ever, very welcome. It's always a pleasure to read your stories, too -- though you're rather tempting me to read a really early one just for the fun of it! As for why I read this fic, yes of course Fluttershy had an influence. Fluttershy always has an influence, and quite right too. But it was mostly the relatively unusual teaming of her and Apple Bloom that caught my attention.
DeleteI've now read FOME's comments about Twilight. I have to hand it to him: there are some really fascinating insights there. I wish I'd seen them! I definitely read the version with quotation marks. It sounds from your comment as though leaving them out originally was a deliberate choice -- I'm interested as to your motive for that.
Finally, on my RiL: I've felt for a long, long time that about 100 is a comfortable size for the list. Since I don't follow FIFO for deciding what gets reviewed next, I want to have enough in there to give me a reasonable choice. On the other hoof, I don't want to feel overwhelmed as I did when the number peaked at 499 a few years ago.
Darn, now I've done it. Curse reverse psychology. Regarding my earlier stuff, let me put it this way: the problems with Practical Nightmares Only were likely worse back then.
DeleteAs for the quotation marks omission: that was because I'd read another Apple Bloom fic about her relationship with Big Mac which used a similar no-speech style. That style made it sound like the narrator was describing the two in conversation with the audience. I quite liked the effect, and monkey see, monkey do.
Plus, I wanted to let myself get telly as an exercise. I wanted to free up my "show don't tell" nervousness, because it was getting to be a self-defeating attitude, and I thought it best to give myself a license to go ahead and write like that anyway for at least one fic. Self-motivation, in other words.
In the end, though, I relented to solid tradition. The way I wrote it was still clearly pushing for (but needlessly resisting) direct speech, and even then it was never a good fit for the talkier scenes between AB and Flutters. The existing compromise was also proving awkward for people to read. My critics made the stronger case for restoring the marks, so that's what I did.
Lastly... What's FIFO, sorry? I'm not familiar with the term myself.
First in, first out. That would mean stories get reviewed in the same order they were added to the RIL.
Delete