What Logan is reading away from the world of colourful ponies

Time for a little non-Pony post. After years and years of being told I should read it, I've finally started on The Twelve Caesars by Suetonius. In translation, I'm afraid! I've got through the first four so far (Julius Caesar, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula) and it's not a bad read. It's not quite the non-stop gossipfest some people make it out to be, as there's a lot of stuff about military campaigns and family backgrounds in there. Still, it does have plenty of entertaining/horrifying parts, so I'll keep going.

I'm also having another go at Non-Stop by Brian Aldiss. This is an oldish-school (1960) science fiction novel which appeals to me, partly because it's shorter than the bloated novels that blight the shelves these days. Also, though, because I like the setup: in the far future on a huge spacecraft, tribes roam the corridors looking for the mythical Forwards. (This isn't a very accurate summary, but it's good enough.) So far it's very readable, which isn't always the case for old-fashioned SF.

Finally, there's another SF novel. The Ennead. Yes, spelt like that. This is a young-adult book by Jan Mark; I'm not sure how well known she is outside the UK, but there was a time when she was everywhere in school libraries. She won the Carnegie Medal, the premier British prize for children's fiction, twice and was runner-up once, though not for The Ennead. This is set on a dying planet where refugees from Earth have settled. Only just started, so can't say much about it yet.

It feels so good to be writing regularly again

It really is working. Chapter 2 of The Danger Within was published yesterday, making this only the second time on Fimfiction (after Where They Understand You) that I've managed a multi-chapter prose piece. As I've said before, the way I'm writing it and the speed I'm publishing at mean it's not going to be any kind of masterpiece, but the simple fact of being able to get at least some words down every day is reward enough for me. If readers enjoy it, and so far at least a few seem to have done, then that's a bonus.

I do, as it happens, have a one-shot taking shape in my mind, and The Danger Within is making it more likely that said one-shot will actually appear eventually. This is a story inspired by "A Health of Information", in particular the part of it dealing with how swamp fever works. I originally wanted to call it Fever Dreams, but as The Descendant has an anthology with that title I'm now using the working title All Set About with Fever-trees, from Kipling's The Elephant's Child. It may well be called something else again by the time it's actually published.

Where it all began

I can't remember how I found it, but someone has a Google album of the 1981 Hasbro Toy Fair catalogue. About two-thirds of the way through, under Hasbro's "Romper Room" brand and just after "MacBath the Silly Sea Slurpent" (I want one!), is a certain My Pretty Pony. The opening words of the description are interesting: "My Pretty Pony is every little girl's dream come true." So even if Bonnie Zacherle didn't mean for the toys she designed to be gender-targeted, Hasbro was on that case right from the start.

Since someone asked...

...no, I don't review all the ponyfic I read. Most, but not all. Every so often, I like just to enjoy reading something. This often happens when the author is someone I know personally, as I tend to find it awkward to review those pieces unless said author has specifically asked me to. After all, if I read such a fic and think it's terrible, I wouldn't enjoy saying so. (I never do, but especially so where the author is a friend.)

The other stories I read but don't review are those which are ongoing. I tend to keep quiet about them as when (if) they are complete I sometimes want to write a review after all. However, one in this category that I will mention is xjuggernaughtx's Cheerilee's Thousand. It's wonderful fun and definitely recommended, but its format (and the demands on its author's time) mean it may never be "finished" as such.

I'm actually just about to start another story that I won't be reviewing, at least not for the foreseeable future: PresentPerfect's The Princess's Captain, described as a "slow-burn romance" featuring Tempest Shadow and Twilight, with considerable emphasis on the "slow-burn" bit. This is being written in serial format, as a series of separate stories, so I may even be able to keep up with it. The setup appeals to me, anyway.

Ponyfic Roundup 187: Go with the Wyvern

The Danger Within has had a reasonable reception so far, though as I expected the fast pace of release has meant a few rough patches. It's got me writing again, though, so it's doing its job. Chapter 2 should be out within a week.

Read it Later story count: 372 (-6)

I don't think this week's title is Googleable, so I'll mention that "Go with the Wyvern" was the slogan used by the now-defunct Midland Red West bus company that operated in Worcestershire in the 1980s and '90s. (Yes, that was part of the inspiration for The Ballad of Wyverns' Rock.) Anyway, here's today's small collection of stories under review:

The Concerns of Butterflies by Jaisen
The Time Twilight Pranked Celestia by Skijarama
Wormy by Fluttrick
My Queen by Bootsy Slickmane

★: 0 | ★★: 1 | ★★★: 2 | ★★★★: 1 | ★★★★★: 0

Viking ZX's article on "The Indie Hypocrisy"

I was alerted on Present Perfect's Fimfiction blog to this fascinating op-ed article by Viking ZX (known as Max on that site) entitled "The Indie Hypocrisy". It's well worth the read, as are the comments on his Fimf post plugging it. Yes, that's right: a Fimfiction comments thread contains considerably more signal than noise. It does happen occasionally!

The gist of this article is that there's an odd disconnect between the general feeling that indie games, indie movies and so on are great, and the general feeling that indie books are bad. Viking ZX even gives an example where indie books were slagged off in a thread devoted to praising indie games, and reasonably enough feels irritated by the inconsistency.

Various people in the comments (there and on Fimf) who know much more about this than I do have made some fine points, for example the general lack of trustworthy curation for indie books – but one that struck me particularly is one that most certainly applies to fanfic as well. Many people, including me, have made it before in various situations, but it bears repeating:

Assessing writing is time-consuming.

Glance at a picture and you can generally tell within a few seconds whether it's any good and, more to the point, whether you like it. Listen to a song and you probably won't have to wait much longer to form an opinion. But writing isn't like that. A few stories are so good they grab you immediately and never let go. A larger chunk are so bad you know after a paragraph that they're rubbish. But there's a huge slice in the middle where you'll need to spend, at the very least, ten or fifteen minutes seeing how things go.

There is a flip side to this, as ocalhoun mentions in the Fimf comments: writing has a really low barrier to entry. If you can string a few words together, you can publish a story. You're not going to be able to create and publish an indie game unless you have some idea of the fundamentals of programming and design. As such, it's much easier for rubbish to get published in writing. By fanfiction standards, Fimfiction's "write 1,000 words vaguely on-topic and in coherent English" is quite a high barrier, by virtue of being a barrier at all.

Several commenters express sadness that in the Big Wide World of Original Fiction there's nothing really like Fimfiction's community. If you're a voracious reader of ponyfic, how do you decide what to read out of the 100,000-plus fics on the site? In most cases, recommendations will be part of the mix. On the whole, these work fairly well – if a fic is plugged by several people, not all close friends of the author, that's usually a good sign. You might not like the story, but it's rarely objectively bad.

A number of the people commenting on Viking ZX's piece are Proper Writers, in that they write (or seriously want to write) original fiction and sell it to people who have never seen a pastel pony in their lives. But even from my point of view as someone without such ambitions who is comfortable in the easy world of Equestria, I still found it thought-provoking. There is a difference between how indie games and indie books are treated: to what extent does there need to be?

UK Pony conventions old and new

So... much... nostalgia value

2018 is shaping up to be a very interesting, and potentially record-breaking, year for the UK as far as My Little Pony conventions are concerned. While much of the news from America over the last few months has been of cons calling it a day – Nightmare Nights and EQLA being two big names to do so – here in Britain we're apparently going in the other direction. There are two established cons to consider and two newcomers, so here's what we know so far.

UK PonyCon: venue TBA, date TBA
This is the biggie, being both the longest-running (by far) and the largest British MLP convention. It is unusual both as a multi-generation event and for its extremely strong family-friendly ethos, but as it's sold out three years in a row that approach clearly works. Plans are already well under way, with committee applications having closed earlier this month. I'm biased, having loved almost every minute of UKPC 2017 in Bristol, but this is the convention I'll be aiming at as a priority in 2018. Last year's con was in mid-October and details were announced in late April.

BronyScot: venue TBA, date TBA
Last year, BronyScot in Glasgow was the only specifically brony-targeted convention in the UK. I don't think I've seen any definite confirmation that the con will happen again this year, but BronyScot will have a presence at Hearth's Warming Con in the Netherlands in February. That's a pretty good indication that we can expect a 2018 iteration. Last year, for various reasons, some details were very late in arriving, but with luck that won't happen in 2018. Last year's con was in late November and ticket sales opened in August.

Griffish Isles: venue Manchester, date 19 May 2018
Now we're on to the new conventions. This is a one-day event organised by HypnoHooves, a name well known to many from other conventions and his organising of the regular Lancashire meets. Although exact locations have not yet been revealed, the con website states that there are two, both walking distance from Manchester Piccadilly station. The only reason I can see for having two venues at a single-day con is a separate music event, as with Rock Nessie at BronyScot. Mention of hotels on the website does hint at an evening component.

Sparkle Nights: venue Bristol, date TBA
The fourth UK con of 2018 doesn't have a date, though "sometime in May" was mentioned on its Twitter, but it does have an exact location: the SGS College WISE Campus near Bristol Parkway station. With a team headed up by another familiar name on the UK fandom scene, Jollyoldcinema, this con is aiming for "laughs and fun" and describes itself as "a more teenage/adult event", though a reference to a target age group of 14–25 seems to have disappeared since I first checked the site. Sparkle Nights has the most eye-catching and detailed website of all four cons at the time of publishing.

Some personal thoughts past the cut.