So are we going to do another corpse this year? When do we start?

>>43184964
Didn't the last collab fail spectacularly?

>>43184997
This thread's just racist against ants.

>no Tunaflag post yet
Did he die? Are we free?

File: HI_TIA.png (146 KB, 1024x1024)

146 KB PNG

>>43185250
I'm not tunafag but I can be him!

File: earwings and faded librarian.png (3.31 MB, 2185x1461)

3.31 MB PNG

2+2+2th for best duo!
Enjoy this conveniently packaged Tuna: https://www.fimfiction.net/story/247031/the-mare-who-once-lived-on-the-moon

File: splashy luna.png (780 KB, 800x800)

780 KB PNG

>>43185255
Well, you can definitely post Lunas!

A post Luna society.

>>43185373
Is it time for a thousand years of prosperity under the best princess?

>>43185376
Cadance?

File: 1345439.png (304 KB, 1208x1395)

304 KB PNG

>>43185380
No.

>>43185406
She dresses like my wife.

File: 1767545529865092.jpg (67 KB, 600x600)

67 KB JPG

>>43185370
Based!

holy fucking shit I am so tired of these captcha checks every 5 minutes is there no way to turn this off

>>43185467
Yes, there is, goy.

>tfw you finally finish your fetish fic after a month of feverish writing
Word count is just north of 75k. I thought the final editing would be a massive pain, but as I read through it, I'm not finding myself needing to do a ton of changes, so that's good.

First chapter posts on Monday. I'm going to try a Monday/Wednesday/Saturday posting schedule as an experiment to see how engagement goes. It'll be fourteen chapters total so it might eventually grind itself into the update section of the feature box, but I'm still skeptical many will end up reading it given the niche fetishes involved.

Deviantart will probably do good, though. The cover art's already reached the view count chapters of my previous fetish fic took a decade to hit.

>review https://www.fimfiction.net/story/589406/child-of-love (even though the website doesn't work anymore)

6.5/10. Flurry's evil for literally no reason. The author doesn't even make an attempt at explaining it. I guess naturally born alicorns have Goa'uld genetic memory or something. The story's fine, showing filly Flurry growing increasingly more despotic and obsessive over controlling the Crystal Heart as it progresses, then it falls off a cliff.

There's a big climatic fight between her and Celestia, then she runs away and the story just cuts off. Sorry, it's a contest oneshot and you've reached your word count limit. It wouldn't have been hard to write a decent ending, either. Cut out some of the pointless filler with Flurry and her friends and put in a proper ending.

I really hate these "this really needs a sequel" oneshots. Why can't authors figure out the proper scope of their plots?

>>43185623
Well what is it?

File: rarity_bat_by_tkotu434.png (2.06 MB, 1024x1024)

2.06 MB PNG

Technical difficulties in,
>/FSBC/

Please ignore this for the next 3.5h; it's just that I will not be able to post or respond until much later, hence this timing. Apologies for the inconvenience.

As for the fic, however, it is very good! I was a bit wary of the anthology format, but the author pulled it off well. Each of these is just a sweet little morsel of differently flavored horror, and it's really fun to both read each individual story and see how M6 pick what kind of story they want to tell. I will probably not have the time to discuss each in order, but I will say that none of them are bad and all could, more or less, be posted as individual one-shots—although, yes, some are very cliché, but here, referencing the different subgenres or styles is the structural frame of the fic, which turns it into a good thing. Oh, and the technical writing is quite decent. Aside from missing full stops at the end of some paragraphs (it happens 3+ times. How?), I've not run into any real errors, and the narrative voice is good—something that particularly stands out after the blandness we've been subjected to recently. Oh, and of course I like the kaidankai framing. I get that it's not too obscure (I have run into it at least twice in completely non-weeb media), but it's neat. I doubt the author knows any Japanese, though, or he wouldn't have written "kaidanki". It's kaidanKAI (怪談会) with the kanji 'kai' (会), here used to signify that it's a meeting or a gathering.

One potential problem with a fic like that would be making it feel like original fiction, not fanfiction. In fact, the first short story kind of marks that as a possibility, with its all-OC cast. Luckily, we're saved from that by the rest of the stories, which use characters and places from the show (although the remark about Filthy Rich reads to me like in-universe they're still talking about the OCs, and we're just shown canon ponies instead—at least until Trixie's fic directly proves this idea wrong). I read them a few days ago, but the FS's dog story, Rara's DT ghost story, Ponk's gorefic, and Trix's Cellyfic all stood out to me enough to be easily remembered. Some of the others, less so, but based on how effective these four were at conveying what they set out to do, I think it's just that their themes resonated more with me, and the other four are also good. Tentative list:
the Dog > DT's ghost > Cheerilee's 'tickle' > Tia's letters > Flim's hat > mirror monster > Everfree trip > zombies
And yeah, even writing them like that feels wrong, because I do remember the writing in some of the lower entries being quite good and evocative. On a different day, I could easily imagine myself ranking them in a totally different order. And the inter-story segments maybe don't add too much yet, but they're fun, in-character, and Trix is great.
It's disappointing that I must leave now, as I liked the fic and would like to say a few more things about each story.

Next week, we're finishing this story!

>>43185903
Gotta leave until noon, but I'll be back with bigger thoughts by then.
I think it's a big point in favour of an anthology when the worst entries are just somewhat bland. And even if you were to dislike any of the entries, you know you'll get something completely different right after. Part of me wishes we could get a bit more of the narrator's voice in each story, but I suppose it works well enough.
I'd say Starlight, Pinkie's, and Dash's were my favourites. The one about Filthy would be higher, if it weren't for that ambiguity.
Plus, the overarching story of the kaidan is a nice way to tie it all together, and it's fun seeing the M6+ballast talk about the stories in way of critiquing, talking about the subgenres of horror, and general talk about storytelling while remaining in-character. It's really the cherry on top. And I always love it when Twilight's autistic.
Oh, and that AN about the number 16 was a nice touch.

>>43185623
>75k in a month
I've been averaging not quite two hundred a day this month so far, because I didn't get any done for a few days in a row, during my break month of all times. How the hell could you write good prose at that rate? I'm going to want to read this when you publish it.

>>43186205
Most large webnovels are written with a sort of pseudo stream of consciousness style that reads fine despite not being particularly fancy most of the time. You want to be so immersed in reading and writing that prose just flows from your head in an already presentable state. Writing only 200 words a day seems rather tortuous. It seems unlikely that the time investment there is paying meaningful dividends. Like perhaps you spend 10x as long on words that are only 1.5x as good as they would be at a faster pace. At the risk of sounding rude, it's unlikely your writing is on the level of say William Gass or Fitzgerald; you may benefit a lot from finding the right state of mind to write faster.

By the way, this is something of a famous historical story, but Dostoevsky wrote The Gambler (a 60k~ word novel) in only 3.5 weeks back when Anon was jerking off to everyone having to write things by hand. So this goes for famous novelists writing beloved fiction too. It's just a bit less common.

>>43186230
NTA but I just want to gripe that that flow-state for me made me objectively better at writing and also required being a bit tipsy which I cannot do because I am an alcoholic and committed to my 8 years off the sauce.
I miss writing.

>>43185903
This story was cool even if it's not October. The first candle was the best but the others were good too. Except Pinkie's Cheerilee story. That one made me sick and I had to stop reading multiple times because it was so gross. Rainbow Dash was right about the DT story, it made me more sad than scared. The Flim Flam story was also sad instead of scary. That might be horror but I don't know. The Apple Bloom story was only cute and the reveal at the end wasn't even scary.
Tbh a lot of these stories become unscary when there's an action scene like the mirror pony chasing Moondancer or whatever. Thinking about it the first one with the OCs and the Celestia one were the only actually scary candles. I would guess it's because they're more psychological instead of monster focused. It feels cliche to say that psychological horror is so great like how Rarity says but maybe it's just better for the medium of written works.
The author's notes are cute although sometimes they're from an in universe perspective and sometimes an out of universe perspective. I disagree with some of his headcanons.

>>43186257
This will be some unsolicited advice, my bad, but I'll just say it in case it's helpful in some way.

There's a long history of artists associating their talents with drug use in some form, but in many cases I've observed these associations were largely psychological rather than being grounded in reality. There's a kind of psychological comfort in creating "modes" for oneself like this: instead of needing to be a good writer 24/7, you can divide it into "bad while sober" and "good while tipsy/drunk." Then you can relax while sober, and then feel a psychological power boost when tipsy - suddenly you have a reason to believe you're good. But this doesn't tend to, in my experience, actually increase quality. Usually, if you take output from such writers while not drunk vs drunk, an observer will not be able to distinguish the two. Whatever ineffable quality the artist perceives is not one that tends to be shared by others. Furthermore, there's some basic explanations we can imagine: like being tipsy makes one less stressed and critical, so even similar output can feel better in the moment.

All of this is to say that your perception of being objectively better at writing while tipsy made not be the case, and you may be psychologically chaining yourself here. If you miss writing, it can be worth tackling these psychological walls. Of course, the human mind is unfathomably complex, and it may be that being tipsy does objectively improve your writing. It may also be the case that your belief here is strong enough to make it a reality even if the alcohol itself isn't doing something. But just based on all the alcoholic authors I've read about and their input, I think there's a good chance that you can force the flow state while sober... or at the least, you can write equally well, just maybe not as stress-free and breezily as the alternative.

>>43185903
>Oh, and the technical writing is quite decent. Aside from missing full stops at the end of some paragraphs (it happens 3+ times. How?), I've not run into any real errors
I saw kind of a lot ha but I don't remember where they were :p
>Luckily, we're saved from that by the rest of the stories, which use characters and places from the show
The OCs in the first candle were okay, in fact the story is scarier and more interesting because it's less related to canon characters. I mean even you say its the best one.
>>43186192
>Part of me wishes we could get a bit more of the narrator's voice in each story, but I suppose it works well enough.
Yea there are certainly parts where things kind of happen between the lines and you have to pick up on it.
>The one about Filthy would be higher, if it weren't for that ambiguity.
Do you mean him being dead or Applejack imagining Filthy Rich and DT in place of whatever OC Rarity told the story about?

>>43186205
>How the hell could you write good prose at that rate?
Anon, I...

>>43186230
>you may benefit a lot from finding the right state of mind to write faster.
You ought to be aiming for quality over quantity in any case. Sure, you might not be Gass or Fitzgerald, but there's already an ocean of stream-of-consciousness trash that's in a "presentable state". Your writing will have more merit if you actually try and raise it up beyond the bare minimum of quality instead of merely writing more of it.
>>43186310
Definitely agree with the "improvement" coming with drug use being an illusion, or at the very least a substitute for simply relaxing and getting into a flow state while sober. It reminds me of how stoners think weed gives them incredibly profound ideas, but the real effect of weed is simply to make them /think/ that regular ideas are incredibly profound.

Hi there, its been a few years since I last posted here, but I finished a story yesterday and apparently people like it enough that it, as of writing this made second place on the feature box.

https://www.fimfiction.net/story/589841/battle-of-the-blacks

Check it out.

>>43186230
>that reads fine
It doesn't, not compared to more carefully written prose. This style is designed to be skimmed. If you try to slow down and appreciate it the way you would the work of a great stylist, it is unmistakably vapid.
>tortuous
1. (often figurative) Twisted; having many turns; convoluted.
(from https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tortuous)
You mean "torturous", I think:
1. Of or pertaining to torture.
2. Painful, excruciating, torturing.
(from https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/torturous)
At least you didn't mistake it for "tortious".
>It seems unlikely that the time investment there is paying meaningful dividends.
It depends on the effect you're going for. I don't write that kind of style because I don't like reading it. I'm more deliberate with my words because that's the kind of prose I like to read. For me, that time investment is worth it.
>The Gambler
Science fiction author Alfred Bester explained once that one of his short stories, Fondly Fahrenheit, was in his consciousness for several years before he figured out how to tell it. Once he did, putting words on the page was easy. When people asked him how long he had worked on it, the best answer he could give was, "Well, it took two days to type." I don't know anything about the genesis of The Gambler, but it might be similar.

As long as we're telling stories about how long it took to write things: Rossini claimed to have written his opera The Barber of Seville in two weeks. Someone went to Donizetti and asked if he believed Rossini's claim. Donizetti snorted and said, "Of course I do! Everyone knows how lazy he is!"

>>43186360
Allow me to restate, I am soliciting reviews please.

>>43186376
It's FoE, so I'm not even going to try reading it. But I will note that the title sounds very racial.

>>43186383
I assure you it has nothing to do with Fall of Equestria.

And that was intentional. I wanted to call it Black on Black Violence but i didnt want it to get aryanned

>>43186358
>You ought to be aiming for quality over quantity in any case.
I was thinking that may be the natural takeaway, but I think it's not quite so simple even though it seems open-and-shut on the surface. I tried to gesture at it with my 10x and 1.5x figures, but what I mean is that the time spent trying to turn "quantity" into "quality" often barely actually improves quality. Most of the best writers out there just shit out text and it's good because they're savants. It seems rare for going slow and trying to "hone' text to actually result in low-skilled authors raising the quality of their output to a significant degree. Usually, it's like, a little better, but not enough to make a notable impact.

I think that if one gets into really tiny time frames, there's definitely a crunch effect where quality starts dropping dramatically. It's like those sketch things artists do: 10 seconds vs 1 minute vs 1 hour or whatever. Definitely, telling an author to write a paragraph in 10 seconds can result in garbage compared to 1 hour. I think this crunch window is rather small. For most sentences (i.e. putting aside particularly complex or important lines that one can spend a lifetime contemplating), an author will probably "max out" their quality at like 1 to 2 minutes, and then any time spent after that will just be different shades of the same color. So, what I imagine for that fellow is, they're probably writing out a sentence, getting it as reasonably good as it's gonna be within a few minutes, and then just spending like an hour fussing over it instead of being satisfied.
>>43186367
I mean, do you think anyone in this thread is a great stylist? If that anon has the talent of one (hence me referencing Gass), then sure, take all the time one needs. But it's not pretty likely that a fimficcer penciling out their story is on the level of craftsmanship where their carefully written prose will be leagues above a stream of consciousness. I think it's very likely that their honed text will be fairly vapid too. This is largely amateur forum for amateurs, after all. And an amateur that is barely writing anything while fussing about quality that doesn't exist for them, would do a lot better to just go faster and get more experience that way. They'd be better off finishing their chapters and spending the time they would have been fussing over lines attending a writing workshop instead or something.

>>43186387
You tagged it as a crossover with Fallout. Your long description has a character with the same name as a character in Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons, a character prominent enough that I've heard of him without having read the story. If it's not an FoE story, then you're going to have a lot of angry readers.
>I wanted to call it Black on Black Violence
That would've been so based that I would've upvoted without reading it.

>>43186404

Oh no, it's definitely a Fallout: Equestria fic. The two protagonists are main characters of separate side stories that i quite like.

Im just saying it has nothing to do with the Caribou rape fetish nonsense that Fall of Equestria is.

>>43186358
>stoners think weed gives them incredibly profound ideas
I knew a jazz musician who tried to test this out as scientifically as he could. One night, he recorded himself soloing. While the band was on break, he went out back and got high. He came back and recorded himself soloing again. Same band, same venue, same audience, same night; he controlled every variable he could.

While he was high, he felt like his solo was amazing, way better than when he was sober. The next day, when he was sober, he listened to both solos. He also played them for some other jazz musicians. Everyone agreed: The solo he played while sober was good, and the one he played while high was terrible.

So it's worse than what you said. Weed doesn't make people think that regular ideas are incredibly profound; it makes them think that bad ideas are incredibly profound.

>>43186360
Came for the title, stayed for the Blackjack. (I am racist.)
Enjoyable for a bit of battle boarding between two characters. Not much else going on here, but feels like it could have been a scene for sure and all the essential beats you'd expect between them were hit. The dialog in the middle felt kinda trite, like what's the point of Blackjack coming into range to parlay if she's not gonna give him a chance to argue his case when he finally actually says he dindu nuffin?
Upvoted, but mainly because I am racist and like Blackjack.

>>43186403
Great? Not on the level of literary giants like Conrad, Joyce, Hemingway, etc. But you don't have to reach those heights for time to matter. You say you don't believe that all that time matters. Maybe you're even right about that; but there is still a big difference between a stream-of-consciousness style and a more careful one, because the stream-of-consciousness style spends about as much time per paragraph as an artist does on a ten second sketch.

>>43186310
Well I won't argue there's a perfectly good chance the quality of my writing isn't strictly linked to inebriation, you've got me there.
But I have struggled immensely to get anything onto the page whatsoever without booze, and that's not something that time and effort have improved at all. I miss the carefree haze, now all my efforts disappoint me.

>>43186459
Reading your reply here, I think the term stream-of-consciousness may have given off a way worse impression than I intended. I've been ruminating on some talented authors I've been reading and I've been forced to accept their stream-of-consciousness is so high level that their natural output feels already literary and brilliant. So I have been developing a high opinion of this so-called "stream of consciousness" style which can sometimes evolve into something excellent. But you're right that a literal 10 second sketch timeframe on a paragraph would be bad. I definitely don't mean to be that extreme.

>>43186455
Blackjack has the problem of trying to fix unfixable ponies, Black Light is absolutely convinced she's in the right at all times and is a complete combat pragmatist.

Blackjack is kind of retarded, and Black Light will use her good pony weakness to hit her again and again

Seriously fuck this new captcha

>>43186205
You just make the words go.

>>43186467
It's pretty plausible that without having your inhibitions lowered it's harder to motivate yourself. It may be a comfort to try to reinforce to yourself that the words aren't worse. Ideally there could be some kind of therapeutic solution here, like maybe lighting incense, or writing after a bath (as per Japanese tradition). Well, I won't force the issue, just something worth considering as you wait for your AA jail to open up. You only live once.

>>43185903
Well I'm liking it so far. It almost manages to be cute/comfy just from the parts after each story, and part of that is that I think it manages to stay pony. Again this is mostly because of the parts between each story. I particularly like Starlight so far. As for the stories themselves, they're entertaining enough, and none have been too crazy which is nice. It manages to stay within the realm of pony sleepover stories I think. Anyways
>calls the big bro a mare
Am I missing something? Or maybe the dog barks at trannies kek
>somehow we get applejacks interpretation of rarity's story
Weird. Wtf was rarity saying when the filly was talking about the cmc? whatever
>rd has a moondancer story
>trixie's subject is Celestia
Kek
>zombies rising just to run away from the cemetery
Kek

>>43185903
>although, yes, some are very cliché, but here, referencing the different subgenres or styles is the structural frame of the fic, which turns it into a good thing
Yeah having the M6 talking about the stories afterwards is great
>(although the remark about Filthy Rich reads to me like in-universe they're still talking about the OCs
Yeah that was weird, I think we just got the AJ version as she thought about it even though it was Rarity's story. But then, was it even Twilight going in to fix it? Or just some random non-alicorn? Who knows
>zombies last
Yeah Twilight's was unfortunate but I don't really mind. It seemed more like a build up to the joke that the zombies were just normal (undead) ponies running away from something in the cemetery under them. But I feel like it maybe fits Twilight to not really come up with anything scarier than that. The scariest stories she's probably heard of have been things she then proceeded to directly experience and fix. But this also assumes she's just never read a horror book
>Next week, we're finishing this story!
I assumed we were reading way more this week (word wise) and was disappointed when I finished quite quickly lol

>>43186192
>Oh, and that AN about the number 16 was a nice touch.
I forgot that was an AN kek. I think it's gonna be the only worldbuilding in the fic too, but yeah I liked it

>>43186308
>Except Pinkie's Cheerilee story. That one made me sick and I had to stop reading multiple times because it was so gross.
Do we have an actual pony in the club? The thing I would consider the worst that we read was the mare in tartarus getting raped by the corpses of all her seduced victims, but that's just me

>>43186205
>How the hell could you write good prose at that rate?
By focusing on writing instead of on how kewl and fancy your software is. I was averaging 2k a day when I took commissions. It's if anything impressive your prose is still so bad when you're so slow, but it's probably just because you're autistic so it's massively harder for you to do anything.

>>43186360
>he finally admits he was Pippanon all along

>>43186403
Shitty writers love to think that taking more time to write more carefully will make for better prose when actually getting more practice in writing will help you way more. They think they can hone a skill they lack the basic training to.

>>43186580
No, the confusion was whether or not i was NMMflag.

>>43186593
Which you were.

I write fastest when I'm nearly keeled over from sleep deprivation.

>>43186403
>>43186477
NTA but you're also seeming to imply that good writers are simply good by default and can just spew forth excellent writing from birth, and thus everyone who doesn't have such natural talent is wasting their time trying to be more skilled than they're capable of when they could be writing more of what they /are/ capable of. However, I think you're discounting how a writer can improve their skill over time, especially by writing more slowly and making incremental gains in their skill. Sure, these great writers can write masterpieces like it's nothing at the height of their careers or whatever, but it's usually after decades of learning and improving slowly. Also consider that most fanfic writers are in their teens or twenties, so even controlling for "natural talent" the average skill level will be lower due to a lack of experience.

>>43186609
And I realised I never said it explicitly, but obviously what I'm implying is that writing slowly and carefully may be less productive in terms of words or even (quality * words), but it's far more effective at intentionally improving a writer's skill than writing quickly and easily.

>>43186601
Not. Correct i was not NMMflag, I kinda miss his reviews

File: pan.webm (3.52 MB, 1920x1080)

3.52 MB WEBM

>>43185903
I mostly hate oneshots, and this story sucks. Back when I read the first half of it, I couldn’t see how the M6 could be telling these stories. They were obviously assigned to the sleepover ponies haphazardly, and I had no hopes for the Kaidan framing being worth it. Except when reacting “wow, that was unexpectedly scary,” they don’t generally seem to be talking in their own voices. Rather, the author seems to be writing the comment section that they wish the story had. Their imagined comment section is, of course, better than the real one, but I still take offense at them using FiM characters mouths to write it. As for the stories themselves,
> Dog
What? Surreal means "nonsense?” The dog injures its own vocal cords to speak better? The dog seems to provoke terror one minute and sympathy the next. The atmosphere seemed forced, probably as a result of the story being so compressed.
> Filthy haunts
an story
> Moondancer
Like it said above, this was more of an action story, a fight.
> Flim's hat
Hate the terrible no-dialogue gimmick. An metaphor. The only thing I appreciated about it was Starlight’s commentary on media illiteracy, but that is much too small to save it.
> Cheerilee noms
Tirst actual horrifying story. Seems like at least a little thought went into it, with the Thursday, Friday, weekend timing, although nopony commenting on Cheerilee's injured leg Friday was bad. I liked that it works as an addiction metaphor while also allowing Pinkie to interpret it as surface level body horror.

>>43186609
>especially by writing more slowly and making incremental gains in their skill
Retarded amateur mindset. You won't get better at running by spending five seconds on every step. Start writing.

>>43186609
I'm definitely on the pessimistic side, and maybe in a self-serving way, but it's also what I see evidence for. It's pretty common for writers to have great first novels and then for the rest of their output to kind of vary up and down from that basis, but never being too exceptional compared to the rest. (This is distinct, by the way, from popularity - earning the public's eye can be pretty random). Usually when I like an author I'll look up their bibliography and check out their first work because I'm pretty self-conscious and obsessive about how good the greats were when they started. For example, I picked up Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe and was flabbergasted by his writing, so I checked out his earlier work - Operation Ares wasn't necessarily something to write home about, but The Fifth Head of Cerberus was already a work of immediate genius. Orson Scott Card is not looked upon kindly nowadays, but I remember at the time getting A Planet Called Treason and finding it just as excellent as his other works. I could keep listing examples, but what I can't list examples of are authors who I thought sucked but got a lot better, or had some famously poor first work. I can't really think of an author that started off mid then spent decades improving slowly until they started producing masterpieces. That's not to say they don't exist, but they are at the very least dwarfed by savants in my experience. Even when I read extremely long running series that span decades (e.g. Wheel of Time) I don't really feel like the author is improving much over time. Worst of all is the ages. It's not uncommon for me to find out authors started in their early twenties. (I don't consider teenagers here since yeah their brain is literally not finished developing). It seems to me age has basically no relevance on actual skill; old authors are more liable to have just spent their youth accumulating life experience or fighting in wars before eventually getting a lucky break with a publisher.

All in all, I have a somewhat dim view of authors improving drastically. That is depressing for someone trying to improve (hey, me too), but it does seem that some immutable factor of the brain's natural verbal IQ has a bigger impact on writing than most other factors. It's still important to practice and get experience, of course, I'm not saying authors immediately start at their maximum power, but it doesn't seem to me they have a massive gestation period either. If I were to make up a number, maybe someone's first 100k to 1m words are a nascent period where even a good author can output garbage while finding their footing, but authors seem to settle into their natural abilities soon enough. If you have counterexamples of writers who sucked ass at the start and talk about their two decades slowly improving I'd love to hear them.

>>43185623
All these evil flurry/rebel Flurry/lesbian Flurry fics are making me want to submit a fic to the ongoing Flurry contest where she's just normal but everyone around her keeps expecting her to grow up into some epic subversion of a princess and start speculating whenever she does or says something that can be vaguely interpreted as un-princesslike. But I won't do it because I'm too busy writing other stuff these months.

File: luna coffee toshiba.jpg (15 KB, 500x636)

15 KB JPG

>>43186637
Having to check which stories are in the first half...
> Headless pone: an spook tale
> Celestia letters: barely a story
> Appleoosa zombies: zombies

>>43185903
I didn't find almost any of them memorable, except maybe Cheerilee's tickle for being gross, hopefully I'll forget it soon.
About the M6 and friends being in character in the end-of-chapter commentaries, I didn't find them to ever read in character when they were "defending" their own stories to the comments at the end. Only the filler stuff about snacks, any of them saying the story was unusually scary or weird "for the pony telling it," and Trixie's braggadocio seemed in character.

>>43186308
In the realm of psychological horror, I think this anthology completely fails to deliver. For the Celestia candle, you have to really give the story all of the possible imaginary credit as to what was on the other side of those letters, because it really doesn't help you along for it. Compared to The Needle or even Familiar, I'd say every psychological candle in Kaidan falls completely on its face. And those stories and more had already opened my eyes to the idea that horror could function as a genre in written form (which is the whole point of Kaidan). It has shown me that body horror also works well in written form, potentially better than visual, but I already don't like it so it's not like it's going to get me to read more.

>>43186673
I like to write her as well meaning and genuinely a good person, just unintentionally destructive.

File: i put more effort into th(...).jpg (265 KB, 951x720)

265 KB JPG

>>43186673
>Flurry! You evil yet?
>No dad, I'm 12.
>Come talk to me when you're evil!

>>43186647
Maybe I still wasn't explicit enough. By "writing more slowly", I meant writing more carefully and consciously analysing your own writing, which necessarily involves writing at a slower pace than what the other Anon was suggesting. Only an idiot would assume that writing slowly per se would be somehow better.

>>43186653
Those are good points, especially about the age of authors, but you also can't assume that an author's first published work is literally the first thing they've ever written. Basically all of fimfiction.net is the kind of amateurish, fun, low-stakes stuff that writers write when they're starting out or learning, /before/ they set out to write something that's serious and also good enough to be published. I hate to sound all Reddit, but you're not seeing the learning process in many of these cases because it happens before the "data" is "sampled". You mention
>I don't consider teenagers here since yeah their brain is literally not finished developing
but teen age is when I'd assume most writers first start learning how to write, which again overlaps with the age range of much of fimfiction's user base.

You're right that there are plenty of examples of extremely skilled authors in their early twenties, but it's also relatively common within that group for those young authors to have had some kind of major formative experience that heavily inspires their writing. There's another discussion to be had about authors learning more or less quickly, and how that separates the intrinsically talented from the plebs, but I'd call that distinct from savant-ness.

>of course, I'm not saying authors immediately start at their maximum power ... but authors seem to settle into their natural abilities soon enough
I can't really give much of an opinion one way or another, just because it's hard to say without much direct evidence inb4 >muh science but I'd agree with you that there's a tendency for authors to plateau in terms of skill, and often even get worse. I still think that neglects the intentional aspect of any artist trying to improve their skill versus feeling comfortable enough with their skill to make the art they want. Maybe an example of an author who improved over time would be Shakespeare? Most of his best-reputed works are from the latter half of his career.

>>43186707
>writing more carefully and consciously analysing your own writing
I can do that at 1k words per hour. Going as slow as the pregfag does is no more than a symptom of his mental retardation.

>>43186637
>> Dog
I agree with this for the most part. The story was the rich filly's brother wanting to kill her to get the full inheritance. The dog was... there? He barked at the filly and was more than a normal dog, but why? I thought it might've been a past victim of the brother maybe and he turned a pony into a dog, but that doesn't make sense because he isn't a murderer, he only wants to kill his sis for the money. So the sp00k dog being next door is completely coincidental to the other part of the story I guess. And the dog was maybe trying to warn the filly? but then when he actually warns the farmer he can turn off evil mode and actually get the message across? then the dog is dead? Why was the dog in the story, or alternatively, why was the brother?

>>43186467
I also have some anxiety about putting words on the page. It really might be true that inebriation helps you write just because it helps calm your nerves enough to actually write. I have found that it helps me to write things that don’t matter to me. Greentexts don’t matter to me, and I don’t have the same nerves if they’re what I’m writing. I’ve also picked a random word and written a paragraph where I use it properly and in context; it’s just practice using words and has no other meaning, so again, I don’t choke up.

Or you could do coke. I bet you could write a lot words on coke.

>>43187010
King wrote entire stories while high off his mind.

>>43186477
I think you are underestimating the amount of effort most writers put in to revising and editing. It might be true that a good writer can spew lots of good words faster than most, but those words are usually not publication quality. A lot of writers spend as much time or more making revisions as they do initially putting words on the screen. There are lots of great books whose writing time was dominated by revisions. That goes back at least to The Aeneid (which Virgil requested be burned upon his death because he wasn’t done revising it). And even if a writer writes a book where everything comes out right the first time, that might not happen for later books Faulkner said that he didn’t change a single word of As I Lay Dying, but he also published like four different versions of The Bear.

File: good news, we can finally(...).jpg (147 KB, 1334x1368)

147 KB JPG

>>43187017
Was he coked up when did the Waste Lands? That was the best Dark Tower IMO.

>>43187037
Yeah but editing is supposed to come after the writing, not during.

>>43185903
i quite liked this so far. as much as the quality varies from story to story, there was only one that i actively disliked.
as for each story individually:
>dog
pretty good. i liked the ambiguity on whether jade's dead at the end of the story or not, and the mystery on why the dog died is good. my only complaint is that the fic gives you pretty much no time to try to figure out the murder plot on your own. but at least once it does reveal its hand, it does successfully make everything before that point scarier.
>ghosts
very much more sad than scary once you figure out what's going on. still a decent story though. although, you'd think diamond tiara would catch on eventually.
>mirror
it seems like most people weren't crazy for this one, but i liked it a lot. it had me on the edge of my seat for most of it. although the ending left a bit to be desired. i don't think moondancer straight up getting gored by the monster would have been a better ending, but i think i wish it was resolved a little less "cleanly" so to speak.
>hat
only straight up bad story. it's repetitive and boring and literally nothing thst could possibly be called scary happens. i also detest making an entire story a metaphor as a concept. if your story does not function without the reader going out of their way to interpret what everything "actually" means, then you have failed at creating a story. allegory is a crutch for bad writers.
>tickle
decent little body horror. not much to say about this one. but what was the point of showing that the teething ring worked to sate the tickle without having cheerilee injure herself if it's never brought up again? no scene where she says it isn't enough anymore, no scene where she considers it but just decides she'd rather knaw on her leg instead, it just dissapears from the story as soon as it cheerilee finds out it works. what was the point of having it in the story at all?
(1/2)

>>43187133
>forest
this one really feels like a classic campfire story.
the formula of
>character is doing scary task and is scared
>they keep looking out for scary things and never find them
>they successfully complete the scary task without ever finding a scary thing and are relieved
>but it turns out there was something scary the whole time
is one that i can't think of any specific examples of, but it would genuinely surprise me if there were less than 10 classic scary stories that use it.
still probably one of the lesser stories though. obviously, not a whole lot happens for the bulk of the story, and the reveal itself isn't that scary either. it's told in an effective way, but the monster just being a monster from another in-universe campfire story is kind of lame.
i also actually wanted to hear the end of zecora's story about the tree.
>letters
best one of the bunch in my opinion. the nature of the letters and their author, and the way the evolve over hundreds of years, really is spooky. the whole thing's just executed really well. nothing bad to say here. good stuff.
>zombies
i could tell by how much time was spent on the preperations for the zombies' arrival that the zombies weren't going to be the real threat. i was actually more surprised that the ponies actually did start fighting the zombies than that they stopped. still,
>runnin'
was pretty creepy. but as good as the ambiguity of some unseen monsters so horrible even the dead fear them is, i really don't like that the ponies just hold their ground. i think it would have been a lot more effective if they got to runnin' too.

there's also the banter after each story, and it's pretty good. i probably wouldn't read an entire fic of just that, but as an addition to the end of each chapter of a horror anthology, it's really nice. i wonder if there's actually gonna be some spooky things happening in them near the end of the fic.

over all, my ranking of the stories would be
letters>dog>mirror>tickle>ghosts>forest>zombies>hat
(2/2)

>>43187135
>i also actually wanted to hear the end of zecora's story about the tree.
that was the best part of that story kek

>>43186498
Therapeutic solutions aren't a bad idea actually, thanks anon. It's definitely a confidence thing, like getting over how scared I am that what I write will reveal my inadequacy to me.
>AA jail
Mm, the commitment to sobriety in this case is mine and indefinite, 8 years is just where I'm at now.

>>43187010
>write things that don't matter to me
also an unironically good idea. okay.

>>43186592
>writing carefully isn't a way of practicing writing

>>43186653
You haven't read Orson Scott Card's Homebody. It's another one of his early novels, but unlike Treason, it's shit. It's just barely publishable. If it were a pony fic, /fsbc/ would rip it apart.
>It seems to me age has basically no relevance on actual skill
I think that's the wrong way of looking at it. It's not age that's the determining factor; it's time spent writing. Furthermore, there isn't a linear relationship between time spent writing and skill; like a lot of things, you learn faster at the beginning.
>I'm not saying authors immediately start at their maximum power
No, certainly not. The longer you spend here, the more your power level increases.

>>43187045
No, he was on cocaine in the 80s. He's said he doesn't remember writing Cujo and that parts of Misery and The Tommyknockers are metaphors for addiction. Of the Dark Tower books, only The Drawing of the Three was written in that period. But he hadn't been clean for that long when he wrote The Waste Lands.

>>43187156
Not when it's to the point of only writing 200W/day and convincing yourself anyone who writes more can possibly be writing well. But in general worrying about the quality of writing as you write is a wrong approach. Words don't exist in a vacuum. You cannot actually judge how well a sentence flows, a term fits, a paragraph is constructed, or a scene works until you have the proper context of everything around them. So spending too long picking each word is simply a waste of time, because you can't actually know what's best until you have a full portion of text around it. That's why you should write first and edit later. Editing as you write is like inking and colouring before you're done sketching.

>>43187189
>parts of Misery and The Tommyknockers are metaphors for addiction
It's really fucking evident as far as the latter is concerned. Even aside from one of the protagonists being a guy who struggles with alcohol and gets blackout drunk, the plot revolves around people making shit without understanding how it works. There's other stuff too that's not coming to mind right now.
As an aside I'll never understand people who say the ending is bad.

Well, I've written 24,891 words this year so far, and my goal is 100,000 in one year. My average per day is 230 and my median is about 200. These are really brought down by all of the days I failed to write anything at all, a little over a full month by now. If we only count the days I've managed to write, then my average is 340 with a median of 300. My highest is 865.

>>43186230
>You want to be so immersed in reading and writing that prose just flows from your head in an already presentable state.
Yeah, that's how I write most of the time. I rarely ever edit anything except misspellings and other basic mistakes. Of course, I reference my dictionary as needed, but that's while the words are still in my mind and nowhere else.

>It seems unlikely that the time investment there is paying meaningful dividends. Like perhaps you spend 10x as long on words that are only 1.5x as good as they would be at a faster pace.
I don't know. My post last thread about agonizing over a single word until I found the right one, "britchens" that is, was the highlight of my writing that day.

>At the risk of sounding rude, it's unlikely your writing is on the level of say William Gass or Fitzgerald; you may benefit a lot from finding the right state of mind to write faster.
Nah, it's not rude. That's one thing I like about commissions, the inability to take too long. So, rather than letting a draft sit around for years, I just get it done. Of course, my writing with the word "britchens" is for a commission. I keep thinking back to someone here saying Tolkien averaged only about 400 per day.

>>43186257
I can't claim to have noticed a difference between sober writing and not, but I don't drink heavily, a glass of whiskey at most, say.

>>43186403
>So, what I imagine for that fellow is, they're probably writing out a sentence, getting it as reasonably good as it's gonna be within a few minutes, and then just spending like an hour fussing over it instead of being satisfied.
No, I can knock out a hundred to several hundred words in an hour or two, or less, it's just getting that going that's difficult some days. I've regularly hit my writing goal for the day with, say, half an hour to spare before midnight.

>>43186572
>By focusing on writing instead of on how kewl and fancy your software is.
I got most of my customizations in over a decade ago, or at least a good chunk of them. You should stop to sharpen your axe occasionally; this would be equivalent to updating your configuration with features you've more recently learned. One feature has really saved my hands a lot of pain lately, but I only learned about it in the last few years.

>I was averaging 2k a day when I took commissions.
I'm only counting my story writing here. One day this month, I wrote roughly two thousand words, but about 700 of those were for a story and I switched to my other writing for the rest of that.

I think I do about 1k-2k words a day now, and that's a couple hours at night.

>>43187320
Look at it this way: A short story is usually around 2,000 to 4,000 words. If you write 200 finished words a day, weekdays only, then you can write a short story in two weeks to a month. If you do that consistently, month after month, then you write between one dozen and two dozen short stories per year. That's faster than most writers can manage. So I don't think 200 words/day is really the embarrassment you seem to think it is. (It's not fast enough for commercial genre writers (mysteries, romance, SF, fantasy), but they're professionals, so they spend a bigger chunk of their day writing than most of us have time for. Also, they're writing novels, and you can go faster with those since you only have to figure out one set of characters, one plot, one setting, etc., instead of starting anew for each story.)

I write so slowly and carefully that I average 0 words/day.

(I fell asleep.)
>>43187368
>I keep thinking back to someone here saying Tolkien averaged only about 400 per day.
If you're writing on Tolkien's level that makes sense. And I don't even mean in terms of prose. He put enormous focus on linguist concerns like creating languages for the other races and basing his word choice on concerns alien to most of us like digging through ancient German to find fitting words for creatures that evolved slightly differently from ours. If you're spending 90% of your day in foreign language dictionaries in a pre-internet era then your prose is going to be slowed down a lot.
>>43187431
NTA, but I wouldn't try to say 200 words/day or adjacent is embarrassing. Rather, I just mean it may not be as good for long-term growth and quality as some might imagine. It's easy to think of going slow as virtuous and beneficial for the long-term, but it may actually be denying oneself tons of valuable practice and output for relatively little gain. Just something to consider.

I also think it's really important to remember we're talking in a context of online fimfiction. This is one of the best and safest places for writing quickly. Not to say writing is ever easy, of course, but the characters are all laid out here, there's tons of genre convention to draw from, there's little risk (well, I suppose trying to earn commissions introduces risk). I may be totally off base here, but I might suggest people try to throw themselves at some magnum opus and write maniacally for months to a year, just vomiting words out. That may end up with more improvement than they otherwise could have imagined going at a slower pace.

I write 10,000 words a day. Not usually fimfiction though. Nor to say I'm an ideal role model.

>>43185903
>General impressions
Good anthology. Nice framing device, and the author knows the value of one-sentence paragraphs for crafting atmosphere and pacing. I like that the fic doesn't waste time and immediately starts with the first story, saving the framing device for the end of the chapter. I would prefer if it wasn't explicitly announced who's going to tell next though, it'd be fun to try to guess whose story we're reading (I don't think I'd guess anyone but AJ, Shy, and Rarity correctly). Also have mixed feelings about character discussions. They're short and nice to have, but in some ways feel redundant. Nice touch with explaining how the stories aren't literally being told about their acquaintances in-universe (imagine how silly a creepypasta about moot or some shit would look IRL). Not sure I'm a fan of the lore dumps in Author's Notes, but I suppose it's better than trying to awkwardly shoehorn them into dialogue as exposition.
>Spike absent
I bet he's telling Big Mac and Discord the horror story of how he cuddled with everypony for 60k words.
>the scripture had eschewed much of its arcane matrix in lieu of ominous warnings
Twilight should've said "Rainbow Dash, stop using ChatGPT to tell your story".
Now for the actual stories.

>Dog
Okay. Kinda weak compared to others. Needed more hints to the dog's true nature, like the filly mentioning that someone used to live in that house before but disappeared since her brother visited them. The talking dog spook is effective though. One thing this story has over the others is that "unknown ponies in an unknown place" is arguably a better fit for horror than specific canon characters.
>Filthy Rich
I liked Rarity's stated view on horror, so it's weird that to me this is one of the weaker entries. Probably because it doesn't really capitalize on that psychological desperation in the face of a shattered comfort zone. It's more bittersweet than anything (and may or may not be a rip-off of a movie I haven't seen)

>>43187501
>Mirror ghost
Now we're talking. I sympathize with RD's view (even if the author blatantly fails to capture her voice). Proactive protagonists who fight back can be really fun, so this was simple and sweet, without losing the horror aspect.
>Flim's hat
Really enjoyed this one. It's pretty laconic, not really delving into the specifics of Flim's insecurities, but it still works as a surreal psychological piece. I especially love Flim's dark, abrupt closing line. The thing I don't love is Starlight's explanation. She really needs to shut the fuck up when discussing these stories in general. Obviously, I'm not against analysis, but I feel like trying to chain the story to a single allegory takes away some of its magic, makes it mundane and pedestrian. I prefer "I can relate the imagery in this story to X" to "this story is a clear allegory of X and nothing more than that".
>Cheerilee
Might be my favorite. Self-mutilation is so viscerally unnatural that it always makes for great horror when written well, and this one is definitely written well. It nails the feeling of an irrational compulsive urge that doesn't have an explanation but just is, and how it can slowly destroy your mind and body. Again, Starlight needs to shut up.
>Forest
95% suspense, 5% pay-off at the end. But it's a really good pay-off, something straight outta Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark. And the bit just before that, where Apple Bloom overhears the adults talking about something she's not supposed to hear, is top-notch in putting you on edge.
(cont.)

>>43187510
>Tartarus letters
Surprisingly, really solid. Manages to create a disturbing image of Tartarus as this horrifying, barely controllable force, without even showing that much. Great rising tension with a gut-punch of an ending. Starlight once again needs to shut the fuck up and stop ruining the mystique. On a meta level, it reads just a little bit like the author jerking himself off.
>Appleloosa zombies
Alright for a short zombie story with a twist, the appuls are quite colorful for how little time we spend with them. I wish there was more attention on the horror of them brutalizing their own dead friends and family, rather than just the unknown threat at the end (although it is effective).

Overall ranking for now:
Cheerilee > Tartarus letters > Flim's hat > Mirror ghost > Forest > Dog > Appleloosa zombies > Filthy Rich
>>43186308
Pinkie...
>>43186519
>the mare in tartarus getting raped by the corpses of all her seduced victims,
That's maybe conceptually worse, but the story doesn't linger on that. Unlike Cheerilee's story, which lets you get into her skin. It had way more of an effect on me than that rape paragraph, too.
>>43187133
See, this is why I don't like Glim's commentary, it boils the story down to a single straightforward concept rather than something to tickle your imagination.
>allegory is a crutch for bad writers.
I can guarantee you can find allegories in all your favorite stories.

>>43187541
>I can guarantee you can find allegories in all your favorite stories.
Look up Tolkien's essay on Allegory vs Applicability
>I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse 'applicability' with 'allegory'; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.

>>43187541
>I can guarantee you can find allegories in all your favorite stories.
there's a difference between a story having an allegory, and a story being an allegory.

Why the hell do I keep typing "had" when I mean "and"? I've caught the error at least a dozen times when editing this thing.

>>43185852
If you mean the fetish fic, it's called Daring Do and the Curse of Avarice. Daring's trying to retrieve a magical artifact that unlocks an ancient kingdom's treasure that contains powerful chaos magic. A sadistic thief is also after the treasure. Cartoon fetish shenanigans ensue.

>>43186205
>good prose
>implying

My fetish fic narrator gives insane levels of detail when the fetish scenes happen, to the point each hoof's position is typically given, so that really bloats the word count out:
>Her forehooves were raised and, in Daring’s opinion, looked to be up defensively. One partially covered the mare’s neck, while the other was just under her muzzle. The bottoms of the hooves were fully visible, as was the mare’s athletic chest and stomach. Daring was shocked to see what appeared to be an indent of the Medallion’s pyramid face on one of the forehooves. Her hindlegs were in the standard sitting position, which, like the pegasus before her, made her cutie mark nearly impossible to determine. Maybe a wood shield and with crossed spears?
>One of her rear hooves was raised up, it’s bottom fully visible like the fore, while the other was planted to the ground. Her tail was just slightly visible from behind her, it’s form and cut mirroring that of her mane.
Repeat this for all 30+ fetish scenes and you get a really high word count from describing body parts alone. It's probably not everyone's cup of tea as it leaves little to the imagination and might even be a bit monotonous to read, but I hate reading fetish stories where the narrator only gives the most basic of descriptions. If I have to paint the mental picture to fap to myself, I'll just make my own scene. The story is also fairly formulaic in its structuring, owing to the back-and-forth thing going on with Daring and the thief, so before I'd even write a chapter, I knew which scenes needed to go in it and how they needed to play out to setup the next chapter.

Picking fetish scenes you find are hot and getting incredibly horny from them also helps a lot. I hit 5.6k one day because I was writing an asfr "freezing" scene involving Daring I've been using a version of for six years. It was getting so bad, I wasn't eating lunch and was instead writing fetish scenes during my lunch break because my horniness was making me lose my appetite.

>>43187686
This is a similar amount of detail to my stories, so I understand you here.

>It's probably not everyone's cup of tea as it leaves little to the imagination and might even be a bit monotonous to read, but I hate reading fetish stories where the narrator only gives the most basic of descriptions.
I feel the same way, and I've had people who weren't into the fetish tell me they liked the focus on detail in mine.

>If I have to paint the mental picture to fap to myself, I'll just make my own scene.
Exactly.

>Picking fetish scenes you find are hot and getting incredibly horny from them also helps a lot.
I can also empathize with you there, kek.

>>43187368
>I can knock out a hundred to several hundred words in an hour or two
Anon...

>>43187621
>>43187555
Allegory and metaphor are different things.

>>43187478
Slow writers write slow because they have little time to write. Tolkien was a full time professor and researcher. Gaiman was busy doing whatever it is Scientology had him doing when he was writing just 500 words a night. If you have the freedom to dedicate a couple of hours to writing yet still come out to just 300 words there's legitimately something wrong.

>>43184443
Look up Iceverse, the early stories that have Celestia listed as a character have her and Luna as children wandering the barren landscapes of the planet after a great catastrophe wiped out all the elder alicorns.
>inb4 Ice Star
Just giving you what you asked for.

>>43188087
Has he stopped being a stupid child or is he still at it?