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?

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

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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

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>>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?

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>>43185380
No.

>>43185406
She dresses like my wife.

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>>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?

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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

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>>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.

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>>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.

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>>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.

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>>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?

>>43188110
According to his most recent blog, he suffered a concussion at the start of 2023. His recovery has been slow, and he has ongoing mental health issues. (I find this totally believable, because one of my coworkers got a severe concussion in a car accident and it took her six years to recover.) I think the answer to your question is, "He never was a stupid child, but his behavior may still be peculiar at times."

>>43188150
He was a stupid child before Covid too.

QRD on Ice Star? His stuff just seems vaguely mediocre and he produces a lot of it.

>>43188415
He was touched as a child so he decided everyone who likes loli should have their head on a pike.

File: forest nights watch.jpg (1.58 MB, 1600x1559)

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>>43188621
Pedophiles should have their head on a pike.

>>43188649
>Luna poster
>anti-pedo
eerrmmm?

>>43188621
Oh, i thought it was more something like Artist

>>43188621
Didn't know he was cool like that.

>>43188649
B-based?!?

>>43188649 >>43188722
Pretty sure he also thinks everyone who likes pony foalcon should have their head on a pike.

Speaking of Ice Star, is anyone here familiar with https://www.fimfiction.net/user/474842/Miro+MM, who's apparently been debating him a lot recently in their stories' comments? One of their stories was added to a group I'm in recently, and I can't tell whether it belongs or not. https://www.fimfiction.net/story/542456/three-bedrooms-in-a-disco-bin#comment/12417581 says that someone is "spamming the story into groups". (In my case it was added by https://www.fimfiction.net/user/336973/Booples, but I don't know whether that's the same account adding it everywhere else.)

>>43188767
I'm more confused as to how a guy with that many followers gets so little traffic on his fics.

>>43187368
>One feature has really saved my hands a lot of pain lately,
Well?

>>43188817
Might be because Iceverse is a huge cycle with dozens of loosely connected stories of varying quality and most people can't be bothered to read them all in chronological order. The Iceverse group is also the only place you can access that order (well, there's also a TV Tropes article, but it's pretty outdated nowadays).

>>43188649
You're right, we should round up all the queers and kill them.

>>43189006
Get over it, Q.

>>43188915
I liked the Weedverse better.

>>43189067
The Freeverse is the superior verse.

>>43189247
The best verse is iambic pentameter.

File: Daring Do Cover Art Fim1.png (1.36 MB, 2000x2000)

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https://www.fimfiction.net/story/589615/daring-do-and-the-curse-of-avarice
Commence the shilling. Prologue is now live. Fimfic didn't like the full size cover art, so I had to shrink it.

>Synopsis
Eighteen hundred years ago, the ancient Kingdom of Tenuia was a mighty power. It basked in wealth and power few empires have wielded. Today, it lies in ruins. Ruins that still cling to the Kingdom’s secrets and its power. One artifact in particular, the Medallion of the Carta Portis, was said to be the key to unlocking the Kingdom’s secrets. Secrets linked to an old chaotic Equestrian foe that had nearly dominated the world not once, but twice before, both times bringing Equestria to the brink of ruin.

It was a familiar story to Daring Do. There were always ruins of ancient kingdoms with hidden powers some amulet or ring could unlock. She had thought it would just another of these standard retrievals. That is, until she came up against a greedy, sadistic thief after the same prize and the powerful, ancient magics in the ruins of Tenuia that are determined to stop anypony—adventurer or thief alike—from greedily stealing its treasures.

Content Advisory: Despite the synopsis and even the plot itself, this story is a fetish fic. Fetishes that broadly fall under the “cartoon physics” banner and include: flattening, compression, shape change, freezing, modulation, and disintegration. Oh, and mind control/hypnosis, as well.

>Short synopsis
Daring Do is after an old, ancient artifact from the Kingdom of Tenuia that’s linked to Discord. So is a greedy thief hoping to cash in on Tenuia’s famed treasure. Tenuia, itself, however, has some very cartoony surprises in store for the both of them.

>>43188815
All I know for certain is that they wrote the ChiCom clopfic that was posted in a recent thread. It looks like they mostly write trollfics? It takes a special kind of person to write that much of that kind of stuff.

>>43189620
I see "Daring Do and the Amulet of Graveeda" is in the similar section, kek.

>>43188845
Emacs has this concept called "Abbrevs" that let you type less. I don't know if Vim has them too, but I'd expect it to have something equivalent.

>>43189787
The vim method is the Ultisnips package. I have no idea how it would be relevant to fiction, though.

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>>43189620
Fucking Starlight Nova, kek.

>>43189649
Very esoteric form of trolling. 2deep4me.

>tfw it's now your worst rated fic on Fimfiction
Kek. I really gotta finish that [Comedy][SoL] featurebait I've had sitting around for a decade to see how normal fics actually perform now. I'm much more surprised by it sitting as the newest story for five hours during the alleged "peak hours" according to that one old blog post. Deadfiction.net confirmed. Doing much better on Deviantart, as expected.

Part of me wonders if the T Tax really hurts it. I was tempted to toss in a sex scene to force the M rating, but I refuse to compromise on its cartoony foundation by tainting it with horse vaginas or crotchtits. I already compromised enough with the implied tentacle thing with the inflation hoses.

>>43188817
Followers =/= story views. It never has and it never will.

>>43189787
>Daring Do and the Amulet of Graveeda
Once I saw that when I first made the story I knew you'd mention it.

>>43189949
I was tempted to reply, but I think I'll just leave it.

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>>43190151
You missed peak hours. Maybe I should collect more data some day, but I doubt it's any different now than it used to be.

>>43188767
B-based?!?

>>43188596
i agree

>>43189024
I'm not that suicidal.

>>43189787
>Emacs has this concept called "Abbrevs" that let you type less
And you still only average 300 words a day in spite of that.

>>43190686
Here, let me give an example from yesterday, when I wrote 335 words. So, I didn't start writing until Cold Blooded Twilight's stream, which is late in the day for me. Over three hours, while watching the stream, I managed 166 words. I wasn't writing the entire time, though; I was also in the chat and distracted with yet other stuff, only trying to get 100 words done in an hour and failing at that. Afterwards, I had an hour left, but I didn't write more until the last twenty minutes of the day or so. That seems to be 189 in about twenty minutes or less. That's pure stream of consciousness writing, where I think about what I want to write, and I just let the sentences pool in the paragraph based on what I've yet to describe and what thoughts I want the paragraph to communicate.

I don't know, is that a bad rate?

>>43190755
Yeah.

>>43190755
Uh, if I'm understanding this right, you were watching a like twitch stream and talking in chat while writing? Sorry, but that's just stupid. The human brain does not do well with processing 2 or more streams of language at once; every time you listened to the streamer speak it would completely interrupt your internal monologue and writing output. It would be basically impossible to focus. That you were participating in chat too is just ridiculous, that's such a lack of focus and effort I can barely believe it. That's why you took 3 hours to write 166 words, and then did 189 in twenty minutes later. Watching a stream while writing is one of the worst possible things you can do for output. Not to mention, it's already just a little pathetic to be dealing with such small figures. This is like if we were on /fit/ and people were talking about doing 10 reps of a 5 pound dumbbell, or jogging for 3 minutes. It's just so pitiful one should stop themselves from talking about it and think "wait, something is clearly wrong" before they even post anything.

>>43190156
Where is this graph from?

>>43190837
I made it. It's about three weeks of data. Maybe it was four? I don't remember for sure. I stopped collecting data when I was confident it was the same pattern every day, even on weekends (and I think there was a holiday in there, too).

>>43190834
It also explains why his writing is such shit. Nobody can write well when they’re not focusing.

>>43190755
>"I carefully curate my word choices and work hard to make sure my writing is the best"
>*writes while watching a stream*
This level of cognitive dissonance would be laughable if it wasn't legitimately sad. You're not even stupid. You're autistic to the point you can't even appreciate the faults in your being.

Best warm fuzzy feel good fics to fall asleep to?

>>43191334
How many Reading Rainbows have you read today?

>>43191383
One

>>43190834
>Uh, if I'm understanding this right, you were watching a like twitch stream and talking in chat while writing? Sorry, but that's just stupid.
It was Picarto, but basically. I'm mostly just either watching CBT draw, talking in chat, or focussing on writing a story. I may knock out a paragraph, get stuck, and then just pay attention to the other two, say. I agree that trying to focus on all three at once just wouldn't work.

>The human brain does not do well with processing 2 or more streams of language at once; every time you listened to the streamer speak it would completely interrupt your internal monologue and writing output.
I agree. CBT doesn't speak at all, so it's just listening to his music, and I already write with music playing most of the time.

>It would be basically impossible to focus. That you were participating in chat too is just ridiculous, that's such a lack of focus and effort I can barely believe it. That's why you took 3 hours to write 166 words, and then did 189 in twenty minutes later. Watching a stream while writing is one of the worst possible things you can do for output.
You may have a point here. I'm compelled to try to get some work done while I'm just watching something like a stream, but maybe I should stop and see how that works out. He only streams thrice a week, so I'm not doing it all that often.

>Not to mention, it's already just a little pathetic to be dealing with such small figures. This is like if we were on /fit/ and people were talking about doing 10 reps of a 5 pound dumbbell, or jogging for 3 minutes. It's just so pitiful one should stop themselves from talking about it and think "wait, something is clearly wrong" before they even post anything.
Excuse me for discussing the matter around such heavyweights.

>>43190977
>This level of cognitive dissonance would be laughable if it wasn't legitimately sad. You're not even stupid. You're autistic to the point you can't even appreciate the faults in your being.
Those aren't mutually exclusive, I even gave an example last thread, but I don't care to explain further to someone so rude.

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If you were going to die soon and had to read one last fic which would it be?

>>43191985
Circles, so when I get to the end, my wife and I die at the same time.

He keeps writing them. I keep reading them, thinking, "This can't possibly be as idiotic as it sounds!" But it is, every time. Sunset and mud. Sunset and mud, over and over. This time I realized it's stopped being funny for me. It's too obsessive for me to laugh at anymore.

>>43191985
Probably my first story to see how far I've come since then.
Or Heart of an Author for the sheer rage to make me feel alive again for a bit.

>>43192024
>writing
lol
he doesn't even slip his typo-laden rewordings into the output to fly under the radar anymore, this one is just straight GPT like the original

>>43191588
Oh, no speaking makes it make more sense. I have used streams for BGM before, like radios, so that's not so beyond the pale, though with chat turned off. Lately, I've been making Foobar playlists of game OSTs and such so that I can better make my entire work environment "offline" in a sense with little distractions. I was getting bothered by youtube autoplay bringing up distracting videos. To some degree, I think letting your attention waver when getting stuck may be something that lowers your writing speed. I mean, it's not going to un-stuck itself. It's not exactly pleasant, but staying focused when you get "stuck" and promptly working through it is probably important.

In terms of "getting work done while watching a stream," I think it's valuable to have the mindset that multitasking always makes both things worse. A writer will probably not want to impact their writing in that way. So, well, personally speaking I devote my full attention to streams when watching them since otherwise I would find them not worth watching and close them, but when using voiceless streams for BGM that's equivalent to not watching a stream for me. The middle ground you're in with chat interaction and watching a bit I guess is unrrusual for me, but at some points I tried playing low-effort games on my backlog while watching, like maybe trying to do some Slay the Spire runs which I don't really care if I lose or somesuch. That's kind of preachy, but I'm not trying to tell you have to live, just yapping. Writing is kind of too important to let be damaged by split attention, I think.

>Excuse me for discussing the matter around such heavyweights.
I meant it less to be rude and more to give important context. Like "100~ words in 3 hours" is pretty close to doing nothing at all. So it should be valuable to reconsider it greatly. Like it wouldn't have been too different if you didn't write at all in those hours, then waiting for after the stream and did as much in 20 minutes.

>>43190156
>You missed peak hours
Think you need to redo the graph. Story was posted at 23:30 UTC (6:30 PM EST). It remained the newest story on Fimfic for six hours.

>>43190755
That's way too many distractions to write. You gotta block out dedicated time for it where you're not doing anything else except listening to music, if that's you're thing. I try to follow a schedule where I give myself at least an hour to write/edit.

>is that a bad rate?
For me it would be. I'm not happy unless I hit 500. If I get north of 1k I'm really happy. At full tilt, I can do 1k an hour, but that's feverish fetish writing. I think my best non-fetish was 4k in a day for the freighter oneshot.

>>43192024
>He keeps writing them. I keep reading them
Congratulations, Mud Anon, you're the new Hailey Potter Anon. You'll only find peace when he moves over to Japanese light novels like Hailey's author did.

>>43192320
I stand by the graph. It was like this every day for weeks. (The one limitation is that it was made when we were not in DST. DST might change things.) 23:30 is the latter part of Fimfiction's day. Peak hours are 20:00–22:30 UTC. If you want to maximize the number of users who see it at or near the top of the new stories list, you should post when the number of users first starts to level off, around 17:00 UTC (unless there's an upcoming contest deadline that's causing a large number of stories to be submitted; then you might want to wait until 20:00).

That said, I don't think that has much to do with your fic's performance: You're still in the new stories column, even with M-rated stories included. It's more likely that people are deciding not to read a fetish fic for a fetish they don't share. (By the way, your long description is remarkably clear about the nature of the story. Thank you for that.)

>>43192299
>>43192320
Alright, I'll try a new strategy. I used to try to write 100 words an hour for a few hours a day, taking a break when I hit 100, and more recently I've switched to this, where I'm writing more haphazardly but just trying to get to so many words a day. I'll go for a week of dedicating a block, an hour or two, to nothing but writing each day and see how that works out for me.

>I meant it less to be rude and more to give important context.
It's fine, I appreciate your thoughts on this. Until we had this conversation, I didn't know how slow my writing speed would be considered. I'd certainly prefer a speed closer to one thousand a day.

>>43192362
Good luck. I definitely think that "just writing" and letting the word count fall where it may is best. Stuff like quotas and "trying to get work done while doing X" feels kind of like one is not enthused about the writing itself. It's best if you're not forcing yourself or feeling pressure, but rather writing while focused for love of the game.

Well, that's just my take as some guy. If it doesn't work out for you that'll be rough. A slower speed isn't a death sentence but generically speaking the lower output and lower rate of practice are both unfortunate.

Damn you guys type slow. Don't tell me you're the kind of people who only think of your story when writing.

>>43192362
>I used to try to write 100 words an hour for a few hours a day, taking a break when I hit 100
Terrible terrible terrible approach. The biggest hurdle to doing something mentally is starting to do it and the best way to do something well is to get deep into it. You're turning off your engine the moment you get it going and worse training yourself to stop. Your writing should happen all at once because the writing in the middle is a lot easier to do than the writing at the start.

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I can't believe AWiBD died so soon after its cover art was completed.

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>>43193029
That's why you finish the story, THEN you get the cover art, THEN you post it all.

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It's up

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>>43189787
>Emacs has this concept called "Abbrevs" that let you type less.
I've never needed this. Just install an autocomplete package and forget about it.

>>43193394
oh neat it's like a shittier version of what my IDE and integrated AI assist do for me but in a context where I'd fucking hate it.

Just write on your tablet.

>>43191334
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBPVANguHQM

>>43193653
>write chapters in ms paint using the pencil tool
>run the image through an image to text tool
>paste the output to fimfiction

Nailing my fics to the door of the church as Martin Luther intended

Passing my fics down as part of the oral tradition like Homer. (Also, they’re about blowjobs.)

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>>43193783
Having a troupe of traveling players in a post-apocalypse act out my fics over centuries until cultural drift and changing standards turn them into almost unrecognizable forms of themselves that are somehow cultural touchstones.

crafting my fics into paper airplanes and launching them from the roofs of skyscrapers.

They put my fic on Voyager

>>43193790
There should be a fic based on that picture, but I'm too busy to write it myself.

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>>43193803
I'm all for more Positive Pinkie Parent Propaganda, honestly. Them and Rainbow Dash's parents get dragged too much in stuff (and Rarity's parents not enough).

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even with a circle captcha

Favorite Applejack fics?

>>43194156
Three Steps Back

i want to write, how do we get motivation to write again?

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>>43194173
Who's this "we"?

>>43194173
Look at the Front Page of FiMFiction and realise you can only be better than that.

>>43194352
How can I beat Pignat blow-for-blow, though?

>>43192351
>your fic's performance
I knew it wouldn't do well. My last niche fetish fic also pulled bad numbers on Fimfiction. Just the nature of the fetish. I'm just shocked it was the only fic posted on the site for six hours in prime time EST. I knew the fandom had shrunken, but I didn't think it had gotten that bad.

>Thank you for that.
I always try to have a good long description. It's the short that's always a pain to do well.

>>43192362
>taking a break when I hit 100
That's honestly shocking to me. I could see stopping after filling a page or two, but a hundred words? That's just a single good-sized paragraph. Seems like you're really obsessing over word choice in the moment. Deal with that later. Just write. You can refine the wording when you do the editing sweeps.

>>43193029
what does AWiBD stand for?

>>43194173
Someone once asked me: "Why do you imagine writers write?" And of course this is one of those questions that have a thousand answers, but here was theirs: "Because they are filled with a need - not a want, a need - to make something that does not exist; something only they can make, clearly, since it has not yet been made by anyone else."

This is probably a bit too pithy to sink in all at once, but to me it is enlightening. If you don't have any motivation to write, or, more precisely, if there is nothing you feel a "need" to make, and you are content consuming, you don't need to motivate yourself to write. You don't need to do anything, because you aren't, in that moment, a writer. Even if you forced yourself to write, it probably would not be that spiritually significant. Instead, you should focus on consuming and thinking, until, maybe, one day, you feel yourself REALLY burning with a desire to read something that doesn't exist. When it hits you its up to you to write it, maybe you will become a writer again.

>>43194501
We think James wrote this.

>>43194516
why is it we?

>>43194516
Who is James

>>43194517
>>43194526
The person whom multiple individuals believe to have created this >>43194501 post. Duh!

>>43194445
a witch in broad daylight

hey, what's the word on creating an alternate accounts for different styles or themes of stories where it's obvious you're the same author? allowed? frowned upon?

>>43194666
Allowed and well accepted.

>>43194566
Arwen

>>43194666
Allowed. For example, having smut and vanilla account is good because one audience might be put off otherwise.

>>43194445
Anon's Wife's Big Dick

>>43194501
I think everything you've said about needing to make a thing that doesn't exist is true. I know nobody is going to satisfy my fetish exactly the way I want it done.
However, now I'm paralyzed that I'll do it wrong, so I have to disagree that it's the only ingredient.

>>43195328
I definitely wouldn't ever say it's the "only" ingredient, if you had your hands chopped off for example you'd have bigger fish to fry. Anyway, when anxieties are strong enough random internet comments won't help, but what I can say to you is that you shouldn't worry too much about doing it wrong. There's 2 powerful tools afforded to you:

One, you can edit your old work endlessly. This can pose SOME difficulties in terms of keeping up continuity and maintaining the integrity of a work, such that it shouldn't be abused too much, but you really can just change stuff if you mess up. I know at least one extremely popular and beloved work that just paused for a few months to completely change the first like 500,000 words of the story to form a stronger base. It was a bit controversial but people overall liked it and the author was satisfied. There's never a point of no return for this stuff.
Two, you can just try again. This is more common in other cultures but sometimes authors just retell the same story from the ground up while using their future knowledge to adjust how things go. These are more popular than you might imagine; fans of the old work like seeing the new take, while new fans can treat it as its own thing. You can try again as many times as you like.

Overall I'd say there are enough ways to recover from doing something poorly that your biggest concern should be doing nothing at all. If you don't write anything, you'll never improve and never be in a position to do it right. You may also learn to appreciate something you write that's not perfect but still good enough to be satisfying in another way. At the end of the day, though, doing nothing will certainly always be easiest.

>>43194501
This is often what gets me writing, wanting to read a story that I'm too lazy to look for or doesn't exist. I still write shit most of the time, but the inspiration is there at least.
This thread is good at making me feel motivated about writing, too. Though it has the double edge of making me feel illiterate some times

Hpw many Victorian era novels should I read before I attempt to write a fic in the Victorian style?

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>>43196190
At least one more.

>>43196190
Just force some children to work in your factory

Fics where little children are forced to work in factories?

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>>43196265
The Victorian era FiMfic that >>43196190 should read, TWOLOT.

>>43196284
Don't you mean TMWOLOTM

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>>43196288
That's what I meant, but I meant to write what I wrote. I like the memetic letters more because they almost spell Twilight in a funny way.

>>43196288
No, the rule is that you take out the title's most identifying words and make the acronym from everything else:

The Mare Who Once Lived on the Moon
-> The Who Once Lived on the
-> TWOLOT

>>43196265
One of the Rainbow Factory spin-offs, I'm sure.

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it's up

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>>43196312
>Chilean
Into the trash it goes

>>43196312
Pooh's Adventures Ass Shit

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>>43196297
Where did they live again?

>start working on your deadfic again
>it just doesn't feel as enthusiastic to write as the fetish fic
>tfw the only way you can feel that high again is by writing the Dash fetish idea
I hate this.

>>43194666
Sockpuppets have long been allowed and accept. Only rule is you can't use them to upvote your other stories or shill them.

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>>43196360
he moon

>>43194633
fuck that's even one of my favorite stories

>>43196400
Do any of your fetishes overlap with mine at least? Can I try to give you new fetishes?
>Only rule is you can't use them to upvote your other stories or shill them
You can, you just need to not get caught.

>>43196478
It's still alive, it just updates slow.

>>43197089
Last update was 7 months ago.

>>43197136
That's quite slow.

>>43197136
I had to wait five years for an update once, you're fine.

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>>43197152
Any day now.

>>43196190
Just watch the clips from Star Trek Voyager.

>>43197346
I wouldn't wish that upon anyone. Even HiE writers.

Are subtle trollfics that are well written on the surface allowed on FIMFiction

>>43197628
No.
It's shit, or nothing.
Subtlety is for losers.

>>43197628
Sorry, the "Shining's Isekai Adventure" guy is running late.

>>43198060
It was a yes/no question, not a fic recommendation question. But per your request, here's a link: https://www.fimfiction.net/story/500819

>>43198060
I'm busy keeping three different /a/ threads bumped.

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>>43198246
Why?

>>43198557
Because I like all three of the shows they're about and would rather carry them to the next episode for the two that are getting one.

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AI scam, or run of the mill autism?
The account is +5 years old with nothing to show for it.

>>43198801
Profile pic is a scantily clad, busty human female. Do not engage.

>>43196785
>Do any of your fetishes overlap with mine at least?
Doubtful. Cartoon physics has few overlaps. Mind control has been wedging itself in with me as well, but it needs to be paired with some kind of cartoon physics thing. Dash becoming Twilight's athletic sex slave after mocking her for being a squishy unicorn just doesn't do anything on its own.

>Can I try to give you new fetishes?
Nah, I'm good. The ones I have are satiating enough.

>>43197217
>Secrets
>tfw someone brings up your deadfic
Hey, I'm still working on it, at least. That's more than can be said for most of them.

>>43198801
Standard Youtube autism. People doing bad Fimfic audiobooks has been a staple since the site's founding. We used to even have a thread voicefag before the guy had a paranoid schizo meltdown that Youtube was targeting him for being gay. You should be good.

>>43197152
>>43197217
>>43198828
Oddly enough, I've seen like three 11+ year updates this year on FimFic and a I think several revived PonePaste stories. I wonder what entered the water. 2026 doesn't seem like a special year.

>>43198885
hasbro gave more chinese companies licenses to make merch for g4, so it's spreading further. plus there was a big toyfair in china i believe this month?

>>43198828
>Mind control has been wedging itself in with me as well
Good, good. As for cartoon physics, do bimbonies land somewhere close to that? How about goo/latex stuff? Body modification by way of an air pump or a 4th wall breaking pencil / mouse editing the character?

I think I am starting to give myself new and exiting mental issues from reading too much mlp fiction. Last week I hardly did any actual work at my job and just kept reading. My dreams are filled with nothing but pony stories and I am starting to really want to just escape reality.
I am not going to stop tho, this reading binge has brought me more joy than anything else I have done in the last couple of years.

>>43199406
Goddamn, son, welcome to 2010.

>>43199412
no no, I remember my mental issues with ponies from back then quite clearly, these are new ones. I also had taken a break from anything pony related for a couple of years now, so that probably contributes.

>>43199406
Masturbate immediately.

>>43199406
I had a dream Sweetie Belle met God and God trapped her in an infinite corridor and told her to walk forward. She asked for a glass of something to drink and he just handed her a thing of Blue juice.
Then she walked in the opposite direction and broke the infinite corridor.

>>43199406
I've almost said pony words irl

>>43199729
Fucking foals always breaking shit

>>43200128
She's understimualted

>>43200168
>stimulating foals
Go back to >>43115487

>>43199931
I once saw someone write “everypony” in a non-pony Discord server. They edited it pretty quickly. I was tempted to start teasing them over it but didn’t want to reveal my own power level.

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https://www.fimfiction.net/blog/1139402/mini-fics-progress-updates

Posted a few little fics that were too small to post on fimfic proper.

>>43200426
>he's scared about revealing his power level

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>>43198801
Me too, now. What'd you do?

>>43199406
How do you find good stories on FIMFICTION?

>>43200899
>there are good stories on Fimfiction

>>43198801
>>43200880
charge them 1$ per view they get on their video

>>43200981
There are enjoyable stories at least

>>43199340
>bimbonies
No, that's not really cartoony. Seems much more to be in the mind control realm.

>goo/latex
Generally no (unless you're talking about melting), but compression/shape change does fit the theme of immobilization that's common in the latex/body suit stuff. Just a different implementation of it that focuses more on a fantasy contortion angle than the tactile "rubber" sensation. Freezing/asfr also has a heavy focus on the immobilization theme as well.

>Body modification
Other than a shape change kind of thing, no. That's getting into TF territory which I'd consider to be entirely separate. The mention of the bike pump suggests inflation, but I'm thinking you're more envisioning a sort of hyper kind of thing which is much more in the TF camp.

>>43200523
>too small to post on fimfic proper
This is why the anthology tag exists. Toss them together in one story to hit the 1K minimum.

>>43200899
>>43201292
I just filter by one or two tags that I feel like reading next, this has been mostly #romance + #(character) + #anon lately, and then check them out. Sometimes I sort by ratings or wordcount as well to find the more high effort stuff. Other than that I start reading and then quit a lot when I come across garbage.

>>43201434
I was mostly thinking about something like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uu3RAz9GWs

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Summoning spirits for fun and profit, in
>/FSBC/

I don't have a lot of time to write this, so the general observations have to come first. I can't, at a glance, determine which half was stronger, and the distribution of 'great' and 'okay' seems roughly similar to me. That said, what last week proved (and what I did not comment on; sorry about my disappearance) is that everyone liked a different set, so this only reinforces my theory that they all range from good to great, and preferences sort them more than some abstract measure of quality. However, one thing I don't remember from week 1 is the swearing. I'm of the opinion very few (possibly none) stories, pony or otherwise, ever get improved by including foul language, and doing that to a mostly fic with a mostly canon-appropriate framing device is especially jarring. And before you say, "What about the gore stories that they tell?" that is the premise of the story, silly, and not something that I see as "unpony" since these are very, very clearly marked as stories. Anyway, it's just a detail; ignore how many words I spent on it just now.
But really, almost everything else is similar to week 1. I liked it quite a lot there, and I like it quite a lot now. Really nice horror fic, and underrated one at that. Also, the accents of neighponese culture are very neat. As for the ending, obviously the choice was between playing it straight for horror and doing this. I think the fic chose the "correct" ending given that it valued the "SoL ponyness" of the framing, but I kinda wish he went for the other option, though of course that would get A LOT more downboops on it. Oh, and there were two blatantly missed words in this week's section despite the overall comparatively high level of polish and strong prose structure.
(1/2)

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>>43202002
(2/2)
As for the stories, I have only one more minute until the deadline, so a quick ranking in order of appearance:
Silver - #4. More adventure than horror, but the mystery was nice and the ending justified the genre.
Timberwolf - #6. I so, so wanted to like this! The idea is good, but it just didn't quite work for me. I liked the dog story; clearly the problem wasn't it being too vague (it did imply strongly what happened), but I never really felt any 'horror' from it. Good banter in the scenes, though. Even this is a decent oneshot, which speaks well of the fic.
Echoes - #7. It is vaguely unsettling, and the atmosphere in the first part is nice, but the non-resolution felt simply weak for me.
MuscleJack - #8. Eh. More sad than horror? Maybe? But actually not really sad, either, so maybe drama? I think this was the weakest one from both weeks for me and the only one I didn't really find anything to like about.
The Ear - #1. This one is just great! More direct horror than some of my other favorites, but it tells a complete story and fits very comfortably into horror, with both direct events and some "casual" chilling lines.
Angels - #2-3. See the next one.
Deer God - #2-3. They have different strengths, and if forced to pick, I think I'd choose the former, but I liked both of them quite a bit. In the [very] short story format, a single great moment is sometimes enough to sell the fic, and the appearance of the Angel was certainly that. But the mood of FS figuring out Ritzcracker in her cellar was pretty good, too.
Finale - #5. Not so much an individual story as the payoff to the anthology. It was good, not great. If you wanted to make it great, you should go for the other ending, but people would rightfully complain about being misled regarding the whole fic. Perhaps you don't want to sacrifice that just to make this one land better. Perhaps you do.

We don't have a next fic set yet and I'm already super late, so here are a few potential choices:
https://www.fimfiction.net/story/37820/lines-and-webs
https://www.fimfiction.net/story/57463/twilight-sparkle-night-shift
https://www.fimfiction.net/story/519321/sorry-we-missed-you
https://www.fimfiction.net/story/86542/winds-of-change
https://www.fimfiction.net/story/423769/the-haunting
https://www.fimfiction.net/story/6810/how-to-woo-your-lady-in-nine-easy-steps
I'll do better next week, I promise.

>>43202002
>silver
i don't have a lot to say about this one. the scene at the vet's was good, and i actually really appreciate the cliffhanger, but it takes a little longer than i'd like to get going. it's okay.
>timberwolf
another one for the "more sad than scary" pile. i actually liked it quite a bit though. it's a cool twist on werewolves, vampires, zombies, and other monsters that turn people into more of themselves. the author's gotta be colorblind though. cloudchaser is not gray. and in this case, i think that genuinely harms the story, as the timberwolf turning into cloudchaser as she turns into it is a lot less obvious in a way it's not intended to be when the description of the half turned wolf gives the wrong color for the pony it's turning into. at first i thought it was a different pony (derpy maybe) who also got scratched by it turning into a timberwolf the same way that cloudchaser was.
(1/3)

>>43202077
>echos
there's pretty much zero story to this one. it's just kind of a list of things, and a stinger at the end that's almost relevent, but not quite. nothing about the story is actually mutually exclusive with, or even implies the absence of, ghosts or an afterlife. not to mention that
>dude, what if when you die, there's just nothing
is pretty much the psychological horror equivalent of a jumpscare. it's lazy horror. you could slap it in anything in any context and it'll get somebody. plus it feels kind of tacked on here, like the author couldn't think of a good way to end the story. probably because there wasn't much story to begin with. the only reason i think this probably isn't the case is that the banter at the end is almost entirely focused on it. and said banter acts like it's an immaculate payoff that plays into the chapter's themes perfectly; like the whole chapter was the same brand of low-effort existential horror; like that was what the chapter was logically building towards and not something that comes completely out of left field.
if the last few paragraphs were removed i don't think anyone would be able to guess what the story was supposedly "about". that's how ill-fitting the ending is.
however: the echos themselves more than save this chapter for me. what an absolutely fantastic horror concept; and executed so well too.
and it's scary in such a unique way. it's not a fear of the present, or the future (no matter how much the stinger wants it to be), it's a fear of the past, and the dark secrets it holds that few are privy to.
but in a way, fear isn't even the main thing the echos evoke. for me, it's almost wonder.
all the echos have stories we only understand a part of. we don't know what drove the ponies who left the chair and knife echos to kill (themselves or otherwise). we don't know whether the author of the book echo successfully containted his desires in himself, or if he merely successfully contained the evidence of his deeds. the hallway echo betrays very little of its origin, and the statue still less, but it seemingly being so different from the other echos, and so mysterious makes it super interesting in its own way. i'm not even sure we can say it actually is long journey's echo.
i kind of want more of this. just a list of objects that cause a minor sensory effect, and a powerful and specific emotion when interacted with in a certain way. forget the story, it doesn't need one. although i can easily see coming up with more interesting anomolies in this format difficult. still, i'm very happy with the eight echos we got. literally any one of them alone is better than the entirety of starlight's first story in this anthology.
(2/3)

>>43202002
>I'm of the opinion very few (possibly none) stories, pony or otherwise, ever get improved by including foul language
Really? Well, as Catcher in the Rye famously said: "Fuck you".

>>43202082
>muscles
this isn't horror. the only thing about it that even slightly approaches horror is the gore, and even then, in every single instance, while the descriptions are enough to make you wince, they're exclusively sad and not scary every single time. that being said, this is still pretty good. it's not good as a horror story, but it's good.
>ear
now this is what i'm talking about. both the deep anomolous oppression of the first half, and the all out panic of the second are fantastic.
this is definitely the most complete out of any of these stories. i can honestly imagine it as its own standalone fic. the only thing you have to do is cut out the banter at the end (which in this instance isn't even about the story itself), but i can see it being improved if it were a little longer.
maybe have the ear wake up a day later, and we actually see what twilight's silent party is like, with the mane 6 still trying to enjoy themselves while under the ear's oppression. and there could be some minor foreshadowing that the ear's about to do something too.
>angels
>muh """biblically accurate""" angels meme
>it's not even well done version of said meme
actual garbage. basically zero redeeming qualities. this is a joke of a horror story, and i mean that 100% literally. there is absolutely nothing here you can't get from the literal memes this is based on.
>gods
>the most direct retread in the whole anthology
>and it's of its worst chapter
yup. this is very similar to the last chapter in many ways, including quality.
while there actually is stuff here not directly copy pasted from internet memes, it's still garbage.
the best part of this chapter is just the mane 6 talking about gods, but besides being obvious padding in a story that desperately needs something actually concrete, the conversations are really just okay.
mystery is extremely useful in horror, the majority of chapters in this anthology have at least one major element go completely unexplained. but there's a difference between the antagonist of your horror story being mysterious, and the antagonist of your horror story straight up not having motivations. the god does random things for no reason, and that is the beginning and end of his character. consequently, the stakes of the story begin and end at "something bad".
turns out, when you make the antagonist of your story intentionally incomprehensible, it just ends up making the story itself incomprehensible. who could have guessed.
>leylines
i was waiting for this fic to get finally get meta. i was hoping from the start that this is what the post-story banter was leading up to, and it didn't disappoint too much. i think it being just an act was a mistake however. it should have been real, and kept going for just a teensy bit longer. not bad though.
(3/4. didn't realise this section went slightly over the limit.)

>>43202090
over all, this fic was quite the mixed bag. this anthology had both some of the best, and some of the worst short horror stories i've read.

and for my complete ranking of every chapter:
letters=echos=ear>dog>mirror>tickle>timberwolf>muscles>ghosts>leylines>silver>forest>zombies>hat>gods>angels
(4/4)
>>43202004
i vote winds of change. i know
>what if x character was a changeling
is a somewhat trite premise, but it's a premise i haven't really interacted with at all, and this fic seems the most interesting out of those options.

>>43202004
>https://www.fimfiction.net/story/37820/lines-and-webs
Feels more appropriate for the other club just because of its length: 161k plus a 231k sequel. We could stop after the first one instead of committing to all 392k. But the first sentence of the long description misspells "Changling" so I'm inclined to say no.
>https://www.fimfiction.net/story/57463/twilight-sparkle-night-shift
Nominally a sequel to Monsters, which the club read in September 2023. (I remember many objections to the foal punting, though I think overall sentiment tended to be favorable?) Given the nearly thousand year time gap between the two, I can't imagine that reading the first one is actually necessary.
>https://www.fimfiction.net/story/519321/sorry-we-missed-you
I know nothing about this, but I'm not sure I trust someone whose output seems to be mostly anthro porn.
>https://www.fimfiction.net/story/86542/winds-of-change
Could be okay.
>https://www.fimfiction.net/story/423769/the-haunting
I can read Admiral Biscuit in small doses, but I don't think I could make it through a full-length story of his. Unless it's a much different style from his usual one. But #human #romance? Sus, as the kids would say these days.
>https://www.fimfiction.net/story/6810/how-to-woo-your-lady-in-nine-easy-steps
Sparity romcom? I don't think that's for me.

I think this means I vote Night Shift or Winds of Change. Not sure I have a preference between those.

>>43202002
Holy Mother Faust.
I always go back and forth on if this is cool or cringe. I liked how it was (over)used in this story.
Anyway, I liked the second batch of stories more than the first one. I think Timberwolf and the angel/god ones were my favourites, but the Ear one was the best structurally speaking.
Anyway, to give a short summary of each:
>Silver
Halfway through I imagined this would turn into a Little Shop of Horrors situation, but it just de-escalated after the vet scene. Cool, and had potential, but it just sorta fizzes out.
>Timberwolf
Amazing idea. Great execution. For the most part. Honestly, I think this just needed a round of polish and punching up the last scene between Cloudchaser and the timberwolf, and it could've been great.
I wonder what happened to the original Cloudchaser. Is she just going around the Everfree?
>Echoes
Probably the most basic form of a horror story. I enjoyed the format, and Celestia's little speech is pretty good. There's not much else to say, though. It's really just a "think of this concept, ain't it creepy?" story.
>Swole
I don't think this ever committed to the horror. It could've gone places. Perhaps AJ starts losing her equinity as she feels she has less control over her body and goes from feeling she's not good enough for society, to fitting in, and then back to being an outcast. Potential for some creepy body horror, but it dropped the ball.
>Ear
I love it when something just HAPPENS. No explanation. No foreshadowing. Boom. You've got to deal with this scenario now.
It managed to do a lot of world building in the first half. It's quite commendable. And it didn't drop the ball, either! The Ear's basic mechanics are described, a loophole is maybe found, and they go all the way with it. Probably the best of the bunch.
>yore devil or yore angle
I liked this one. Just like the echoes one, this presents and idea and lets you stew on the implications. Also, who would've thought it was that easy to communicate with higher beings? Just drag some clouds together, bro. Just chilling enough to be rated high, and just long enough to make it effective.
>God
I want to write a full story based on this premise. I liked how the theological talks build up to God's reveal. Also, was every mention of "He" really in bold. or was that just my screen?
I suppose this loses a few points because the coolest part is just kept as a short summary that Fluttershy thinks about near the end, but I liked this one very much.
>Leylines
I liked the bait and switch about the true intentions of the kaidan. I think spending all night reading in bed and reaching this part really helped sell it to me.
And the next b&s was a really nice way of tying it together in a very pony way.

I've got to say, it's one of my comfiest reading experiences in the club lately.
>>43202096
Seconding this. Why not.

So when is anon going to drop what he uses Abbrevs for?

>>43200523
>Tuna fic
This is based off the thing with Luna's moon miscarriage isn't it. Isn't it?

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>>43202220
>>43202077
This is what I'm talking about. Both of (You)r posts read like something that could be true, but several of the opinions are different. It's so rare for the club's opinions to be so all over the place. It's very interesting. But it also makes discussion harder other than "I disagree about x".

>>43202077
>turning into cloudchaser as she turns into it is a lot less obvious
Yeah, I also had this issue with it, but what comes after gives you way more than enough clues to fix author's color error. For me, it really lacked one more scene somewhere around that part, though.

>>43202082
>Echoes
>however: the echos themselves more than save this chapter for me.
You say this here, I say something similar about angels. But here, it wasn't quite enough to justify this story. I agree that the concept is solid, but the fumbled finale negatively impacted my opinion of the story. It would've been better if those paragraphs weren't there at all, especially with the banter that you mention.

>>43202087
Yes, really. A few f-bombs in stories felt good, but even in those cases, I think the scene could've been told better without them. I can think of some character ideas that would perhaps need profanity for authenticity, but even then, I'm not sure it'd work out well.

>>43202090
>it's not good as a horror story, but it's good.
Eh. It is sad, but it is also so much worse than, say, the Ghost story with DT from week 1, and that one was actually thematically horror, too.
>basically zero redeeming qualities
Wrong. The "angel's" appearance after RD's flight was a good moment and a good, unsettling visual. The story is just this one visual, but I liked it for it.
>very similar to the last chapter in many ways, including quality.
kek, but I would agree (in disagreeing still)
>being just an act was a mistake
Like I said in the post, it's a tradeoff. The fic is insanely less pony with it being real, but the final story would be better that way. I would also prefer for it to be real, but most people would not, and it would get 20+ dislikes instead of just one. I don't think it matters, but perhaps the author disagrees here.
And it cannot be wrong to lean on writing something to be more pony.

>>43202096
>had both some of the best, and some of the worst short horror stories i've read
I agree but I strongly disagree with ~50% of your rating, which, again, feels very interesting to say.

>>43202220
Honestly, my opinions are way more in line with yours, so I don't have much to comment. I like that everyone can see that the Ear was best.
>just needed a round of polish and punching up the last scene between Cloudchaser and the timberwolf,
Yeah, exactly! It was really missing that scene for me, too!
>original Cloudchaser
Are you assuming her wolfsona made it out of there alive?
>>yore devil or yore angle
Glad to see someone else liked it.
>was every mention of "He" really in bold
It was. I'm torn on this decision. I don't think it added much.

>>43202220
>I wonder what happened to the original Cloudchaser. Is she just going around the Everfree?
twilight killed her.

>>43202261
That image haunts these threads like Luna's stillborn foal haunts her dreams.

>>43202002
>an entire story just to justify why aj can't win against rd
fucking kek "Doctor, remove my muscle inhibitors."
>"and until they discovered how to make the Ear go away, they had to live with it."
Do they though? I'd be long gone if somepony got decapitated
rd meets an angel
kinda kino
>Last story is Twi using the elements to curse existence
I thought for sure Luna would've shown up at the end considering it was her idea and she foreshadowed some sort of climax at the end but instead we get discord for some reason. I really don't have much to say about the fic as a whole though. A fun little read but not much more. Seems like half the fics were just SCP ideas by the end. Am I gonna rate each candle? No, I don't care enough. And I'm still not entirely sure why, or even if, we are really hearing the stories at all or some weird ponyville centered version of them via the narrator.

>>43202002
>As for the ending, obviously the choice was between playing it straight for horror and doing this. I think the fic chose the "correct" ending given that it valued the "SoL ponyness" of the framing, but I kinda wish he went for the other option, though
going with Luna instead of Discord could've done this for sure. She could just sent them to a waking nightmare or something and she could've not had anypony in on it (which again is where I thought the fic was going ever since like the 1st chapter when Luna suggests the game)
>angel and deer god 2-3
Angels was definitely better

>>43202077
It is a shame the timberwolf story didn't do more with its body horror.
I would've liked to see at least one glimpse of the clouchaser-turned-timberwolf maybe stalking the edges of the Everfree trying to get a glimpse of Flitter before going back into the forest.
>>43202082
The echoes are a great concept, and I would read the story you describe there. A shame I don't think I've come across one that does it.
>>43202090
The AJ one could've easily become body horror. It would've been awesome. All the elements were there. It just didn't commit.
And yeah, the ear one was great. I like that its defeat was final. It even came at the cost of Pinkie going deaf. I would've liked to see some of the failed attempts, though.
I'm kinda sad we disagree so diametrically on those two. I thought the angel one was a tad one-note, but I liked Dash's progression through the story.
I still liked God a lot, though. It does suffer from us not experiencing Fluttershy's discovery and it subsequent end times that get thwarted by her.
I would really like to read a fully fleshed out story of this exact concept. Maybe I'll write it one day.
I don't know about the ending. On the one hand, I would've liked to have a full horror bow to tie it all together. On the other, every chapter has been a horror story that gets brought back to reality by ponies being ponies, so I think it's fitting to have it all harken back to silly ponies being silly.

>>43202090
>actual garbage. there is absolutely nothing here you can't get from the literal memes this is based on.
What does this even mean? Are there irl memes of RD meeting a pony angel or like in equestria memes. Or do you just mean the appearance of the angel? Why read anything when you can just look at memes if that's the case? Weird take

>>43202196
>But the first sentence of the long description misspells "Changling"
kek, he's just a chinese ling

>>43202264
>And it cannot be wrong to lean on writing something to be more pony.
based and correct

>>43202286
>I would've liked to see some of the failed attempts, though.
>Caramel on the ground in 8 different pieces.jpg

>>43202264
>It would've been better if those paragraphs weren't there at all
agreed. after reading it, i thought about better ways it could have ended instead, and i came up with one i liked where one day, twilight just stops perceiving echos, and is left wondering whether something about her changed, or if all the echos themselves just suddenly disappeared. it probably wouldn't be a perfect ending, but i think it'd fit in a lot more with the rest of the chapter's more mysterious horror that leaves you wondering more than anything.
>Wrong. The "angel's" appearance after RD's flight was a good moment and a good, unsettling visual.
it's a fine enough visual but nothing you haven't seen before. it's not really different than any other hyper-colossal creature, which is a visual i think works a lot better with uh, visuals, in the first place.
>>43202282
>And I'm still not entirely sure why, or even if, we are really hearing the stories at all or some weird ponyville centered version of them via the narrator.
we definitely are. even with the ones that you'd think would rely on canon characters the most, like letters, the banter at the end always refers to the characters by generic names, like "the mare". as for why, probably because the author wanted the stories to be about canon characters, but with this framing device, it'd be kind of weird if the characters were telling these stories about themselves and ponies they knew.
>>43202286
>I would've liked to see at least one glimpse of the clouchaser-turned-timberwolf maybe stalking the edges of the Everfree trying to get a glimpse of Flitter before going back into the forest.
anon, she's dead.
>I would really like to read a fully fleshed out story of this exact concept.
i think fleshing it out could save it. just give some impression of the god's goals or motivation and you're most of the way there.
>fluttershy is forced into being the servant of a malevolent diety that lives in her basement
is a great idea for a horror story. i just think it was executed really badly here by putting all its eggs in the "incomprehensible" basket.
>>43202320
>What does this even mean?
just the general "biblically accurate angel" memes that were popular a while back. it really adds nothing to the concept of
>what if angels were liek, all scary lookin an stuff
other than a half decent description of an enourmous being, which as stated earlier, is also hardly a novel concept.