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>>BlueChameleonVI
Hey man, you've been tearing things up like no one else has in a long time. The rest of us are probably just glad to have someone with your level of energy and enthusiasm contributing at the level you've been able to.
If scaling things back some helps keep it fun and rewarding... well, I didn't get one in this time myself, so I feel that.
But please don't get discouraged. Next time Gadget!
Hey man, you've been tearing things up like no one else has in a long time. The rest of us are probably just glad to have someone with your level of energy and enthusiasm contributing at the level you've been able to.
If scaling things back some helps keep it fun and rewarding... well, I didn't get one in this time myself, so I feel that.
But please don't get discouraged. Next time Gadget!
>>Skywriter
"Unfixable" is a harsh term. Also, even despite that, I still put this at 2nd place on my final ballot. (Phoenix Festival was first, which... kinda does the same thing in a way.)
As for the bitterness being core to things... You picked a character with too much backstory. Reframe this with another character we don't have so much on. Make it before the fall of the empire maybe, with one of those slightly-less-removed granddaughters in between Amore the Third and Cadance. Replacing Twilight Velvet with any OC mother-in-law shouldn't be too hard either.
Another angle is change the timeframe. Make this centuries ago, when Cadance was younger, and hadn't met the Twilight family, and it was just her and Celestia. Yeah, you'd have to change the setting, but a buried armory under Canterlot with "remnants" of the empire works almost as well as this being under the Crystal empire.
Whatever you do, don't worry too much about a couple critiques on a fairly nuanced problem. This is still good stuff (you won the damn contest after all!) You could just publish it as is and tons of people would enjoy it just fine.
Anyway, congratulations on the gold!
"Unfixable" is a harsh term. Also, even despite that, I still put this at 2nd place on my final ballot. (Phoenix Festival was first, which... kinda does the same thing in a way.)
As for the bitterness being core to things... You picked a character with too much backstory. Reframe this with another character we don't have so much on. Make it before the fall of the empire maybe, with one of those slightly-less-removed granddaughters in between Amore the Third and Cadance. Replacing Twilight Velvet with any OC mother-in-law shouldn't be too hard either.
Another angle is change the timeframe. Make this centuries ago, when Cadance was younger, and hadn't met the Twilight family, and it was just her and Celestia. Yeah, you'd have to change the setting, but a buried armory under Canterlot with "remnants" of the empire works almost as well as this being under the Crystal empire.
Whatever you do, don't worry too much about a couple critiques on a fairly nuanced problem. This is still good stuff (you won the damn contest after all!) You could just publish it as is and tons of people would enjoy it just fine.
Anyway, congratulations on the gold!
Just for the record, this was at the top of my final ballot, barely nudging out Skywriter's "Guardian" which did end up winning.
Retrospective!
First off, thank you to all who commented and critiqued (and voted this up rather highly.) I'm totally happy to get Bronze, as there were better stories than this... But part of me really wanted the gold this time, as this was my own prompt as well.
For perspective, no I didn't have this planned in advance. In fact, I didn't start writing this until about 10pm the night before. I basically wrote non-stop for 7 hours, though I'd brainstormed for about an hour during dinner earlier, almost all the plot was developed in real time as I wrote.
Originally this was meant to be Starlight going back and looping herself to find more time for work, which explains the opening scene... but that fell apart quickly, once I realized it'd be too hard to hide tons of Starlights, and as I already had her bumping into Ocellus... well, that seemed obvious.
As hinted at in my own fake-review, I was inspired a lot by the Time Turner bit in Harry Potter (and it's more clever uses in HP and the Methods of Rationality) as well as many other time travel stories... the biggest of which is "All You Zombies" where the main character is everyone in the universe. Also, "Brit the Elder" and "Brit the Younger" from Spell or High Water by Scott Meyer, time-looped versions of a woman who hate each other, but went back in time and found Atlantis then had to go back in time to create it.
To answer some general questions:
Yes, Ocellus is the "real" Celestia, and most every other pony she's ever met too. The original (e.g. about an hour from the deadline) ending plan was to have Twilight find out, round up the school, and after a few admissions of "I'm Ocellus" from various students, she asks "Okay, everycreature that's Ocellus in disguise, just raise a limb." Every creature in the room does, and as she turns, she sees even the other Elements are shy raising their hooves as well.
The reason she keeps going back in time (instead of jumping forward) is that she lost the spell to go forward in that lakeside fire. Originally she was going to learn (after she was way in the past) that you had to place an anchor spell BEFORE you jumped back, and as she didn't do that, she'd always have to take the long way around. I ran out of time to make that explicit.
>>Trick_Question
Agreed, I need a better reason for her to be desperate for "more time." Also, yes, everyone is Ocellus.
>>CoffeeMinion
The ending wasn't meant to be comedy. It was meant to be the completion of the lesson, by she, herself, having to go back and teach herself her own first lesson in friendship. That said, it was rushed (had like 10 minutes left and I wanted to at least proofread) so I'll try to smooth it out in the rework.
>>Samey90
>>Trick_Question
Yes, she is. :-) And that was the idea for the ending originally. (See above.)
>>Miller Minus
No worries on not liking it, I appreciate the criticism. You make a good point about the plainness of the writing. It's been months since I last wrote, and this was a late-night rush job, so I fell into some lazy patterns.
As for rules... there ARE rules here. Very strict ones, but I didn't spell them out cleanly. As I mentioned above, one was going to be the discovery that she could never go FORWARD in time if she hadn't previously set an anchor spell, and she wouldn't learn that until she was so far in the past she was kind of stuck. The other was that the difficulty of "aiming" gets worse the bigger the jump, hence why her first one mostly works, but the later ones are off by large margins. Another was the importance of spatial anchors, less (like the previous Starlight) you jump and arrive underground or in deep space, and basically die instantly. In sum, the ONLY power here is the ability to go backwards in time, by increasingly large (but increasingly unpredictable) steps.
The second set of rules concern paradoxes. Ocellus starts to hint at some of these, where she's surprised that basically her memory isn't changing as she changes her own past. This was going to lead into the bigger, darker reveal, that she's not (technically) jumping into the past, but into alternate timelines. As the word limit began to loom though, I realized I had to pull most of that out because I'd never be able to do it justice. Instead, I went with a Doctor Who style approach. Paradox means you can't change the big things, the "fixed points" but everything else is fair game. I don't know if you watch Who, but there was a big finale where all dozen incarnations of The Doctor showed up at the same time and fought side by side, so this sort of "timey wimey" reasoning seemed good enough.
As to your third point, that the comedy falls flat. Again, this really wasn't meant to be a comedy. I mean, a few bits here and there, sure, but the overall premise was meant to be exciting and (at least initially) surprising, as a science-fiction style adventure. I totally understand if you found the ending predictable though, and if it wasn't your style of story, no worries.
>>Posh
I need to clean up some of the scenes a fair bit to make it less confusing. The initial scene was originally when the story was featuring Starlight, but... once I realized Ocellus was going to BE Starlight, I left it as a bit of foreshadowing (since the entire story is, technically, from just Ocellus's perspective.) It's probably a bit of a rough kludge for that purpose though.
>>Icenrose
Again, yeah, it's confusing... partly that's because I was rushed to write it, and partly it's meant to be confusing to the character. I need to clean up the writing-mistakes half of that. Oh, and yeah, they're all Ocellus... and I SO wanted to have Discord there, but that would've doubled the length of the story with how much fun I could have there! :-)
>>Anon Y Mous
I do plan to edit/rewrite this and publish it (along with several previous writeoff entries I still have laying around.)
Thanks again, everyone, for reading and commenting!
First off, thank you to all who commented and critiqued (and voted this up rather highly.) I'm totally happy to get Bronze, as there were better stories than this... But part of me really wanted the gold this time, as this was my own prompt as well.
For perspective, no I didn't have this planned in advance. In fact, I didn't start writing this until about 10pm the night before. I basically wrote non-stop for 7 hours, though I'd brainstormed for about an hour during dinner earlier, almost all the plot was developed in real time as I wrote.
Originally this was meant to be Starlight going back and looping herself to find more time for work, which explains the opening scene... but that fell apart quickly, once I realized it'd be too hard to hide tons of Starlights, and as I already had her bumping into Ocellus... well, that seemed obvious.
As hinted at in my own fake-review, I was inspired a lot by the Time Turner bit in Harry Potter (and it's more clever uses in HP and the Methods of Rationality) as well as many other time travel stories... the biggest of which is "All You Zombies" where the main character is everyone in the universe. Also, "Brit the Elder" and "Brit the Younger" from Spell or High Water by Scott Meyer, time-looped versions of a woman who hate each other, but went back in time and found Atlantis then had to go back in time to create it.
To answer some general questions:
Yes, Ocellus is the "real" Celestia, and most every other pony she's ever met too. The original (e.g. about an hour from the deadline) ending plan was to have Twilight find out, round up the school, and after a few admissions of "I'm Ocellus" from various students, she asks "Okay, everycreature that's Ocellus in disguise, just raise a limb." Every creature in the room does, and as she turns, she sees even the other Elements are shy raising their hooves as well.
The reason she keeps going back in time (instead of jumping forward) is that she lost the spell to go forward in that lakeside fire. Originally she was going to learn (after she was way in the past) that you had to place an anchor spell BEFORE you jumped back, and as she didn't do that, she'd always have to take the long way around. I ran out of time to make that explicit.
>>Trick_Question
Agreed, I need a better reason for her to be desperate for "more time." Also, yes, everyone is Ocellus.
>>CoffeeMinion
The ending wasn't meant to be comedy. It was meant to be the completion of the lesson, by she, herself, having to go back and teach herself her own first lesson in friendship. That said, it was rushed (had like 10 minutes left and I wanted to at least proofread) so I'll try to smooth it out in the rework.
>>Samey90
>>Trick_Question
Yes, she is. :-) And that was the idea for the ending originally. (See above.)
>>Miller Minus
No worries on not liking it, I appreciate the criticism. You make a good point about the plainness of the writing. It's been months since I last wrote, and this was a late-night rush job, so I fell into some lazy patterns.
As for rules... there ARE rules here. Very strict ones, but I didn't spell them out cleanly. As I mentioned above, one was going to be the discovery that she could never go FORWARD in time if she hadn't previously set an anchor spell, and she wouldn't learn that until she was so far in the past she was kind of stuck. The other was that the difficulty of "aiming" gets worse the bigger the jump, hence why her first one mostly works, but the later ones are off by large margins. Another was the importance of spatial anchors, less (like the previous Starlight) you jump and arrive underground or in deep space, and basically die instantly. In sum, the ONLY power here is the ability to go backwards in time, by increasingly large (but increasingly unpredictable) steps.
The second set of rules concern paradoxes. Ocellus starts to hint at some of these, where she's surprised that basically her memory isn't changing as she changes her own past. This was going to lead into the bigger, darker reveal, that she's not (technically) jumping into the past, but into alternate timelines. As the word limit began to loom though, I realized I had to pull most of that out because I'd never be able to do it justice. Instead, I went with a Doctor Who style approach. Paradox means you can't change the big things, the "fixed points" but everything else is fair game. I don't know if you watch Who, but there was a big finale where all dozen incarnations of The Doctor showed up at the same time and fought side by side, so this sort of "timey wimey" reasoning seemed good enough.
As to your third point, that the comedy falls flat. Again, this really wasn't meant to be a comedy. I mean, a few bits here and there, sure, but the overall premise was meant to be exciting and (at least initially) surprising, as a science-fiction style adventure. I totally understand if you found the ending predictable though, and if it wasn't your style of story, no worries.
>>Posh
I need to clean up some of the scenes a fair bit to make it less confusing. The initial scene was originally when the story was featuring Starlight, but... once I realized Ocellus was going to BE Starlight, I left it as a bit of foreshadowing (since the entire story is, technically, from just Ocellus's perspective.) It's probably a bit of a rough kludge for that purpose though.
>>Icenrose
Again, yeah, it's confusing... partly that's because I was rushed to write it, and partly it's meant to be confusing to the character. I need to clean up the writing-mistakes half of that. Oh, and yeah, they're all Ocellus... and I SO wanted to have Discord there, but that would've doubled the length of the story with how much fun I could have there! :-)
>>Anon Y Mous
I do plan to edit/rewrite this and publish it (along with several previous writeoff entries I still have laying around.)
Thanks again, everyone, for reading and commenting!
>>Trick_Question
Ah ha. Thanks for the critique. The effect is to slow time closer to the rift and that's how she finds it. Whilst the explanation there in the story, it is too subtle and divorced from the action; I'll have SG note the serendipity of it after her discovery of the invading shadow host. I'll keep the rest of what you said in mind, too.
Ah ha. Thanks for the critique. The effect is to slow time closer to the rift and that's how she finds it. Whilst the explanation there in the story, it is too subtle and divorced from the action; I'll have SG note the serendipity of it after her discovery of the invading shadow host. I'll keep the rest of what you said in mind, too.
>>Posh
>>Xepher
>>Trick_Question
>>Miller Minus
I feel the retrospective on this one was way overdue, partially owing to the fact that I was gone on vacation for a week, and partially owing to the fact that I didn't really know how to respond.
First off, I'm grateful that you all read it and gave some feedback! This story came from a somewhat personal place, having lost my own grandmother a few years ago, and my grandfather (a carpenter) only a year ago. However, ironically, my personal investment are what held it back in spots, owing to the jerky transitions, and places that needed more space to pad out emotional impact. While I grew up, I was mostly emotionally distant from both of my grandparents, and when each of them passed, I felt very little for them, which is reflected in the story. I think, in part, this story was my attempt at making up for my lack of emotion, because I do feel underwhelmed and a little ashamed of how little I felt. (Now it sounds like there's a different story under all this!)
Excuses aside, the pacing is a critical issue I will hit in the rework, as well as the telly-ness. If you have some suggestions for techniques that reduce telly-ness in first-person stories, please let me know, because it's a perspective I definitely need to polish.
Thanks again for reading!
>>Xepher
>>Trick_Question
>>Miller Minus
I feel the retrospective on this one was way overdue, partially owing to the fact that I was gone on vacation for a week, and partially owing to the fact that I didn't really know how to respond.
First off, I'm grateful that you all read it and gave some feedback! This story came from a somewhat personal place, having lost my own grandmother a few years ago, and my grandfather (a carpenter) only a year ago. However, ironically, my personal investment are what held it back in spots, owing to the jerky transitions, and places that needed more space to pad out emotional impact. While I grew up, I was mostly emotionally distant from both of my grandparents, and when each of them passed, I felt very little for them, which is reflected in the story. I think, in part, this story was my attempt at making up for my lack of emotion, because I do feel underwhelmed and a little ashamed of how little I felt. (Now it sounds like there's a different story under all this!)
Excuses aside, the pacing is a critical issue I will hit in the rework, as well as the telly-ness. If you have some suggestions for techniques that reduce telly-ness in first-person stories, please let me know, because it's a perspective I definitely need to polish.
Thanks again for reading!
>>Miller Minus
>>Icenrose
>>Shalrath
>>scifipony
>>Trick_Question
>>CoffeeMinion
>>Posh
>>Xepher
My favorites from the comments in the writeoff:
“too baka to live, too kawaii to die,” - Icenrose
Genre: Flash Sentry Scores A Lot of Weed - CoffeeMinion
There were a few suggestions that the second mountain should get a scent. The only problem I have with that is the story stinks enough already. (ducks for cover)
Generally, I could probably spend quite some time doing a gradual reveal of the mountain, the scent, and the contents, but I was thinking the *smack* at the very end works better that way. I did some cleanup and tidied the ‘counting by primes’ thing because you have to remember Shining Armor is *related* to Twilight Sparkle, and thus has adapted several of the same coping mechanisms.
>>Icenrose
>>Shalrath
>>scifipony
>>Trick_Question
>>CoffeeMinion
>>Posh
>>Xepher
My favorites from the comments in the writeoff:
“too baka to live, too kawaii to die,” - Icenrose
Genre: Flash Sentry Scores A Lot of Weed - CoffeeMinion
There were a few suggestions that the second mountain should get a scent. The only problem I have with that is the story stinks enough already. (ducks for cover)
Generally, I could probably spend quite some time doing a gradual reveal of the mountain, the scent, and the contents, but I was thinking the *smack* at the very end works better that way. I did some cleanup and tidied the ‘counting by primes’ thing because you have to remember Shining Armor is *related* to Twilight Sparkle, and thus has adapted several of the same coping mechanisms.
Look, I liked it. Just enough silly to keep it from being morbid and just enough morbid to keep it from being silly. The Reese's Peanut-Butter Cup of Fics. With volcanoes. Two, in fact. So it's Reese's and Twix.
Darnit, now I'm hungry.
Darnit, now I'm hungry.