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Under the Sun · FiM Short Story ·
Organised by RogerDodger
Word limit 2000–8000
Show rules for this event
Unsolicited
Stamps were rare on Bechamel stead. Bachelorhood made letters unnecessary when you knew most the ponies in town and talked with during the week coming in with the wagon. Nervous hooves ripped the letter open, it didn’t have the Canterlot enblem, so it wasn’t yet another tax increase for other ponies to get rich off of.

Hello there,

How does it feel to be a loved one? I wish to feel it someday.

I am Maud Pie, an educated middle class mare from, Ponyville, Equestria. I am a doctor with my rocktorate and earn for a decent living. I am very hard working and honest to my profession, which indirectly implies that I don’t have much free time.

So this has given rise to problems in my personal life. Lack of free time has deprived me of the chances of finding my love and life partner which many professionals might share with me. So I want to tell straightaway that I am in search of my life partner.

If you ask why postal dating then the answer is that it is the only option left for me. Moreover I was always fascinated by other places, their culture, and geological formations. I always had a dream of meeting a perfect stallion just like in films. The best way to find a stallion to date with is at an organization for dating.

During my search of a perfect way to date, I came across this organization, where thousands of young mares like me had registered and found the love of their life. If you are a single and you also want to get loved and live together with a fine mare in harmony and love, then please join this program and mail me. I will be more than happy to converse with you and get to know each other.

Sincerity,
Maud Pie


It was four stamps for a only bit, and she seemed like a nice mare.




Sleepy hooves pawed through the mailbox, and grabbed a hooful of letters. The first few were the standard bureaucratic formula from Cloudsdale, and she made sure to drop those in the ‘do later’ pile. Forms and regulations were for later, when the weather was safely squared away. Hooves sorted, then paused. This one was different, the outline of a stormcloud on the front. It probably wasn’t a complaint, nopony would waste their nice stationary on a complaint. Curious hooves shredded the letter to reveal the treasure within.

Hello: Rainbow Dash, Ponyville Weather Manager

We are one of the considerable full-integrated weather profile facilities. located in the newly famous cloud material Clouds-Deil

Diversity of manufacturing capacities allow us to provide “One-Stop’’ services from rain extruding, cloud treatment (anodizing, brush, polishing, powder coating), rainbows, season management and cloud house assembly.

We have in-house mould design & mould manufacturing workshop, 600 ~ 2800 tonnage extruders, multiple Cloud Numeric Controls with 6.5-meter-long working platform, 12-meter-long condensation line. And we are equipped with full set of advanced facilities for testing cloud properties and atmosphere components.

Main products: vapor parts for modernized clouds(such as high-capacity raincloud), special high-strength shaped cloud profiles, cloud accessories for house( such as window, desk, shower), cloud platforms & ramps(such as all kinds of cart ramps, wheel chair ramps), cloud parts for new energy: accessories for Concentrating Solar Power, cloud profiles for truss, scaffolding system, shower room, furniture ECT.

We are innovators in the field and can product ANY styling of clouds!
Examples include Cirrus, cirrocumulus, cirrostratus, Altocumulus, altostratus, Cumulonimbus, cumulus, nimbostratus, Stratocumulus, stratus.

You design it, we make it!

Any new design and technical drawing is welcome,After all, implementing our clients’ ideas is our mission!

Best regard
Daring Flyer


Cloudy-Deil? Wasn’t it Cloudsdale? Too early in the workday, sleepy still. Do later pile, probably do never.


Starting the day, starting the oven. Hooves walking to the window, turning the sign, unlocking the door. Checking the mail slot, always a few. Taking them to the counter, bending down and taking out last night’s fresh baked and loading them into the counter case.

Always the early birds, coffee and croissants. Till open, bits, till close, Thanks and a smile. The missus in the back, starting the first batch. Still early, shop empty, letters on the desk.


Melting prices for you – good sex mood for your partner.

It is very important for a stallion to have some true friend nearby when he faces impotence!

Sex is a dead duck for you? Listen to me, you friend, and it's gonna be ok!
Only a small number of all stallion in Equestria face no problems with having normal sexual activity.

Welcome to one of the premier mail order marketplaces to find best drugs at unbelievable prices!

Make Sure To Mention Our Promotion - when ordering through the catalog and get ADDITIONAL discount 5% for all our product, even product that is already at LOW LOW PRICE!

Boost your weapon now!

Turn and look, you’re alone. It goes under the register.
It’s been lacking recently. Something to spice it up for later.
Later.



A diamonded mare checks the mail, sorts. Oh, she’s got a letter. Honor society? Wonder what for. She’ll see it when she gets up.

Padding down the stairs, still a filly but everyday more of a mare. Letters are unexpected, still a joy. Thanks, honor society? This could be good! The perfect thing for a resume often reminded about. Excited, rips open.
Hi Sweetie Belle,

I am reaching out today about our Honor Society chapter program. We are inviting you to serve as founder and president of the Honor Society Chapter at your school.

We currently have 26 chapters across the Equestria.

Benefits of starting a chapter include:
+ Waived membership fee
+ Exclusive eligibility for a 1000 bit scholarship only available to chapter founders and presidents
+ Recommendation letter for founders/presidents who are graduating

Here is some background information on our chapters:
Honor Society is focused on helping ponies succeed by connecting members with the right ponies and opportunities to help them achieve their goals. In order to nurture those connections, Honor Society introduced campus chapters at schools across the country as a way for members to receive an elevated member experience.

Honor Society Chapters allow members to have an in-pony support system that allows them to reach their goals and excel academically. Members of chapters gain real-world leadership experience and are positive influences on campus and within their communities.

Benefits of Honor Society Chapters

Community

Honor Society gives students a platform to network with other ambitious students on campus and with successful alumni. University campuses thrive on students working together and being actively involved in the university’s community. One of the major benefits of Honor Society membership is that members are a part of a community of students with similar goals across the entire country. When students are striving to reach their goals, they are also eager to help provide encouragement and motivation to others. Chapters strengthen this community by connecting them on their own campus on a regular basis providing a foundation of day-to-day motivation. They keep each other on track to reach their highest academic and career goals.

Leadership

The hands-on leadership experience gained while building and maintaining a chapter is beneficial to all of the chapter’s members. This leadership experience translates into real world experience, which is something that hiring managers and graduate programs highly value when it comes to recruiting students. Members gain first-hand experience creating marketing campaigns, recruiting new members, public relations, leading presentations and so much more. Honor Society headquarters provides the chapters with guidance along the way, but the growth and preservation of the chapter on campus is up to its members.

Impact
Honor Society encourages its chapters to give back to their local community as well as providing service to those around the world. Chapters have hosted events to collect toys for children in need during the Holidays, mentoring local high school students, and donating time at the local soup kitchen. Local chapters provide service to the community at least once per semester which is an important character trait to build and grow.

If this is an opportunity you would like to learn more about or pursue, please reply to this letter to let me know.

I look forward to hearing from you!

Thanks!
Shining Star
Director, Honor Society Chapter Development




Why me? To be looked into further, maybe Cherilee might know.



Always work to do, even when the shops closed. Ponyville store, the first and the most favored, Barnyard Bargains beckoning. Always mail, always ponies wanting things.
Hello Sir

I am Barrister. Top Class a lawyer in West Pony Republic. Mr. Silvermaker., a gold merchant, who was my client died as a result of lung cancer. Now I want to present you as the next of kin, to Mr. Silversmith’s Bank so that the money left behind by Mr. Silversmith can be transfer to your account through my help. The money value of 10.5 Million darneirs (approximate five hundred thousand Equestrian official bits) was deposited in a bank here by Mr. Silverstein before his Death.

Further explanation, try get back to me soon. Please send letter to the above marked address

Best regards,
Barr Top Class
Lawyer

Heh, that’s a new one. They’re learning.

MR. FILTHY RICH


I am contacting you regarding a special cargo that has been abandoned here at our warehouse In Los Pegasus for over a period of 2 years and when inspected, it revealed an undisclosed sum of money in it. From my findings, the cargo originated from Zebra Republic and the content was not declared as money by the consignor in order to avoid diversion by the shipping agent. So after our discovering, we decided to break the box and we found cotton wool lining wedged into the plywood box, the box contained $8.5 Million Zebrecian Konars. And we also found out that the box also contained one certificate which is LEGALITY CERTIFICATE. Please I want you to mail so that I can show you everything.

Best Regards
Assistant Chief of Operations - Default Judgement
Los Pegasus, Port Authority
1 World Way, Los Pegasus


I don’t even have a store there! I don’t even have any distributors there! At least they spelled my name right this time.


Letters in the mail, always fun. A yellow mare, and an easy way to talk to ponies without having to actually talk
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It’s from Barnyard Bargains, but it’s not? I’ll have to ask him about it when I go into town.



Purple, green and bored, the daily cleaning done. Letters put aside now read. Sharp claws make short work.

I WILL REPORT YOU. YOU PIECE OF SHIT

Stop stalking me and my friend or I will report you. You piece of shit, cock-sucker douche. I do not know why you are doing this! You slept together once, only once. It does not mean anything. Have you not you heard of hook up? So, go off and leave us alone.


F*** You.

“Twilight!”













Pics
« Prev   9   Next »
#1 · 1
· · >>Fenton
Genre: Epistolary with a twist-olary (please don't kill me, I couldn't resist)

Thoughts: I feel like this could've been a bright little slice-of-life if it had ended on a different note. Right now it's missing something to help tie together the themes of joy and struggle in ponies' lives, and the current final letter makes for a confusing downer of an ending. Really though, this was at its best when it was skirting the edge of silliness, such as with the reactions we got from Mr. Cake and Filthy Rich. Give us something like that to end it with!

Tier: Almost There
#2 · 1
·
>>CoffeeMinion has pretty much say everything. This was an interesting start. I was trying to find what connected the letters when it abruptly ended. I'm also confused by the author of the last letter and what he/she has to do with Twilight and Spike.
Moreover, I don't get the left space at the end. Did you run out of time and forget to erase them? Or did they actually have a meaning?

I'm too confused to rank this piece very high. However, I suggest you add more letters to what you already have and try to connect them in a more obvious way. Epistolary stories aren't a common genre and what you already have is quite solid. It's up to you to make it shine.

Edit: Epistolary stories aren't a common genre in the Writeoff
#3 ·
·
I'll admit I'm confused as heck, especially for the last two letters being "blank." Epistolary stories could work here, but I don't see much in the way of a coherent theme. It's as if somepony at Equestrian Royal Mail decided to wander through a bunch of random letters. Or if there is a theme... it went right over my head.

Ending the "story" on the letter to Spike was also a radically different change in attitude and style that left me with a sour taste. While I can see you're trying to show a gambit, that's not a great note to end on since it's so hateful it overshadows everything else.

I have a feeling that you may have simply ran out of time. If that's the case, I'd be curious to see what the complete version of this story would be.
#4 · 3
· · >>The_Letter_J
I'm also a little baffled by the last two slots being blank. If this is actually a case of running out of time, a small piece of advice would be don't make it so blatant that you ran out. Cut the extra and just wrap it up. An abridged end is better than nothing.

Anyhow, this is cute and the gimmick is interesting, but where I think it falters is that it spends too much time on the letters and not enough time on the ponies reading them. Reactions to the mundane can be interesting, as demonstrated by the first letter and the Mr. Cake letter. The problem is we only really get spastic, somewhat stream of consciousness views of the ponies that don't really give us much to go off of.

Basically, you need to make each section shine bright for more than just the letter. It needs to affect a change in the character reading it. So yeah, basically my big recommendation would be to provide a bit more attention to the ponies reading the letters.

And yeah, the Spike letter is -really- out of sync with the remainder of the pieces. They are a bit goofy, but they still feel at least a little pony? The Spike one is just really jarring.
#5 ·
·
Echoing the above, mostly. Although it took me a minute to figure out I was reading spam mail, despite the title. That's 100% on me.

The final Spike letter does feel out of place, but I think less so for the vitriol than the fact that it doesn't read like junk mail at all. It's a straight threat; there's no scam, offer, or advertisement. If anything, it was just delivered improperly.

I'm also really unsure how it relates to the selected art at all.
#6 ·
· · >>horizon
As I mentioned earlier, I've only read the three stories that used my picture as a prompt.
Of the three, this is by far the worst.

First of all, I don't see how this connects to either of the pictures it uses as prompts. I could almost see this using Protector as a prompt, since it at least includes Spike and his love life, but I don't see how these two relate. Unless it's because this is a trollfic and you think those pictures were submitted as trolls. I can't speak for Super Trampoline, but at least some people (and by that I mean Dubs) seem to think that Tall was a serious and excellent entry, and I didn't intend mine to be a troll either.

Now the story itself is...nonexistent. It's a few sentences about someone reading a letter surrounding several paragraphs of spam mail. That spam doesn't say anything interesting, and I found myself immediately bored and skimming through it. So I guess you get points for writing realistic spam, but that's not something to be proud of. And while some of the characters' reactions to the spam were at least slightly interesting, it doesn't really matter because you immediately cut to the next boring letter. I didn't even have any real reaction to Spike's letter because I had been bored and disengaged with the story for so long by that point. What surprised me the most was that you just end with two empty sections at the end. But as far as I can tell, those are probably just there because you just stopped when you hit 2000 words and forgot to clean up after yourself.

And there's nothing to tie it all together either. If you had ended the story with a short scene about how these letters were all part of the CMC's latest plan to get their cutie marks, or Flim and Flam's latest scheme to earn some bits, or Discord doing some particularly unimaginative trolling, then there would have at least been a story. It probably wouldn't have been a great story, since you would have had to come up with something extraordinary to justify 2000 words of empty spam, but it would have at least been a story then.
Or you could just listen to >>AndrewRogue and spend more time on the characters' reactions to the letters and less time on the letters themselves. That would work too. After all, we've all seen spam before. We know what it looks like. You only need to give us a few sentences and we'll all be perfectly capable of inferring the rest of it. And then you could spend more time showing us the characters' reactions which really were the most interesting part of this.

I'm sorry I'm being so harsh, but I think the fact that you used my story as a prompt just made this feel more personal to me. But luckily for you, I doubt that I'll be reading any stories not based on my art, so you don't have to worry about me putting this at the bottom of my ballot. (As it happens, the other two stories are on my initial slate, so I might still rank them (if the site will let me rank only two stories), but this one isn't.)
#7 · 4
· · >>Ranmilia
>>The_Letter_J
I realize you felt frustrated reading this story, but I urge you to remember there's an author on the other side of the screen that's silently enduring these reviews. Phrases like "This is by far the worst" are unlikely to be helpful. I know I winced when I read that; I can't imagine how the author feels.

Yes, it's incomplete (if the blank templates are any indication). It ends at a strange place. To me that says that the author was trying to do justice to an idea right at the deadline, ended up staring at the clock with 30 seconds left to go, and faced the choice between either submitting what they had or losing the opportunity.

We've all been there, I think. And frankly, author, I'm glad you decided to take a chance on this. I've repeatedly said that I am a fan of experimentation in the Writeoffs -- this is nothing if not experimental, with an unusual format and focus. I don't think the experiment lands, for many of the reasons described above, but that doesn't invalidate it as a piece of writing, and I don't want to see you (or the rest of us!) scared away from trying to push boundaries.

So, author: Regardless of quality, regardless of voting results -- thank you for submitting. I actually was intrigued reading through -- I was definitely hoping for more resolution or a stronger story-framework around the spam (or perhaps a little more explicitly Equestrian worldbuilding, see below), but this was a daring choice and those tend to catch my attention.

... That said.

This seems to share some common issues with "THAUMIC FIRES", in that it seems fairly tightly bound to a source text, and appears to be more "found art" than original writing. That's not a deal-breaker for me -- for much the same reason that images consisting of elements Photoshopped together can still be considered art -- but it does mean that I have to judge it in the context of what the author has contributed to the work above and beyond the source material.

I googled a phrase from the Rainbow Dash letter, and found this. Comparing and contrasting, a great deal of the wording is identical, or else has some word-replacement modifications (to make the letter about cloud products rather than metal products). There are one or two entirely new paragraphs, enough for me to feel comfortable this isn't merely a copy-and-paste job, but it still does end up feeling awfully derivative. Author, I encourage you -- if you're going to pursue this style of writing in future entries -- to take much more significant liberties with the source text and make the piece truly your own. The tiny scraps of pony-specific material that we get are engaging despite their brevity; I have a lot of confidence that with a little more time and focus you could make an idea like this shine.

Tier: Flawed but Fun
#8 ·
·
>>horizon
Seconding everything here. There's not much else to say about this one, except that I could see the blank boxes being a formatting error rather than an indication of unfinished business.

It's not really a story as it stands, but it does make me interested in reading stories based on some of the entries. Pen pal romance with Maud Pie sounds amusing, Sweetie Belle's opens the door for a nice character piece, and Filthy Rich's is... I think one of the most positive and immediately interesting portrayals I've seen of him, even with just a few sentences?

I can't really rank it above the entries that do tell stories, but that's fine, I did genuinely enjoy reading this. Thanks for writing!
#9 ·
· · >>Posh
I'm not sure what to make of this one. It's ponified spam, and try as I might, I can't find anything deeper. The blank messages at the end, and the one full of insulting and cussing just make me double-down on the "hate" I have for normal spam. Author, I'm sorry, but I have no idea what you were attempting, as I don't like reading spam in the real world, much less for fun in a fantasy world.