The Buttery Snake Show: The Six-Month Blog Post · 1:18am Oct 9th, 2023
It was a moist and humid night as Buttery Snake crossed the soggy, damp ground, his hooves sinking slowly into the verdant and squishy moss. He shuddered at the thought of how many water bears would soon rise from it, crawling up his body to suck his precious juices clean out of his body.
He stopped a place where a waterlogged piece of bending particle board sat. With one swift motion, he grasped it and lifted it—revealing Unwhole Hole, several feet below the loam, using a shovel for it’s eponymous purpose.
“Digging your own grave again?”
“If there’s one thing I’ve learned from politicians, it’s that if you find yourself in the bottom of a hole, your best course of action is to dig your way out of it.”
“Like the way you’ve written this same blog-post six times over the past six months?”
“One more six and we summon Satin.” Unwhole Hole sighed. “If it had been fives instead, we could have gotten an astable multivibrator instead.”
“I prefer monostable personally.”
Unwhole Hole looked up from the muddy pit where he had come to live—ever progressing more on his evolution toward a tuber-like being. “Did you come at here to put heresy in my hole? Cover me up. The light perturbs my growth. I’m busy.”
“Are you?”
“How should I know.” Unwhole Hole sighed. “I just do what I’m told.”
“By whom?”
“Passive voice, Buttery. Nobody tells me. I am simply ‘told’.”
Buttery Snake shook his head and mumbled swear words I’m not allowed to type. “We talked about this, the passive voice—”
“Is not preferential. I know. Except I don’t because I use it all the time. I am of the minority option that both voices have their places and can produce different atmospheres. If you use all one or all the other you sound weird.”
“So you want to talk theory, then?”
Unwhole Hole stared out of his holey home and sighed. “Yes. But not here. That’s the problem I’ve had for the past few iterations of this conversation. I get diverted from my thought process and start talking about things that really deserve their own considerations.”
“You’re already getting diverted.”
“Not this time! You can’t confuse me, I am you.” Unwhole Hole hauled himself out of the hole and sat on the edge. “I have considered the idea of creating a separate set of blog-posts for my weird ramblings about writhing theory.”
“Are you...actually a writer?”
“Not really, no. Nor do I consider myself a professional. Not yet. But that won’t stop me from babbling into the ether.”
“Stop breathing ether, it’s bad for you.”
“No. It keeps me luminiferous. Also, ether does, in fact, smell really strong. Chloroform, on the other hand, does not. Don’t ask me why as I don’t know.”
“Or maybe you just can’t smell?”
“If only I didn’t smell. I secrete a wax that smells like cockroaches. I fear Kafka is coming to get me.”
“Do you?”
“No, I’m having a funny. Anyway, yes. I would like to babble in separate places. But the here and now is to update my general...ness.”
“Concerning the story you just finished.”
“Yes. Underped. Which most people, myself including, read as ‘Under-ped’.” Unwhole Hole sighed. “You know, I thought of a really good title for it early in the writing process...and then didn’t write it down. I forgot. So that was the best I could come up with on short notice.” He paused. “There are two flies crawling on my computer screen. It’s incredibly annoying.”
“From the smell?”
“No, their gnats. I have so many gnats. Never have I had so many silent g’s in one room. Again, though, not the point. Eew, there’s one in my coffee.”
“You’re getting distracted.”
“You’re one to talk.” Unwhole Hole leaned back into his mental moss. “Right now, I’m working on an alternating schedule. I write one story that is non-pony based, then take a break to write a pony-based one. Sort of.”
“Sort of?”
“Turns out, I’m too heavily integrated into this place to fully exit. Oddly enough, most of my ‘non-pony’ stories are actually just fanfictions with the names changed.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning I quite literally spent most of today writing a story about Morgana Amaranthine investigating a fungus in the futuristic city of Bridgeport. And earlier this year, one that was basically Mass Core 4 but with the unicorns even more racist. And one that was actually written to transcribe on a 1:1 ratio to a fanfiction.”
“What does that even mean?”
“It means that all the characters are interchangeable between ponies and humans. It was intended to be written both ways, to have two versions. I only did the human one so far, though.”
“So...”
“So almost all of the universes I’m developing for fiction I ‘totally can publish some day, I’m serious!’ where made here. Specifically ‘Mass Core’, ‘Elrod’, and ‘Equestria 485,00’.”
“Not ‘Four Yellow’?”
“Quiet, you.”
“No.”
“With that said,” continued Unwhole Hole, “I am now working on an alternating schedule. So I do intend to have something created, probably toward the end of this year.”
“Any specifics?”
“I have an idea for a horror story based on Gen-5.” Unwhole Hole sighed. “Aside from the fact that I haven’t really watched any of the Gen-5 stuff aside from the movie. The characters are adorable but I have no feel for them yet. So I have to catch up on that.” Unwhole Hole slid back into his hole. “That, and probably some inane babbling about my weird theories on writing in the blog-post section.”
“You should do a romance.”
“If I could write romance, I’d already be a very wealthy writer. Instead I’m...whatever my job is. Gnat herder or something.”
“I heard a gnat, once. He spoke such terrible prophecy...”
And with that, Unwhole Hole pulled the decaying plywood back over himself—and resumed digging with even greater vigor.
Can't wait.
We will never escape this place.
My two cents: when writing using existing universe with familiar characters it's like using a lot of extra power so reader's imagination will rely on established ponies and universe, but this comes with a price tag. This price was especially obvious for "Fallout: Equestria" by Kkat where two established universes were merged in awesome way but price of using so much free power was very high: to appreciate it reader must well know and like both Fallout and ponies... and it's a relatively rare thing; after 10 years this story have around 10K likes here and outside of those fandoms nobody read it, compare to millions of readers for quite weak modern day sci-fi, fiction and adventures books written for "normal people" (I've already whined about this here). But this free power allows authors to focus their efforts on the story itself and thus made it much more awesome, so good that it's hard to find something equal outside of the fandom(s).
So, for me it will be interesting to see are those assumptions about free power are true or simply wrong - what will happen when your stories will loose connection to already pre-established concepts of pony characters and magic world in the neural network of my brain and all that will be replaced with something new and more human(?)... probably it will work because you're good writer but this task may become quite a writer's challenge!
I would read every single iteration you could ever create of/with Four Yellow. That story is a masterpiece and anything even remotely like it will be as well!
I'm truly excited to read any non-pony stories you create. Your fics are generally quite OC heavy anyway, and considering how wonderfully you craft characters, I know that any original work from you, fanfiction or not, will be great!
Would love to read your significantly less horse-laden writings someday! Maybe try posting something on Royal Road or somesuch?