Plugs, Princesses and Projects Pending · 1:13am Nov 12th, 2016
First, in celebration of How Many Princesses Does It Take getting 1,000 likes, I’m punishing rewarding the readership with another chapter titled Power Failure. God only knows what I’ll do if it ever hits 2,000 likes. (Oh, and if anybody can tell me how to fix why Google Docs has decided that everything I paste out of a Gdoc needs to be double-spaced now...)
Anyway, I’m slacking on blog post plugs. Here’s a number I’ve been stashing away while I’ve been working on Drifting Down the Lazy River. I’ll include a snippet out of my work on Drifting too, so you can see I’m not being lazy. Well, more lazy than normal. It is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) but there’s no way I’ll get even close to the goal.
Plugs:
Prane’s Operation - Wonderbit Orphans and Wonderbolts, oh my. Part of his very popular (and well worth it) Of Lilies and Chestnuts series.
Educated Guess’ I’ll See You To Shore, a very deep (and short) seapony story, well worth reading.
HoofBitingActionOverlord’s classic A Final Farewell on a Moonlit Evening. Rarity and her mane. To say more would spoil it.
Tara Strong tweets her life in one word. (Politics free, just to let you know.)
Iisaw’s classic and classy The Quest — A brave stallion goes on a quest to save the world by finding a lost princess in an enchanted forest. Things don't work out as he planned.
And the ever loving (and someday I hope to submit a story for) Clyde’s Tales — More stories about Clyde the Practical Pony. Short and glorious.
For those of you thinking recent events may send you to a therapist, I suggest reading about once instead. ABagofVicodin’s excellent Therapist Visit, with Princess Luna. A little sad, but worth reading, as are the others in the series.
In the real world, I’m working on The Atrocity Archives, as soon as I can pick it up from the library. And no, it’s not political commentary (despite the title). It’s… um… weird. I’ll know more when I’m done with it.
Anyway, here’s the snippet I promised out of the sequel to The One Who Got Away, called Drifting Down the Lazy River, in which Ripple educates Turpentine on the art of freshwater clam cooking.
Somehow, Turpentine did not think dressing a fish involved clothes. It most certainly involved knives, much like the one that Ripple removed from her mane and used to prod at the bottom of his hoof where the most painful of the wooden splinters had lodged. It was a slightly longer knife than the short single-edged blade Turpentine had in his luggage, and much larger than his pigment-stained pallet knife. Unicorns did not need the larger grip an earth pony would use to hold it in his jaws, so Ripple’s knife was mostly slim and sharpened steel, tapered to an off-center rounded point and sharp all the way down to the short handle.
She wedged the tip under a thick wooden splinter and pried back and forth. There were little grating noises under his shoe and a sharp twinge in his frog as it popped free, and she ran the edge of the slim knife around the inner edge of his hoof in order to catch any more loose splinters. Switching to the next hoof, she sighed and tapped the long knife against his steel shoe as her stomach rumbled again.
“I wish we could at least steam some clams. I’m starving.” Cleaning out a few minor splinters, she waved the knife and continued, “Normally, we just shuck ‘em out of their shell underwater and eat ‘em there, but I don’t think you want raw clams.”
“If you go get the clams, I can build up the fire,” suggested Turpentine, as his aching muscles did not want to move far from the campfire anyway, and there already was quite a bit of driftwood accumulated, even without the splinters he had gotten. He was not all that hungry, and clams did not really sound that tempting, but Ripple had shown him quite a few things he had never dreamed of in his life. Plus, when he would drift the raft down the river tomorrow, it could not be more than a day’s travel to the castle/steamship that Ripple seemed so enthusiastic about. Baron Gaberdine had promised to see him on the way to Baltimare afterwards, and it could be weeks or even months before Turpentine could return. It might even be winter by then, and the thought of swimming below the ice with her did not really appeal to him.
While Ripple darted out into the sun-drenched river for the main course, Turpentine arranged the campfire as best he could and soaked down the cattail reeds he planned on using as a grill. He had seen freshwater clams before in the creeks around home, ugly little brown things about half the size of a hoof, and with only about a mouthful of meat—
He shuddered and poked the fire with a thick dampened cattail to get it more level. At this rate, he would be growing his own tail by the end of the month and be a seapony by winter.
By the time the sun touched the horizon in smears of gold and orange, Ripple returned and dumped her findings on the sandy shore. The smallest of the clams she found was twice as big as the largest he had ever seen before, a ridged arc of shell he could not have covered with a hoof, and the largest…
“Are you sure that thing is good to eat?” asked Turpentine. The huge mollusk was the size of a pony’s head, and most probably had teeth.
“Um…” Ripple tapped the huge clam, apparently getting second thoughts now that she could see it in what was left of the light of day. “It’ll probably take forever to cook. I’ll just go put that one back. And… that one,” she added, picking up several of the larger clams in her magic and vanishing into the river again.
It took a little to arrange the damp cattail reeds over the fire, but Turpentine felt a little better about arranging the clams on their new ‘steaming’ rack once he realized the mollusks did not scream or thrash when he put them out on the thick mat of reeds. He almost had half of them arranged when Ripple came back, lunging up out of the water onto the sand at the edge of the water in a way that would have given him a panic fit a few days ago. It still startled him into dropping a clam in the fire.
“Aren’t they done yet?” asked Ripple, adding her magic to the task of arranging the last of the clams across the damp reed mat. The last couple of clams she held back, getting out her knife and settling down in the light of the setting sun and glowing fire.
“I don’t know,” said Turpentine, unable to take his eyes off the silvery knife glittering in Ripple’s green magic. “Are you going to eat those raw?”
“Sure!” Ripple settled down with an intense frown and brought the first clam up to the blade. “You just gotta get the knife in between the edges, then go around all the way until it pops.”
The magic-driven knife traced a path around the doomed clam and the top shell popped off, revealing a goopy lump of yellowish flesh. Ripple tossed the empty shell over her shoulder and into the river with a forlorn ‘plop’ as she continued to scrape the remainder together, then slurped it up in one gulp. “Yummy!”
“Ewww!!” declared Turpentine. He shook his head and swallowed once while Ripple got out the next clam. “I mean it’s neat and all that, but eww just the same.”
“Maybe you’ll like the cooked ones better,” said Ripple just before slurping down another one of the slimy things. It was worth some thought, and as he thought, a few of the clams on the fire began to open up just the way the book said. Besides, Mother Windrow had always told him to try something before rejecting it, even cooked beets.
“Maybe one,” he hesitantly offered over the objections of his churning belly. “Two at the most.”
Everybody should be open to new ideas. Except me. I'm old, and set in my ways.
4298061
Thought I was the only one.
I don't know what is up with the double spacing, but when posted, it becomes single spacing. Super weird.
The Atrocity Archives are great, and not political. But, like everything Stross writes, the later books get more and more political. I didn't read past, hrm, The Fuller Memorandum.
I'll look over your other recs. I need something to cheer me up. This was supposed to be my day off, and of course it was the day that the place burned down figuratively speaking. It always is, it seems. I never do anything! Why is it that the place seems to go haywire when I take time off?
A few minutes later, Turpentine regretted letting the head-sized one go.
4298061
4298064
4298070
I think it's something to do with how you set the document formatting up before. I had it before where I had to space everything again after bringing the gdoc into the fimfic editor, but when I switched to writing on microsoft word and then copy and pasting from that onto gdoc and then uploading it into the editor, it worked just fine.
Either that, or the gdoc uploader is like Russian Roulette with 5 rounds chambered, and you're hoping you get the one round that isn't loaded.
4298076
Fixed that for you.
4298079
Considering my luck, the gun will somehow be jammed instead, and all the other people in the game will think I cheated and beat me up.
4298076 No, because these documents have been set up forever. Some, even years.
Everything I copy out of a Gdoc into a Fimfiction story/Writeoff entry/blog post gets warped. So if I have a section that reads 'something something paragraphmark paragraphmark something something' and copy/paste it into Word, it looks like 'something something paragraphmark BIGparagraphmark something something' and if I paste it into Fimfiction it looks like 'something something paragraphmark paragraphmark paragraphmark something something'
So it converts Return Return, into Return return return.
I love computers. Sigh.
4298070 I was going to argue with you but I double checked first. 'Something something return return something' (i.e. a double space in Gdoc) is converted into 'something something return return return something' when pasted it into Fimfiction, BUT when saved and brought back up in Fimfiction, it's back to DISPLAYING double space instead of the triple space it shows in edit mode.
The Writeoff site still shows it as triple spacing, like my story Murder, She Collaborated. Gdocs did this once before a few years ago, but something happened and it all started working right again.
4298106
Then I dunno. I guess I'm lucky when I convert my gdocs. Or maybe I'm not realizing my fics are badly formatted, but I've done it for so long it now looks like some sort of weird style of writing.
Congratulations for your 1000 likes. Oh, I haven't read it yet. There's might be one more in a few minutes.
And a sequel to The One Who Got Away? A story I discovered thx to EQD? One of my fav because you can easily replace ponies by anything and it still works perfectly? And you tease us with a short extract?
i0.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/612/917/02d.gif
Didn't read it because I don't want any kind and spoilers. In Georg I trust
Clyde's Tales was fun. Thanks for pointing that out.
Hey, I'd like to take this opportunity and thank you for plugging my stories on your blog (though I'd hardly call two pieces a series... I guess now I have no choice and one of those days I'll have to fix that).
Google changed the format for gdocs; that's caused some problems.
4443029 They changed the thing that was causing the copy/paste problem, at least. It's back to normal, which is good because that's how I move *everything* to Fimfiction.
4443080
Oh, I wasn't aware of that development.