Still Writing It: Short Sneak Peek Included · 1:32am Jan 4th, 2017
I'm at 11K now, and Discord's still a friggin' little kid.
*begins to tear hair out*
Why must everything I write must be so long? Gah.
Anyways, since I still don't know how long it will take to finish the darned thing, I thought I'd give you guys a snippet to help. It doesn't give away too many spoilers, I think, but it'll still have a detail or two you may find interesting. It's unedited and rough, so feel free to offer any advice if you'd like on how to fix things, but I just couldn't keep writing this thing without letting you all know once again that I haven't abandoned this story...That I haven't updated in more than five months and started writing like a bajillion years ago.
So. Here it is. I'll cover it up so you can't read it unless you hover over it.
Thanks for your everlasting patience.
___________________SPOILERS/SNEAK PEAK BELOW_________________________________________
For someone who enjoys change as much as I do, I didn’t understand it when I was shiny and new. The air changed, and I didn’t know why. It felt different. It made my teeth chatter and my skin sting until it was so numb that I couldn’t feel it anymore. Later, I would learn the term for this was cold.
The land was bare and I couldn’t find anything living. There were no huffy little angry birds for me to bother, no bugs to chase, no squirrels to steal nuts from. Old nests and beehives became husks of the past, with no eggs or honey for me to pilfer for.
But what scared me most of all, oddly enough, were the trees. They actually scared me. Can you imagine? Me, afraid of wood without cover. It confused me. I liked how the leaves had changed color, because it was beautiful to me. But when they all fell off and began to disintegrate, I grew afraid. All I had known were trees with leaves, and grass that covered every inch of the ground. And it was all leaving me.
Yeah. For even me, my first taste of true change was scary. But this was yet another thing I realized years later, after gaining the gift of language. Those changes had scared me because I had thought the world was coming to an end.
I thought death was coming for me, and I didn’t even realize it.
Snow eventually came down. At first it delighted me. It was soft and it wasn’t rain nor thunder, but something I could mold into whatever I wished. I drank it, I licked the icicles. I remember one day, I even made the classic mistake of getting my little tongue stuck on an icicle. I remember laughing at myself while trying to tug it away.
I don’t recommend laughing when getting your tongue stuck to an icicle. It’s rather painful.
But that's not what ended my joy with snow. No, that little love affair ended the moment that I began to starve.
I remember nights where I had grown so hungry and cold that I had trouble sleeping. I did what I could to keep myself warm, but the stinging cold tends to be unrelenting. All I could do to survive was forage and keep on walking. I don’t know how long I walked, or what direction I went. Was Equestria just much smaller then, and I eventually came upon it? Or did I just manage to avoid ponies until the day I found them?
I don’t know. But I really don’t care either.
But I do remember when it happened. The day was gray, the ground soggy with slush from a big snowstorm that had occurred the day before. I remember how hard it was to walk that day, because every time I took a step I seemed to sink into it, only to tug my paw out of the ground with a wet popping sound. Once again, it seems like something I should have enjoyed, but when one’s ribs are beginning to show as your stomach roars with hunger, finding food is the only thing that seems to matter.
Now I know what you’re thinking. But Discord, can’t you eat things that aren’t really food? Like glass and paper?
The answer is yes. But I can only do that with my magic. And as I’ve said… I didn’t even know it existed yet. But more on that later.
The sun began to sink back towards the skyline and already I was shivering. The fact that I was so short and surrounded in frozen hard snow didn’t help either. But I wanted to make more ground. I was exhausted, but I was determined to keep going, because the more I traveled, the more likely I was to find something new--something that would hopefully help me in such a predicament.
And, as always, I was right. The first change I noticed was when I checked the sky again, trying to gauge just how much time had passed. As much as I wanted to keep going, I was getting exhausted and I needed to find somewhere dry (or drier, at least) to rest before it got too dark. The sky was a deep purple and the stars began to appear. But as I looked at the stars, I realized that their light wasn’t as twinkly as they usually were. I checked the moon, and it was full, so it wasn’t as if the moonlight was making it stronger.
I lowered my head and at first, I thought I had seen a star on the ground. I reached for it, only to find I couldn’t grab it. And then I realized, it wasn’t just some tiny thing sitting on the surface of the ground. It was something far, far away. Something that glowed. Something that wasn’t...natural.
Once again I grew frightened, but can you blame me? I’d never seen pony-made light before. I was only used to the world as it naturally was. However, my nose, as sharp and as sensitive as noses come, started picking up the slightest traces of scents. Scents that my roaring stomach seemed to appreciate, for my hunger pangs grew even more painful to the point where I couldn’t move for a moment. But once they died down, something in me began to move as fast as I could, despite the mucky ground and my weak little stringy body.
As I got closer, I could see objects rising towards the sky. They weren’t rocks, and they weren’t trees, but they were made of wood and straw, things I was familiar with. And the light, oh the light! It was like starlight, but it wasn’t at the same time. It was yellow, and warm, and dare I say, even a bit comforting. It was a light that was easy on the eyes, a light that beckoned me and told me to come, come towards the warmth, come and find the source of the delicious things you smell, come and take the world in, for I knew less of the world than I was even aware of.
But that soon changed as I came closer and caught movement, and I stopped in my tracks. I’m not sure to this day exactly what it was I was expecting. Of course I suspected something lived there, but my hunger had kept me in a ravenous fog, and I hadn’t even stopped to wonder what might have lived there.
Their mouths were stretched upward in expressions I wasn’t familiar with, their eyes reflecting the warm light. Their furry bodies came in a plethora of colors of all different hues, with hair that swayed from their heads and their hinds as they trotted across cobblestones. But the oddest thing of all was the pictures. Many of them had pictures on their sides, on both of their sides! Pictures of things I had seen, like clouds and plants and animals, and things I had yet to discover, like playing cards and bouncing balls and slices of strawberry shortcake. All the bigger ones had one, while only some of the smaller ones did.
A shadow passed over me. I looked up and noticed a black dot far above me against the moon until it landed in town on the cobblestones. Then I noticed a few more, and they looked just like all the others in the little town, but with wings. Fascinated by this, I looked more closely at the creatures, ducking behind a building as I drew closer. Horns. Some of the four-legged things had horns! I remember my claw reaching for one of my own as I stared at them.
One in peculiar had caught my eye, one that had some sort of sack strapped about him, with a baggy looking cloth material stuffed over his head. “Extra extra, read all about it!” it had yelled.
And that pony’s horn began to glow, and I gasped as a newspaper floated out of its bag. I had never seen magic before, and I had been so baffled by it that I fell over. But I scrambled back on my four legs, just so I could watch the thing ignite his horn with magic again.
Had I known the word to describe it at the time, I think I would have called it beautiful.
“Extra extra, read all about it! Starswirl sets out to look for Alicorns to look over the new Equestria! Read all about it, only one bit each!”
I had absolutely no idea what he was saying, but I was enthralled by it. So many sounds, made with so many shapes of his mouth! His voice young and youthful and full of vigor, so loud that it seemed to rip through the very air itself! And then I realized that all the ponies had been making those sounds. And they all sounded so very different from one another. No two voices sounded the same, even if their coats or their manes or their eyes were the same color! It was like music, like song, like nothing I had ever heard before.
The other ponies seemed enthralled by his voice as well. Especially when he said that one particular word, Alicorns.
Yep. The Princesses didn’t even have to be around yet to cause a fuss.
I try to avoid spoilers, but I am glad to see you are getting closer to a new chapter. I do wonder why you don't just cut it into two though, or put it into two parts. Mind you, I am fine with a 11k long chapter, but I try to keep them around 4-6k so readers will remember and comment on the start of the chapter and not just the middle or end of it.
4368212 I might be closer, but I grow wary thinking of how close that actually is and how long both the readers and myself can wait. It feels like I've been writing this for years and years and years and that it's my Big Major Flaw. I beat myself up about it.
But thank you for.your support! You write so well, so I'm always flattered when you comment.
As for why I can't break then up...I think I'm too romantic about it. I think, "no! Break up the chapter?!? But the scenes are too related, I can't keep them apart!" It's like each chapter is a baby of its own to me. And cutting babies in half is too horrendous a thought to bear. (I apologize for any images this gIves you or anyone else.)
That, and I can never find a good, clean break for it whenever I consider breaking it up.
Basically, I think too much about it and stall.
4368289 Heh, gotcha. I often help Crowscrow find places to cut his chapters in half when he goes overboard. It gives you a breather since you can just release the other half next week and get even more wonderful, motivating comments!
You can also do what others have done and do the *chapter name part 1* *chapter name part 2*, but, regardless, you need a good break point, and a good re-opening point. You should poke at your editors or idea bouncer person for help on that if you aren't good at it on your own. You'd be surprised how many times someone else finds something in your story you didn't notice. *I swear, I get many comments on how amazing I linked some things together, and half the time I didn't even notice it turned out that way*
And thanks, I like the detail work and how you keep it interesting. I need to work on my own, as descriptions of places and locations are just not my forte most of the time.
Good luck, I look forward to seeing what happens next in the story.
4379565
First, thank you for the compliment! I always thought you had good detail yourself, but I'm flattered that you feel I do it well. Thank you so much!
Second...guess what?
I have changed my mind!
I'm gonna split it up! Part one and 2 on Discord's past! I figured out a good stopping point and I just gotta write the end of it! Because it's been too long since I updated and this ended up, once again, super long. I'm at over 16k and he's STILL a kid. A few years older, but still. He's not even met certain characters yet, or has been to the Neighyan Rainforest like I said in 'The Field Trip' chapter. HAHAHA yaaaaaa! I'm so pumped! Gonna write a post really quick on it right now.