News Archive

  • 180 weeks
    MSPiper’s “Autumnfall Change” [Royal Canterlot Library]

    You might want to keep a whiteboard handy for today’s story.


    Autumnfall Change
    [Sci-Fi][Slice of Life][Human] • 8,419 words

    Magic and technology may have pierced the void and blazed a path between the realms, but that was the simple part. Adjusting to the changes that follow can be far more daunting.

    Yet despite the complexities involved even in basic communication, Serendipity has found friends to talk to among humankind who can cheer her up when she’s down. And occasionally inspire her to bursts of ingenuity unhindered by such trifles as foresight.

    Read More

    6 comments · 9,150 views
  • 196 weeks
    The Red Parade's "never forever" [Royal Canterlot Library]

    Today's story never says never.


    never forever
    [Sad] [Slice of Life] • 1,478 words

    Lightning Dust will never be a Wonderbolt. When she left the Academy, she swore she'd never look back. When the Washouts disbanded, she swore she'd forget about them.

    Yet after all these years, against all odds, she finds herself here. At a Wonderbolts show. Just on the wrong side of the glass.

    Read More

    20 comments · 8,140 views
  • 201 weeks
    Freglz's "Nothing Left to Lose" [Royal Canterlot Library]

    Don't lose out on today's story.


    Nothing Left to Lose
    [Drama] [Sad] • 6,367 words

    Some things can't be changed.

    Starlight believes otherwise.

    FROM THE CURATORS: One might be forgiven for thinking that after nine years of MLP (and fanfic), there's nothing left to explore on such well-trodden ground as changeling redemption — but there are still stories on the topic which are worthy of turning heads.  "Though the show seems to have moved past it as a possibility, the question of whether and how Queen Chrysalis could be reformed alongside the other changelings still lingers in the fandom's consciousness," Present Perfect said in his nomination. "In comes Freglz, with a solidly reasoned story that combines the finales of seasons 5 and 6 and isn't afraid to let the question hang."

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    26 comments · 7,558 views
  • 203 weeks
    Somber's "Broken Record" [Royal Canterlot Library]

    Today's story puts all the pieces together.

    (Ed. note: Some content warnings apply to this interview, regarding current world circumstances and mentions of suicidal ideation.)


    Broken Record
    [Drama] [Slice of Life] • 7,970 words

    There has never been an athlete like Rainbow Dash. The sprints. The marathons. The land speed record. She held them all.

    Until she didn't.

    Until she had only one left... and met the pony that might take it from her...

    Read More

    11 comments · 5,359 views
  • 205 weeks
    jakkid166's "Detective jakkid166 in everything" [Royal Canterlot Library]

    Missing out on today's story would be a crime.


    Detective jakkid166 in everything
    [Comedy] [Human] • 15,616 words

    "Every pony thing evre made would be better if it had me in it."
    - me

    I, Detective jakkid166, will be prepared to make every pony fanficion, video, and game better by me being in it. All you favorite pony content, except it has ME! And even I could be in some episodes of the show except cause the charaters are idiot I'm good at my job.

    The ultimate Detective jakkid166 adventures collection, as he goes into EVERYTHING to make it good.

    Read More

    171 comments · 9,625 views
  • 207 weeks
    Mannulus' "Sassy Saddles Meets Sasquatch" [Royal Canterlot Library]

    Today's story is a rare find.


    Sassy Saddles Meets Sasquatch
    [Comedy] [Random] • 5,886 words

    The legend is known throughout Equestria, but there are few who believe. Those who claim to have seen the beast are dismissed as crackpots and madponies. Those who bring evidence before the world are dismissed as histrionic deceivers. There are those who have seen, however -- those who know -- and they will forever cry out their warning from the back seats of filthy, old train cars, even to those who dismiss them, who revile them, who ignore their warnings unto their own mortal peril.

    "The sasquatch is real!" they will cry forevermore, even as nopony believes.

    But from this day forward, Sassy Saddles will believe.

    Read More

    16 comments · 6,209 views
  • 209 weeks
    SheetGhost’s “Moonlight Vigil” [Royal Canterlot Library]

    Take a closer look into tonight’s story.


    Moonlight Vigil
    [Tragedy] • 3,755 words

    Bitter from her defeat and exile, the Mare in the Moon watches Equestria move on without her.

    Read More

    1 comments · 4,852 views
  • 211 weeks
    Unwhole Hole's "The Murder of Elrod Jameson" [Royal Canterlot Library]

    Today's story is some killer noir.

    [Adult story embed hidden]

    The Murder of Elrod Jameson
    [Dark] [Mystery] [Sci-Fi] [Human] • 234,343 words

    [Note: This story contains scenes of blood and gore, sexuality, and a depiction of rape.]

    Elrod Jameson: a resident of SteelPoint Level Six, Bridgeport, Connecticut. A minor, pointless, and irrelevant man... who witnessed something he was not supposed to.

    Narrowly avoiding his own murder, he desperately searches for help. When no living being will help him, he turns to the next best thing: a pony.

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    14 comments · 5,342 views
  • 213 weeks
    Grimm's "Don't Open the Door" [Royal Canterlot Library]

    Today's story lingers like the curling mist in a dark forest.


    Don't Open the Door
    [Dark][Horror] • 13,654 words

    After an expedition into the Everfree Forest ends in disaster, Applejack and Rainbow Dash take refuge in an abandoned cabin until morning.

    This is probably a poor decision, but it's only one night, after all. How bad could it be?

    FROM THE CURATORS: "I don't care much for horror stories," AugieDog mused. "But this one does so much right, I found myself really impressed." Present Perfect thought it was "simply one of the best horror stories I've ever read," and Soge agreed "one-hundred percent" that "this is pitch-perfect horror from beginning to end."

    Read More

    8 comments · 4,658 views
  • 215 weeks
    TwilightFlopple's "The Celestial Mechanics in Midsummer" [Royal Canterlot Library]

    It's always the season for a fic as great as today's story.


    The Celestial Mechanics in Midsummer
    [Slice of Life] • 8,716 words

    "My dear Twilight Sparkle,

    Thank you for your recent letters. And I must apologize to you first and foremost that I have not responded back in kind to each and every one. I imagine has this concerned you, but please don't worry. Things have been very unsettled here in the castle as of late. Princess Luna has been researching Equestrian history, and I find myself in a strange kind of mood..."

    Read More

    9 comments · 5,459 views
Jul
3rd
2020

Author Interview » TCC56's "Glow In The Dark, Shine In The Sun" [Royal Canterlot Library] · 1:53pm Jul 3rd, 2020

A villain might just have a bright future in today's story.


Glow In The Dark, Shine In The Sun
[Equestria Girls] [Drama] [Slice of Life] • 27,035 words

Despite all attempts, Cozy Glow still hasn't been shown a path to friendship. No pony has been able to get through to her, and she's only gotten worse with each attempt.

Reluctant to return the filly to stone again, Princess Twilight has one last option. One pony she hasn't tried. Or in this case? One person.

Sunset Shimmer.

Can Sunset do what no pony has been able to?

FROM THE CURATORS: Stories about late-season characters are relatively scarce.  Happily, though, there are still gems to be found — such as this examination of redemption.  "Reforming Cozy Glow is not a simple task, not least because the show refused to even give her much in the way of redeeming elements," FanOfMostEverything noted in his nomination.  "Chrysalis had her children, Tirek had his brother, but Cozy just appears to be a young sociopath with no purpose beyond being a manipulative little hellion."  So who better to redeem her than another former manipulator?  "The core idea here gave me one of those 'of course!' moments that only fanfiction can deliver," AugieDog said, "but the story goes beyond that and executes the idea in a way that makes the Equestria Girls characters shine."

The solidity of that execution led our praise.  "Sunset acting as a blend of friendship guru and parole officer works magnificently given her tactical similarities to Cozy in her own bad old days," FanOfMostEverything said.  "Plus, Cozy's journey in the human world feels natural and earned, with stumbling blocks and false starts that keep it all from feeling too 'neat'."  Present Perfect added: "Cozy herself is excellently written.  I was also pleased with Sunset's portrayal, the bits of foreshadowing preceding the magical storm, and the shape which that storm takes."  And there was plenty else to appreciate along the way, AugieDog said: "It's maybe the third or fourth story I've come across on Fimfiction that makes good use of different-colored text."  Its strengths made it a good starting point despite being tagged as a sequel, Present Perfect noted: "This isn't a true sequel to Three Second Chances — it definitely stands on its own."

That was bolstered by powerful character work.  "Each of Sunset's friends is written with a mind toward different life experiences undercutting similarity to the pony characters," Present Perfect said.  "We see this as Cozy Glow is continually tripped up by the actions of the 'professors' she otherwise knows to their cores."  But far from being just a character piece, this also had some surprises in store.  "I quite liked the eventual revelation of the story's antagonist, and the realizations that Cozy comes to during their confrontation really made the story for me," AugieDog said.  "I also like how the story ends with us seeing just the beginning of a path forward for Cozy Glow.  As a plain ol' piece of storytelling, this takes top marks."

Read on for our author interview, in which TCC56 discusses antagonist chemistry, Beta Ray Bill, and 3 AM backstory.


Give us the standard biography.

Hi there, I’m your friendly neighborhood TCC56. I’m an older fan (who declines to state a specific age beyond ‘too old’) from New York. The state, not the city. 

I’m a longtime writer — I’ve roamed the internet since the days of Usenet, passing through a large number of fandoms along the way. I got my start with tabletop roleplaying, getting my first D&D books (the classic red box) at six and running my first campaign at eight. Since then, fiction writing and slipping into characters has been second nature to me and my primary outlet for creativity. 

I came into the FiM fandom early in S1 when all the hype was starting, but I largely bailed soon after. The fandom as a whole was getting a bit… extra for me. Too much drama, and a lot of folks were going over the top. I glanced back every once in a rare while, but kept my distance until the S9 announcement came up. Since the show was ending, I thought I’d catch up. As part of that I stumbled onto FiMFiction and started looking around. 

Then Oroboro launched the Sunset Shipping Contest: Endings at about the same moment my other creative pursuits dried up and, well, the muse demanded an outlet. 

How did you come up with your handle/penname?

Laughably, it was actually just a filler. I set up my account because I got tired of tagging individual stories and wanted bookshelves — but I couldn’t use my usual handle. Going by ‘Tempest’ in the wake of the Movie felt wrong (even if Tempest is a good pony), so I contracted my normal tag and tossed in some filler. Then I was a fool and started writing and it just sort of stuck.

Who's your favorite pony?

Sunset Shimmer is Best Human, Best Pony and Best Princess, fite me. 

What's your favorite episode?

That’s actually kind of tough. I love a lot of specific moments in episodes, so picking one as a whole is difficult. If I absolutely had to? I’d probably say To Where And Back Again because of how it utilized secondary characters so well, gave them wonderful development, and wove several running plotlines into a single coherent story that acted as both a capstone for those plotlines and a bridge into the next arc for those characters. 

Though my alternate answer would be Forgotten Friendship because Wally is adorbs.

What do you get from the show?

Well, foremost is a wide setting with good characters and a world that’s just built enough to establish a coherent theme while still having enough gaps to give creative space. But that’s the writer in me talking. 

As a reader/watcher? It’s that it’s bright. Too much out there — both in media and in the world at large — is dark and depressing. FiM provides a reminder that there’s good in the world, too. Positive things. That sometimes problems can be solved through Kindness or Generosity. As I’ve gotten older I’ve realized that those are much more satisfying than when I was young and the answer seemed to always be some form of violence until the bad guy fell down. 

The world needs to be a brighter place, and the show encourages that. It won’t always be the solution, but in the words of Beta Ray Bill? “If there is nothing but what we make in this world, brothers, let us make good.” 

What do you want from life?

Honestly? Not a lot. I’m lucky enough to have a fairly comfortable life with a loving spouse, a nice home, good friends and a steady job that provides me sufficient free time. There’s always the small things that could be tweaked or improved (like needing to get into better shape), but my life’s pretty good these days and I’m thankful for it. 

Also for the Buffalo Bills to win a Super Bowl, but that’s not going to happen any time soon.

Why do you write?

Because my muse demands it. 

Really, that’s the answer — I’ve always been a creative person that way. Sometimes my mind just demands that I vent ideas onto paper (or paper-equivalent) and the words just flow. I can direct it, but for the most part? When the words want to happen they take control. This is why my work tends to be short and flash fiction — my writing is very momentum-based. It tends to either be out on the page immediately or it just doesn’t come at all.

And yeah. I’m that person who shows up to a beer-and-pretzels D&D game with twelve pages of backstory because at 3 AM my brain said “Write. NOW.”

What advice do you have for the authors out there?

Keep your writing focused. Don’t say in fifty words what you can say in five. One of the biggest sins a writer can make is to lose track of your own story. Know what story you’re trying to tell and tell it — don’t get distracted by telling three other stories in the middle of it. 

Read your story aloud as part of your self-editing process. Your brain has a lot of language built into it that isn’t conscious. Saying the words instead of reading them is a huge help for picking up on when something’s phrased poorly or some dialogue is awkward. You might not see it in text but the spoken word will trip your brain to go “That’s wrong.”

And challenge yourself. Don’t just write what you’re comfortable with — take on characters and topics and ideas that push your own envelope. To paraphrase a gaming friend of mine: “If you don’t die occasionally, you’ve got the difficulty turned too low.”

What — other than the final chapter of your earlier story “Three Second Chances” — inspired “Glow in the Dark, Shine in the Sun”?

It was that chapter fairly directly, to be honest. I’m a huge Sunset Shimmer fan, and while writing Three Second Chances I realized that Cozy Glow and pre-reform Sunset were extremely similar characters. The two had a ton in common and at the time their possible interactions hadn’t really been touched on by the fandom (aside from Casketbase77’s Innocent Until Proven Cozy). I love exploring niches like that of unusual character interactions and ‘just off screen’ moments, so the idea leapt out at me. To me, they just seemed like a pair that could have some excellent chemistry that hadn’t been tried before.

Why did you choose to hide the main antagonist’s first “appearance” from readers not using Fimfiction’s night mode?

Initially, none of the playing with text color was supposed to happen. It wasn’t in my outlines at all. But when the time came to write, I was searching for a way to foreshadow the antagonist’s growing influence without making it screamingly obvious. When I realized that as a mental construct it was a very meta-capable character, the idea of the text color jumped up as a way to give subtle hints to the reader without tipping my hand too hard. It was meant to trip that little nagging voice in the reader’s head to look at a sentence and realize that something was off about it without being able to entirely pin down what it was. 

Would you have liked the show to have done more to rehabilitate Chrysalis, Tirek, and Cozy Glow?

Yes and no. I think as characters they had more mileage on them and could have had more story, but you can’t exactly continue a story after a show ends. I partially actually respect that they weren’t redeemed in the end — not every solution is going to be Friendship and sometimes life doesn’t work out. If I was going to make a change to the ending for the Trio, it wouldn’t be to redeem them but to make locking them away to be more of a tough choice and reluctant rather than the punchline of a joke. 

Do you think Cozy Glow will make a better human than she did a pony? 

Almost certainly. Even without the Sunset aspect to influence her, the human world is much more suited to Cozy’s mindset and thought process. Besides, she wanted a world without magic — so there she goes.

Is there anything else you'd like to add?

Only to say thank you for this amazing honor — I haven’t even hit a year writing here yet, and I’ve been blown away by the reception on all fronts. There’s a lot of awesome authors out there who I think deserve this recognition more than me, but I’ll try to take it with humility and use this little bit of horsefame to boost those who I think have earned it and celebrate their recognition next.

Beyond that? Thank you all. I hope you’ve been entertained, and that I continue to do so in future works.

You can read Glow In The Dark, Shine In The Sun at FIMFiction.net. Read more interviews right here at the Royal Canterlot Library, or suggest stories for us to feature at our Fimfiction group.

Comments ( 10 )
Majin Syeekoh
Moderator

It’s ya boy Majin saying congrats!

A fantastic story, and one of my personal touchstones for how to write Cozy Glow alongside the already-mentioned Innocent Until Proven Cozy. I was riveted to the screen with each update.

Great story and well deserving of the RCL. Congratulations! I'm hoping we see a bit more of Cozy's journey in this 'verse. Not necessarily a full on sequel, but maybe an occasional one-shot to check up on what she's up to and how she's progressing.

Sunset Shimmer is Best Human, Best Pony and Best Princess, fite me.

Preach it!

Very much deserved!

Fantastic read. Saw the recommendation here and clicked right to the story before I could be spoiled. I binged it in one long go, savoring the whole ride and squealing with delight continually when I recognized what TCC56 was doing and the journey he was taking me on. This is more than deserved! Congrats!

Now to get into Three Second Chances...

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Thank you all for your kind words and your support. I can barely express how awesome this honor has been. I couldn't have made it without the help of the community, and hopefully I can give back by continuing to keep up the standards set here.

Again, thank you.

Hey, congratulations! I confess I haven't read all that much of your work but I guess it's time to change that!

Congratulations TCC, this (and Three Second Chances) stuck with me long after finishing and I'm super glad to see the acclaim being given!

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