New story! Another new story! New stories everywhere! · 9:39pm Jun 3rd, 2015
I've spoken here in the past about the Writeoff events. They're an awesome writing competition put on every month by Roger Dodger, and you should absolutely check them out.
I love writing contests because they force me to write. They give me motivation to produce stories that otherwise never would have been written, including one that just went up:
The Destruction of the Self
There is a village where everypony can be the same.
You may have read some nasty things about it. Rumors of stolen cutie marks and power-mad unicorns. Tall tales about forced smiles and frightened glances.
It's all lies. All except the part about us wanting to escape. That's true.
It's why we came here in the first place.
This latest Writeoff had 136 entries, a new record for us. Minific contests, which are limited to 750 words, are notoriously fickle, with little room to develop a story or stand out from the pack with a certain writing style. Fics almost always win or lose based on their concept, and when I was writing Destruction, I was pretty sure I had a winner.
It turns out I did. The Destruction of the Self took first place. I'm still riding high on that.
There were some other outstanding stories from the May Writeoff, and as people get them polished up and posted, I'll put up some links to them.
So, what else have I been working on? This will sound silly, but I'm turning my entry in the April Writeoff event into a longer-form story, which looks like it will be around 40k or so when it finishes. I'm super-psyched about this one, which also managed to win its round. Keep an eye out for it in the coming month.
Here's the art:
And yes, I'm still working on Salvation. Always, always thinking about Salvation.
Good to hear. I'm really looking forward to the next part, when you're ready to publish it.
>mfw
The original 750-word story is here. Link people to it whenever they say you can't tell a story in under 1000 words. This story says more than most 20,000-word stories.
I haven't read the 5000-word version yet. I don't think it's a 5000-word concept, but CiG probably knows what he's doing.
CiG, you still haven't said whether you'd ever read "The Lottery of Babylon". It's a famous story, and I like your story considerably better. Borges rambles on for pages and yet fails to get to the center of the matter as you did in that one paragraph that you said was too telly.
How did you make the art for those 2 stories? I really like the late-50s feel of the "Destruction of the self" one. "Land of the Blind" looks like circa 1990. It's hard to date art now that everything is retro. BTW, knighty wrote recently about enforcing a standard aspect ratio. (I know; no artist could imagine how that could be a good idea.) I don't know when that will happen, but beware.
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I never actually read The Lottery In Babylon; in fact, I'd never heard of that particular story of his until you mentioned it (I am not particularly well-read). The closest inspiration I can loosely link to this story would be various tales of American experiments in planned societies, which often require some degree of social engineering. See "Waldon 2" as an example. But honestly the episode itself was more meaningfully influential than any book I'd read.
Expanding the original by simply making it longer would have watered down the message, so I went with the decision to look at some of the other ponies from the original, and how the village affects their lives. I think it turned out pretty well.
As for art, I do it in photoshop. The two styles I use are either an audible depiction of characters or scenes from the story, or a more modern "book cover" style like these two. Whatever I think will get people's attention best.
Intriguing cover and title. It will be interesting to see what ponywords you come up with this time!
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Second response, now that I'm not at work using my cellphone!
So I went and read The Lottery in Babylon. I think I'm more sympathetic toward it than you -- I love Borges' imagination, though I agree that he spent a lot of time indulging in it before he got to the main point of his argument, that the Company was a fiction and the chaos of Babylon was entirely a product of the city's insanity. The style is also fairly old fashioned, as we discussed in the Writeoff thread -- this sort of telly exposition, while fun to read when as well-written as Borges can produce, still feels stodgy to our ears.
I don't know. Maybe Borges would have turned in a better product if he'd been limited to 750 words and 24 hours.
With regard again to the art, the font on The Destruction of the Self's artwork was deliberately chosen for its Art Deco style, as I wanted that sort of Modernist feel that was in vogue when socialism first swept the world. I don't view my story as being about socialism, but I needed somewhere to go with the art, and that's where I went.
For Land of the Blind, I just needed something distinctive and eye-catching. That design really has nothing to do with the actual content of the story, which I feel is a bit like cheating, but sometimes we cheat when appealing to our readers :p
3122390 I wondered if you were going for art deco. I have a hard time identifying 20s fonts because I haven't seen paperback books from the twenties. But, yeah, sorry, that does look art deco.