Someone wrote, "Fiction teaches us that other people are real."

Earlier this year, I was visiting my mother, and while we were sitting and talking, I apologized for being late, and she said, "Oh, that's no trouble."

But I was looking her in the eyes when I said it, and her eyes said that it was, in fact, trouble.  I know my mother well enough that I can read a lot in her eyes.  What I can't read, I can mostly fill in from the context; I know what matters to her and how she thinks.

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The post Viking ZX made on Nov 20th has been read 1000 times and has 37 comments.
The post he made on Dec 4, which tells how things ended, has been read 67 times and has 2 comments.

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from The Man Behind the Nose by Larry Harmon & Thomas Scott McKenzie, 2010

• Larry Harmon, aka Bozo the Clown, stuttered as a child.
• He became the drum major for Cleveland Heights High by lying about his age and auditioning with a broken leg.

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Shaslan's Prismatic won't show up on the front page, because she posted it in a blog post instead of as a story. It's only 791 words, which someone decided is too short to be a real story.

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To My Uncle

One month ago, PaulAsaran posted "To My Uncle", a story about writing stories. If you're thinking about writing stories, or just starting to write stories, or have been writing stories for a long time but are still bad at it although you don't know it, why not read this instead of some other pony story that isn't about writing stories?

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In other Eneasz-releated news, Eneasz recently blogged his reasons for believing that SF&F magazines (and, I'd assume, all print publishers) will soon have to stop taking unsolicited submissions, owing to the overwhelming number of AI-written stories being sent to them.

Eneasz Brodsky, author, blogger, LessWronger (I think), and some-time fimfiction reader, posted this video of a pegasus at the last Burning Man:

WARNING: Noisy!

It's called "Wings of Glory". Designer and builder Adrian Landon made a web page about its creation. Looks like it first went to Burning Man in 2019.

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I'm almost certainly too late to help this get featured, and too tired to write much tonight, but this is another fine story from PatchworkPoltergeist. It has a lot of simultaneous storylines in 9100 words:

• Tirek's attempt to read an ancient book that's protected by an obfuscating spell
• the mystery of what happened in Cloudsdale and why Cozy Glow is so upset
• the revelation of Cozy Glow's underlying motivation for being a villain

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Perfect things in poetry do not seem strange. They seem inevitable.

- Borges, The Craft of Verse, lecture 1, "The riddle of poetry"

Sweetie Ban by Casketbase77

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