It's that time again! That magical time when TD publishes a story and then goes on a reading spree to see what he missed while he was editing his work.

The review set is only a day late. Shhh.

But yes, I did publish a story earlier this week, and I'm rather proud of it:

The Fated Hour



Comedy, Romance

8,328 words Twilight almost missed out on the chance to have friends. So when she finds a spell in an an ancient tome that promises to tell her when she will meet her true love, she decides to get a head start on things and prepare for the fated hour. Too bad her true love seems to be taking their sweet time showing up.

Originally a story for the writeoff, The Fated Hour is a fun little piece about Twilight freaking out when her true love doesn’t show up when her love timer spell says they should. And who doesn’t love watching Twilight freak out? It contains ship-teasing, but also a core sort of sweetness to it, and has a somewhat subversive ending for a story tagged like this which I think falls in line with the central message of the show – that friendship is indeed magic. I think a lot of you folks who enjoy my comedies will probably find this amusing.

I’ve actually been trying to make an effort to put more of my own work out there; I went into a long hiatus of publishing my own writing earlier this year, and despite writing during that time, I published nothing. I want to change that and be more active again. I’ve got several stories I’ve been sitting on for months that I want to get published soon, and I hope to have another story, My Fluttering Heart, ready for you folks by Sunday.

But I won’t let that stand in the way of reviewing. Last night, when I started getting tired, I started reading stories. Then I went to bed, woke up, and then read more stories. And while I continue my long, unabated tradition of hating everything, I did find some things I did enjoy, thanks to a particularly talented writer. A writer whose stories I always mean to read, and which still all too often slip by me unread.

I should really set up a net.

Today’s stories:

Rari’doh by shortskirtsandexplosions

Why the Nobles are Big, Stinky, Stupid-Heads by Clockworklich

Stupid Gems Cannot Keep Secrets! by Dalek Saxon

SS&E’s One Thousand One Hundred and Seventy-Eight Word Rarijack Fic for Fourths by shortskirtsandexplosions

Knotty Logic by Estee

Rarid’oh!

by shortskirtsandexplosions



Romance, Slice of Life

3,062 words Sweetie Belle discovers an amateur novel lying abandoned on the ground. The mysterious story soon becomes all the rage with everypony. And then Rarity hears a passage of it being read out loud...

Why I added it: SS&E is a good writer.

Review

Rainbow Dash wrote pulp fiction story about how her self insert character Blue Streak saved Rarity Princess Fuzzdiamonds from the evil villain Meat Hoof, who was intent on using a Lame Ray to make the world… lame.

And it is terrible, in the “so bad it’s good” sense.

The story really is split into two parts – the first half is everyone in Equestria reading the story after it gets disseminated following Sweetie Belle finding it, absolutely mortifying Rainbow Dash.

The second half is devoted to Rainbow Dash and Rarity having a conversation wherein Rainbow Dash is embarrassed and Rarity is deeply amused (and interested).

It is really the first half that sells the story; terribly written pulp adventure stories (and pulp romance, and similar things) are sometimes fun to read, and “It’s so bad, it’s good,” is indeed a thing. The interspersing of the terrible story with everyone snickering about Rainbow Dash the nameless author who they definitely don’t recognize from word choice alone is fun to read, and the conclusion wraps it up neatly.

If it has a flaw, it is that the story never really feels like it pushes up to the next level. It is funny pretty much throughout, but it is never quite hilarious, and the final scene between Rainbow Dash and Rarity feels almost rote – it accomplishes what it is trying to do, but is extremely predictable, and the fact that my mind put together that scene pretty much in its entirety without even reading it made it feel a little anticlimactic.

That being said, it is funny, and was fun to read. I smiled throughout, and was left with a smile at the end.

Recommendation: Worth Reading, especially if you ship RariDash.

Why the Nobles Are Big, Stinky, Stupid Heads

by Clockworklich



Comedy, Random

1,726 words Annoyed that the nobles keep taking up all of princess Celestia's time filly Twilight vents the only way she knows how. By writing an essay! However she wrote this essay on the blank bottom of the scroll containing the speech princess Celestia was to read to her little ponies. And once the speech ends, Celestia doesn't stop. Much to the horror of some of the nobles in the crowd.

Why I added it: It was featured. Also, the title is deliciously petulant.

Review

The heart of this story is the essay that Princess Celestia reads out loud unveiling the secrets of the ponies – Celestia’s secretary, who takes bribes, her treasurer, who defrauds the government, cheats on their wife, ect.

Some of the “secrets” are kind of silly, while others are actual crimes, or are at the very least extremely embarrassing.

That being said, this story paints well within the lines – this isn’t the first time I’ve seen “Child gives away grown-up secrets without understanding what is going on”, and unfortunately, it is a very standard use of it which doesn’t really make much use of Twilight’s character. It is just sort of a generic kid character, and it doesn’t match what we saw of Twilight as a filly very well.

As it targets a bunch of ponies who are all OCs, and does so with fairly generic things… this just didn’t feel like it went anywhere all that interesting. And indeed, the story itself is just a vehicle for the speech; we’re given little sense of Twilight’s frustration.

It isn’t terrible, but it is generic, and if you’ve ever read anything about a kid giving away grown-up secrets without understanding them, you’ve already more or less read this.

Recommendation: Not Recommended.

Stupid Gems Cannot Keep Secrets!

by Dalek Saxon



Drama, Romance, Slice of Life

12,701 words As Fluttershy examines a few memory gems containing some of her and her friend's most cherished memories, she comes across a startling discovery. She looks into one of the gems belonging to her best friend Rainbow Dash and sees something she was never meant to see. One of Rainbow Dash's most private secrets that just so happened to be important enough for it to be dangling in the chandelier. A turn of events that could've been avoided if Rainbow Dash only checked to see what memories had been stored in that chandelier. Flutterdash oneshot.

Why I added it: He is a fellow admin of the FlutterDash group and the idea seemed interesting.

Review

Fluttershy, while looking through the memories in Twilight’s chandelier, comes across one where Rainbow Dash kissed her while she was asleep.

She then confronts Rainbow Dash about it.

Dalek noted to me that his writing is pretty rough, but I was like “This got only one downvote, how bad could it be?”

I should have listened.

This story’s writing is very rough:

• It is telly.

• It struggles mightily with Lavender Unicorn Syndrome, calling characters by various descriptive… well, descriptions constantly, and for no good reason, switching between them constantly.

• It uses questionable color words like cerise kind of awkwardly. Cerise is what might be called an expensive color word – they’re words which can often feel awkward when the rest of the language in a piece, or even in a section, isn’t quite so fancy. Oftentimes, it is better to compare a color to some object when you’d end up using a word like cerise or cornflower or something similar – it isn’t that people can’t understand it, it is that it often just feels strange, some odd mixture of plain and fancy.

• The story itself is 12,000 words long, but the actual content of the story is pretty minimal. It spends an awful lot of verbiage on cruft which does little to advance the story.

This story is pretty clearly a learning experience for Dalek. I liked the idea of Fluttershy catching out Rainbow Dash via the memories in the chandelier – it seems like such an obvious font of potentially shippable moments, really, but I’ve never seen it used that way in another story.

That being said, while the central idea was potentially interesting, the execution ended up putting me off. The overall structure of the piece was pretty straightforward and felt like it lacked real tension. Fluttershy’s confusion over having been kissed feels weirdly drawn out and still kind of off somehow. And yet it is quite long.

That said, he did win his little mini-contest with SATails over who got more upvotes, so clearly at least some of the FlutterDash shippers didn't mind.

Recommendation: Not Recommended.

SS&E’s One Thousand One Hundred and Seventy-Eight Word RariJack Fic for Fourths

by shortskirtsandexplosions



Romance, Slice of Life

1,178 words Applejack stumbles upon Rarity late one night inside Twilight Sparkle's castle.

Why I added it: SS&E is a good writer. Also, RariJack.

Review

God damn it, Skirts.

Long ago, a group of authors got together to write a terrible book called Atlanta Nights. One review noted:

The world is full of bad books written by amateurs. But why settle for the merely regrettable? Atlanta Nights is a bad book written by experts.

This story really illustrates why someone who is good at writing can write truly deliciously bad writing that is nevertheless fun to read.

This is a RariJack story. But it is really an excuse for SS&E to indulge in prose so purple it’d make Nero jealous. The story is full of overly-precise descriptions, terrible similes and metaphors, lavender unicorn syndrome applied to body parts, the use of nouns like “applepone” and adjectives like “marshmallowy”, and hyperbole that would ordinarily make me wince, but instead, it all comes together for an effect that makes me chuckle and shake my head at Skirts.

The underlying story is sweet in a innocently saccharine sort of way; Applejack making an affectionate gesture towards Rarity while her friend is asleep is cute, but ultimately serves as a vehicle for the prose. Still, it is serviceable enough as a fluff piece, and I’m sure at least some of you will enjoy that angle of it as well.

Recommendation: Worth Reading if a parody of purple prose sounds fun to read.

Knotty Logic

by Estee

Comedy, Slice of Life

3,005 words The garlic knots: half a bit each. The optional dipping sauce: an additional half-bit. The local value of 'optional': possibly not what you might expect it to be.

Why I added it: Estee is a good writer and I somehow missed that this story existed.

Review

Knot Nazee is the proprietor of a new restaurant in Ponyville. His garlic knots smell delicious. There’s just one problem – he wants to sell them with rather rancid marinara sauce. Optional sauce.

Except you have to buy it. Your option is to take it or leave it.

Pinkie, Twilight, and Rarity take issue with this.

Unfortunately, I’ve never watched much Seinfeld, so while I am vaguely aware of “No soup for you!”, I… lack any special context for this story. Ultimately, this story served as a vehicle for some characters to try and reason with an unreasonable person. And while there is some potential in that premise, ultimately it felt a little bit by the numbers – the mane six show up, try their particular approach, leave, insert next character. And in the end, I didn’t feel like it really accomplished a whole lot as a story. It was kind of silly, but I never actually laughed at it, and after a while it just felt kind of predictable.

Recommendation: Knot Recommended.

Summary

Rari’doh by shortskirtsandexplosions

Worth Reading Why the Nobles are Big, Stinky, Stupid-Heads by Clockworklich

Not Recommended Stupid Gems Cannot Keep Secrets! by Dalek Saxon

Not Recommended SS&E’s One Thousand One Hundred and Seventy-Eight Word Rarijack Fic for Fourths by shortskirtsandexplosions

Worth Reading Knotty Logic by Estee

Not Recommended

And there we go!

Now, to get back to writing My Fluttering Heart. You all should go read SS&E’s stuff; they’re both fresh stories and both deserve to be featured.

Though, you know, after you’ve read The Fated Hour, if you haven’t already.

Incidentally, while reading this set, I read enough stories for two review sets. Expect to see Read It Now Reviews #89 tomorrow.