Re: [GRIMDARK] Fallout Equestria: Project Horizons Discussion

[Admiral Stoic Rum]

Have a respirator.. once it clears you'll love not being in tears

[Ironmonger]

The tiger, it drinks fuel like cider.

Spoiler:

[Admiral Stoic Rum]

Stick a swastica on porn or a pony and it becomes nazi... stick bacon on a swastica and all is right with the world

[Ironmonger]

Stick a swastica on porn or a pony and it becomes nazi... stick bacon on a swastica and all is right with the world

Put a swastika on a tank and it becomes an enemy. Put a tank on a swastika and it becomes a political statement. You know what I don't even know.

[Admiral Stoic Rum]

Bacon makes everything better

[FeatherDust]

Wait a minute.

Spoiler:

EGADS! I am found out!

Are you my mummy?

[Admiral Stoic Rum]

the superior genetic material of the parent will tell you all you need to know

[Kippershy]

Also, I lost the post, but what add-ons were recommended for NV? (Can't play Fo3, just keeps crashing)
Oh, and on a side note: I finally got around to looking up on equine anatomy. Noticed they have about all labia internally, will have to re-work my fics a bit later heh. The new ones only I mean.
Well, expect me to reply to all the comments tomorrow or something like that. Gonna go lie down for a while.

My recommendations:

Project Nevada.
Freeside Open.
ACF Brighter days darker nights (darker version is best version).
--Electro city if you go with ACF BDDN--
Wasteland Flora Overhaul

Radio stations:
Wave radio
CONELRAD (authentic!)

[Meleagridis]

I WAS CAUGHT UP THIS MORNING NOW THERE'S FOUR MORE PAGES WHAT THE CHEESE?!

GUH. Sometimes catching up here feels like watching a pot of water boil.
This will be so much easier when I can use my own computer again!

Peppermint... blank? Maybe? Is there anything they could keep that isn't a pony but could look like... hm...

Why does it need to look like a pony?

Mostly, I'm jumping to the conclusion that Peppermint received the Eternity core. I suppose there isn't all too much evidence so call it a half-assed hunch. On a slightly related note, does anyone remember the last known holder of the talisman?

Oh, Medley's death, right?
...
All that's left now is to sit back and watch Somber either disprove my headcanon or ignore the issue entirely :)

Now I know I'm still not using anything close to 'proof positive' here, but almost every member of the Medley medley had a musical name. They, at the very least, know how to sing in choir. And they'll soon have one of the greatest musical minds of the past two hundred years in their personal attendance. Sure, Adagio could go on to become a wicked acrobat, but I'm fairly certain there's some more musical talent in there somewhere. I doubt Chapel will ring silent any time soon.

[Cptadder]

Actually there's probably a good pony story in there (with zebras maybe?). Try to coax people into thinking it's just another fan fic but as it develops it's revealed that it's in FoE universe.

I've got the outline of six chapters done myself but everytime I look at the EQ daily FoE side stories compilation I get scared because there are literally forty of the damn things. And I've not written a fanfic since I was 14?

Anyway, I'm checking in to say I'm going to be sixteen pages behind by the time I get back from this trip up to Columbus today, or so it seems like.
I think someone needs to start writing thread summary posts for people who are busy.

Last time on Project Horizon Z!

[Kippershy]

Actually there's probably a good pony story in there (with zebras maybe?). Try to coax people into thinking it's just another fan fic but as it develops it's revealed that it's in FoE universe.

I've got the outline of six chapters done myself but everytime I look at the EQ daily FoE side stories compilation I get scared because there are literally forty of the damn things. And I've not written a fanfic since I was 14?

Anyway, I'm checking in to say I'm going to be sixteen pages behind by the time I get back from this trip up to Columbus today, or so it seems like.
I think someone needs to start writing thread summary posts for people who are busy.

Last time on Project Horizon Z!

Well over just forty... on the Fallout Equestria Resource, I'm 143.
(http://fallout-equestria.com/story/143)

checking through it, there's 381 stories listed.

GRANTED, 99% of those have nothing more then a single chapter, it seems.
However, yeah, there must be about 40 that actually update.

Still, look at me, Broken Bonds is literally the very first creative piece I've ever written that's gone past 2 A4 pages (which I wrote when I was like, 13 or 14.)


Go for it. Just go for it, you might find yourself surprised.

[Valikdu]

OFU-
I'm an alicorn now.

I DUNN WANNA BE DUNKED.

The sensation you are experiencing right now is from your internal organs changing shape and relocating and your skeletal structure being twisted in unnatural ways. Soon you will be h--ASSUMING DIRECT CONTROL

[IncoherentOrange]

@CptAdder Do eeeit. Writing is fun! And if you haven't written a fanfic since you were fourteen, that's experience you can use. Mind if I ask what of?

Speaking of writing and fun, I just figured out why I haven't been able to write anything; I was focusing too much on what I thought would get the most attention and forgot that I should write what I want to. Silly me!

I probably will not write an FoE sidefic, but anything could happen, I suppose. I've already written an unorthodox Fallout crossover, but, eh.

[Ironmonger]

Writing an FoE sidefic (or in my case a sequel) is hard work and tedious in my opinion. There's a ton of stuff you got to keep in mind while writing and planning lest you break continuity. Well, this is coming from a wannabe gunsmith and not someone with a passion for writing, more of a hobby. I calculated that if I went for my goal and wrote 50K words per chapter at a rate of 1000-2000 words a day, with each chapter released monthly, and a total of 50 chapters, I wouldn't finish for probably 5 years.

[Cptadder]

@CptAdder Do eeeit. Writing is fun! And if you haven't written a fanfic since you were fourteen, that's experience you can use. Mind if I ask what of?

Come to think of it I had a bunch of one off projects when I was seventeen, it's when I grew up a touch and realized I did not hate English, I just fucking hated poems and any class that made me write them. Five years later I tried my hand at a story that made it about four pages worth of a what-if in the old Star Wars EU which started identically to what would be used in Timothy Zahn's Hand of Thrawn duology. I started thinking after reading The Last Command if Thrawn would ever clone himself as if he was the person I imagined him to be I could see him loving the idea of having someone he could trust utterly since he's logical enough to know the Galaxy is a big place and no matter how smart you are, you can only be in one place at a time FTL or no. So I wrote a opening to the same thing in Hand of Thrawn where Thrawn takes a cloning tank for his own personal clone and sets up a stronghold to grow his own clone to be feed his morals, believes, teachings and memories to take over for him in case he died. In my story it was identical except it was not one tank but twelve and split into groups of four and it was not ten years after his death but one.

I had the intro written, the first chapter or so then I gave up on it for time contrasts and I had no idea where to go with the story aside from Clones run amok and reactions from the main cast. I ran into the problem of...now what. What do these clones get up to? Do they try and wrestle control of the Empire away from the warlords conquering petty fief by petty fiefdom?

[Valikdu]

1) Complete Downer ending. If it does end with the "Blackjack's army vs the Harbingers / Core denizens" that Adder talked about I have a feeling it will be built up as an inspiring story of an unlikely hero getting groups together that people considered irreconcilable and taking the fight to the core. Everyone will be hopeful and Glory / Blackjack will probably have a passionate pre-climax climax. Then the fateful day rolls around and it turns out the Core has secret defenses that wipe out Blackjack's team before the fight even begins.

A-and then... Eater appears to the dying Blackjack in a vision... and it's taken on the form of Medley... and it explains... things... that it needs to take the souls of everyone to save them from something... and then... and then...

*has a nervous breakdown and cowers under a table*
square root of 912.04 is 30.2... it all seemed harmless...

...

*automatic medical systems engaged*
In all seriousness, um... no.

I calculated that if I went for my goal
and wrote 50K words per chapter at a rate of 1000-2000 words a day, with
each chapter released monthly, and a total of 50 chapters, I wouldn't
finish for probably 5 years.

Ehm. You might wanna re-check the size of your goal there.

[Ironmonger]

Ya think?

[Valikdu]

Ya think?

50.000 words per chapter. 50 chapters. That's 2.500.000 words, or about two Horizons (probably slightly less). Have you suddenly become a god?

[Ironmonger]

I have a habit of planning big. Morale of the story: Don't raise the writing bar too high for certain things, you'll never meet them. I re-sized my goal to 10-20k words per chapter, making it roughly equivalent to the original FoE story.

[CamoBadger]

I'm just going for trying to reach 10K in the long chapters of my story, since that much in a chapter starts to look like too much in my mind (probably because I'm used to 3K chapters with 5K as a max).

[Kippershy]

50k words per chapter is stupid, anyway.
Somber writes incredibly long chapters, they sit on the verge of 'very long' and 'too long', though never overstepping through very careful consideration on his/editors part.

His chapters are 35k longest (I believe. can't say for sure without going through them all and finding out by saving each and every one to check.)

10k - 15k chapters are probably the best.
They're long enough to get a decent amount of content out with each one and they allow for a chapter to be extra long (hitting 20k) and still not feel too long.
Likewise, they're not so short that you can't get any sense of achievement in terms of the story or let the readers down and leave them feeling like it's only half written with each chapter.


The shortest chapter I allow myself to release is 9k, excluding the first chapter / prologue / pilot because you have to assume your readers only want it to be short to get an idea of what they're going to be reading.


Also - unless you have a detailed outline of what's going to happen, when it's going to happen, how it's going to happen and how things are going to stay fresh, don't give yourself a chapter number goal or total wordcount goal.

[Valikdu]

roughly equivalent to the original FoE story

That's, um... ambitious.

Well, good luck. Additional pylons adequate FoE side stories are cool.

...Meanwhile, my own story is yet to get off the freakin ground. Need to stop playing with little tanks, finish up the DF mod... then, start writing again and probably find someone who would agree to beta the horrible mishmash of various stuff it will turn out to be. Okay.

I "sort of" have a list of points about my "expanded universe" and an outline of events. I haven't written seriously before.

[Kippershy]

roughly equivalent to the original FoE story

That's, um... ambitious.

Well, good luck. Additional pylons adequate FoE side stories are cool.

...Meanwhile, my own story is yet to get off the freakin ground. Need to stop playing with little tanks, finish up the DF mod... then, start writing again and probably find someone who would agree to beta the horrible mishmash of various stuff it will turn out to be. Okay.

I "sort of" have a list of points about my "expanded universe" and an outline of events. I haven't written seriously before.

If you want any help from someone who knows how that feels, speak to me.
Broken Bonds is my first venture into writing yet after seven months (almost) I have 147,473 words total over 14 chapters (15th in the works), 3940 views, 26 upvotes and 47 favourites.
I -don't- use a prereader though I do have one guy that looks for grammar problems after release, though usually he only finds about four or five bits over 10k words, so not bad.

I'm happy to help you out if you want it, for any reason.


I've started out as a sub-adequate level writer and to be fair, I personally still see myself as one, though there are some people (Katarn, Ketchup & some of my followers) who get very vocal when I say this.
I've learnt a lot of lessons about writing, and I can pass them onto you if you wish.

[Valikdu]

I haven't actually written any significant amount (6.5K now) or put it up. The main problem (apart from the... concept and everything) so far is just my procrastination.

Well... How about this, for now: I send you a PM with a list of points about the story, and you tell if it's even viable?

[IncoherentOrange]

The first ever attempt at fanfiction was something I wrote this last March, I think, that involved MLP. It was a self-insert like my first published one, but with a different perspective and more original approach. Came up to around two double-sided and single-spaced pages for a prologue and first chapter. A week later, I proceeded to write the one I'd publish, working a scant three or four hours, churning out 3000 words of terrible, not even bothering to proofread it before spitting it out on FiMFiction. (Though, my passive grammatical expertise was, even at the time, respectable. Having left out the editing portion of writing in English class, as with doing away with studying in the second grade, I've adapted to not be dependant on it to make what I write presentable) It actually turned out not so bad; its ratio is 30:2 as of now, likes to dislikes. It terminated at thirty thousand words--not far over a longer Horizons chapter, if I guess correctly. I've gotten quite a bit better since then. It has been five months since its completion, after all. On reflection, I was a fool for not having a better idea and sharing that instead.

Come to think of it, I might've written something in the much more distant past based on something else... or perhaps it's just a phantom memory.

What I continue not to fathom is why that story I mentioned above has better ratings and more popularity than Kipper's story. I mean, that's totally not fair; he put a lot more effort into his, I can tell.

And yeah, I know a thing or two 'bout writing now, too, so ask me anything. I absolutely love helping.

[Kippershy]

Concept problems? What kind?
Honestly, work on getting the concept pretty damn solid first, because you DON'T want to be several months into the story and then think "wait... no, this doesn't quite work, I don't want to do that... I want to do this!"

Because that? That kills a story outright.
It's not happened to me, though I have had the concept of my story (as in, the second half of it all) change / adapt / extend itself as time goes on.


So, work on getting the concept to be a strong basis. If the ending changes as you're writing, it's not too bad - but the main storyline, what makes it what it is and at least the start & middle have to remain relatively the same from when you start to when you're writing them, otherwise it'll cause all sorts of problems.

[Valikdu]

It's an expanded setting with interstellar travel and alicorns. And you can take a guess what the main character is.

...I'm sure that's more than enough concept problems already.

[Caoimhe]

Remember fic writers: your story needs a theme as well as a good setting. I just went through the first couple chapters of 3 random fics on fimfiction and none of them had a good idea of what the hell kind of story they were trying to tell, but they did elaborate on the setting a whole bunch. Not having character motivation makes for a boring as hell tale, especially when it's in serial format.

[Ironmonger]

A running theme in my work is "War is the father of all things." Where Littlepip and Blackjack seem to despise war altogether (at least I got that impression), my fic has a pro-war feel to it and how it can help the wasteland if conducted properly.

[Kippershy]

My story starts off on the survival of an entire region, dependant on a new water talisman.

It then also takes on the theme of revolution and oppression in a city ruled by iron hooves.
It also takes on other, smaller themes, though to go into detail would be spoiling it.

Indeed, having a theme for the story is just as essential as having an interesting area to play around in.

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