A New Short Story—Or Semi-New, At Least

     Just over ten years ago now, I wrote a piece of My Little Pony fanfiction called "Collaborators." Hopefully this news doesn't shock anybody too much.

     I've actually got two pseudonyms that I use when writing what the kids call "MLP fanfic." The first one, AugieDog, is where I post the general stories I've put together in response to the fourth iteration of the My Little Pony franchise, the one that's subtitled "Friendship is Magic" and was created by a genius of the Western animated arts, Lauren Faust. And the second pseudonym, Baal Bunny, is where I post Pony items that I write as part of the assorted Writeoff contests, a writing workshop that, up until the Pony cartoon went off the air just over five years ago now, was quite a bustling little community.

     Nowadays, half the time, I'm the only one submitting stories in answer to the prompts over there...

     But one of the stories that I originally put together as Baal Bunny back in 2014 dealt with one of the more obscure characters from the cartoon. In the Pony universe, y'see, there's a series of novels about a pegasus adventurer named Daring Do—clearly a parody of Indiana Jones—that's written by a pegasus author, A.K. Yearling—just as clearly a take of J.K. Rowling. Well, as the cartoons went on, they revealed that A.K. Yearling secretly was Daring Do, that she went off on these incredible adventures, then returned home to write them up and sell them as fiction without letting anyone know that her books were largely true.

     My first thought when that particular episode aired was that Yearling was just asking for legal trouble. What if one of the villains she defeated and then wrote about defeating sued her for defamation? The villain could probably get her to settle just by threatening to tell the world her secret. After all, the cartoon showed her going through quite a bit to keep herself and her character separate, so that separation must've been pretty important to her...

     Anyway, I ended up overthinking things as I do and wrote up a whole story about it. I then changed all the Pony stuff into non-Pony stuff, rewrote the story a number of times, and started submitting it to paying venues. And now one of those venues has published it: "Collaborators" went up earlier today on the Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores website. The editor there cut about 2,000 of the more than 9,000 words I sent her originally, and I think it makes the story quite a bit stronger. Apparently I need to be more ruthless when it comes to the self-editing process...

     Still, here's a ten-year-old story that's been completely redone and made new again. It's an end-of-the-year miracle!

                                                                           Mike

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