And Now, A Short Story

          If you'd rather read the story than all my falderol about the story, clicking on the "My Little Pony Meets Magritte" image or the title later on in this sentence will transport you to the Zooscape website and my piece "The Sleep of Reason." But if you'd like the backstory, too...

          See, for the past six years, I've been involved in the online writing contests/critique groups at Writeoff.me. They started with monthly My Little Pony Friendship is Magic fanfiction contests, but the whole thing has since expanded into original fiction, poetry, and visual arts as well.

          The usual way it works has the registered members submitting a word or phrase as a potential prompt during the first 24 hours of the contest, everyone then voting on the prompts for the second 24 hours, and the one that gets the most points when the third 24 hours begins becomes the prompt for that contest. When the writers go first, they have a set amount of time to produce a story based on the prompt: flashfiction rounds give you 24 hours for something between 400 and 750 words, and the short story rounds give you either 3 or 5 days to string together between 2,000 and 8,000 words. Sometimes to mix things up, the visual artists will go first, getting 3 days to come up with a piece based on the prompt after which us writers have to pick a picture and make up a story inspired by it.

          All stories and artwork go up on the site with no names attached, and revealing which piece is yours before the end of the contest is grounds for disqualification. I've found the group to be very helpful with commentary, and even though participation has dropped precipitously the last year or so—November's "My Little Pony" short story contest had two entries other than my own—the three to five day deadline keeps my mind focused quite nicely on popping out a rough draft of something that I can then get comments on and revise.

          Which brings us to last February's original short story contest. It was one of those where the visual aritsts were going to go first, and of the eleven prompt phrases that were entered, mine won: "Wind and Rain." Eleven images were submitted inspired by that prompt, and three of those eleven featured My Little Pony characters. Even though it was an "original fiction" round.

          Those of us who are easily shocked were shocked, but after recovering, as a life-long Magritte fan, I couldn't help just enjoying the heck out of the little wall-eyed pegasus character known to the fan community as Derpy Hooves appearing in the place of the pipe from the famous "Treachery of Images" painting—I mean, the artist here had even titled it "La Trahison des petits chevaux." How could I not write a story based on it?

          So I did, working the My Little Pony character into a piece about how life works when you're a figment of someone's imagination, and I submitted the story. Only one other story got entered that round, and it beat mine when the final votes were tallied.

          Still, I took the comments I'd gotten, did a fair bit of revision, and as I said way back at the beginning of all this, the story's now up on the Zooscape website under the title "The Sleep of Reason." Which is a reference to another famous piece of artwork, so I'd have to say things are getting just a little bit too "meta" around here for me...

                                        Mike