Pony Short Stories 25

Only read two pony fanfics lately. Been working on longer non-pony stories and a non-fiction book. Including the complete Lovecraft collection that is just going as fast as molasses. Which will get it’s own post eventually. Might not wait to finish it. I’ve been liking having a post here every day for the last few weeks and might actually start posting non-review type stuff just to keep up the trend since I haven’t been reading fast enough to keep that up.

 

Pony Short Stories 24

Okay, keeping up with the flow of things. Read a non pony full novel length story and wrote up a post for that right after it. Then read four pony fanfics and going to do them as a post and then I’ll have continued to keep up more or less. A day or two between reading and posting is not bad at all.

 

Book: Warbound

Wow. Apparently there are books out there that don’t include magical cartoon ponies. I just read one of them since I’m taking a break with the ponyfics to enjoy being caught up. Anyway, onto the book in question. Some spoilers below though I try to keep things abstract.

Warbound (The Grimnoir Chronicles) by Larry Correia is a title and author spellcheck does not like. Of course spellcheck doesn’t like the word spellcheck, so it is probably a little crazy. This book is the third and final entry in the Grimnoir trilogy. I really liked the first one, was disappointed at the second one. This was a decent end to things, but left me disappointed. Better than the second one, but once again not as good as the first one. This author just doesn’t write action scenes in a way that grabs my brain. Well, not since the first book anyway. The stories I keep comparing these too is the Dresden Files series by Jim Butcher. Butcher writes a action scene that just reaches into my head and gives me a good shake. I always feel like everything matters and that everything leading up to the action scene has weight and meaning. This one, not so much. It mostly just felt like plot device judo back and forth until the author got bored. Never really believed the good guys would lose because they had the big deus ex machina that was never really demonstrated as anything except a ‘we win’ button.

There is a spot at the end where the teleporter girl who is the deus ex machina realizes there is evil monsters attacking everywhere and she’s the only one who can be in enough places at once, so she disappears to fight everywhere. Then later she shows up and is a little out of breath and kind of covered in blood. Why couldn’t we see her struggling to be everywhere? See her teleporting and fighting over and over again, have her be the connecting thread showing us how everything is going to hell everywhere and that the good guys across the world are stretched to the breaking point. Give us a little bit of tension. Then when the big reveal happens we’ve seen that she’s been pushed to the limit and then is thrown at the big huge bad guy that shows up. As it was it was ‘she goes and kills all the bad guys’, we see some mostly unrelated stuff, ‘she does something really hard, honest, and wins’. It was unsatisfying.

Additionally the story wasn’t as dense as I like. There were cool ideas sort of tossed out randomly, but the author never does anything interesting with them. I wanted more about the magic system, which more and more just felt like superpowers instead of mystic forces. I wanted to see more stuff involving the crazy doctor, like why he thought he was invincible. I wanted them to break into one of the crazy magic-tech engineering laboratories and fight magic cyborg abominations. Instead I got two-thirds of a book that was all build-up that should have happened in the second book of the series. There is no reason this story couldn’t have been building tension, action scene, more tension, even more awesome action scene, dramatic chase scene, incredible over-the-top action extravaganza! That sort of thing.

It really has gotten me thinking even more about my own writing. Reaffirming my desire to make sure my own stories get more packed to make them as dense as the stuff I like reading. Packed with more worldbuilding, more character

Warbound (The Grimnoir Chronicles) by Larry Correia

 

Pony Short Stories 23

This is it. I’m actually caught up with what I’ve been reading. Here you have the last seven My Little Pony fan fiction stories I’ve read. One of them as recently as yesterday. Of course the moment I finish typing this I’m going to ruin it by reading another couple of short stories, so it will be a fleeting victory. Also this post is going up a few days after I write it. So guess it’s even more fleeting than I thought. People of the future, if you have a time machine be sure to come back to when I’m writing this to share my moment of victory before I get back to reading.

 

Pony Short Stories 22

No time for pre-post ramble. Only one post after this and I’ll be caught up. Then I might be able to switch back to one post one story. Assuming my pony fanfic reading continues its current glacial pace. Maybe try one of the really long stories.