New Fanfiction By Chris

Break Away: The Alicorn Amulet Collaboration

Cadance and Twilight have discovered something about the Alicorn Amulet. Whenever someone rejects its promises of power, it weakens the Amulet's magic. In theory, if enough ponies should be tempted by it and reject it, it would destroy the amulet forever.

They summon the help of volunteers from across Equestria, in the hope of destroying it for good.

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If you haven't been keeping up with cleverpun's collaborative project about various ponies trying to resist the Alicorn Amulet's lures... well, you should be.  First off, I'm in it, and my chapter's just gone up.  But also, there are a variety of authors, from the famous to the relatively new, who've offered up a wide variety of takes on the same core idea.  Collectively, they make for a fascinating range of interpretations, and with the collab currently under 20,000 words, now's a good time to jump in and start reading before it gets too long (don't worry, all chapters are already written).

So go click that picture/title above and read it!  And when you're done (or before, if you prefer), come back here and head past the break, where I'll talk about my just-published part in the collab: chapter four, the Carrot Top-centered Relevance.  Find out more about what I wrote, below.



So, Carrot Top.  Over the years, you've seen me make her fly, you've seen me write about her shuteye, and you've even seen shrug and me say "make her do whatever you want, guy."  But now...

...Now, it's time to make Carrot Top cry.

Relevance is basically 5000 words of me exploring my Carrot Top's emotional insecurity, and to me at least, it feels like a bit of a flipped script from how I usually write Carrot.  When I write about her, it's typically from the frame of her being relatively normal, and celebrating that normal doesn't mean "boring" or "useless."

But sometimes, being normal does feel boring, and it's easy to feel useless when you're surrounded by people with more impressive accomplishments.  Or sometimes, just people who make their lives sound more interesting; I know people who can make the video game they were playing last evening sound much more fascinating than my hiking trip through the Rincons.

So what if instead of just silently doubting yourself, a magical entity set out to prove that you really didn't matter?

What if it was right?

This isn't the story I first planned to write for the collab; my initial vision for the story was a much more typical-for-Chris take on Carrot, where the amulet tries to tempt her with power and glory and blackjack and hookers and she simply points out that those things don't appeal to her--that she's happy with what she's got.  But the more I thought about it, the more I realized; if the amulet is supposed to be competent (and while different authors had somewhat different takes on how effective/insidious its temptations really are, we all agreed it wasn't dumb), the more I realized that it would figure out pretty quickly that that wasn't the way to attack Carrot.  Thus a rather comic take on that first idea became the story's jumping-off point, before the real drama, and the real temptation, presents itself.

Sidebar: if you don't want to read about Carrot Top being put through the emotional ringer, you can pretend that my story ends after the first three scenes and one paragraph!

But no, this is intended as a fairly cutting entry into the collab, hopefully framed by a bit of more Chris-typical touching stuff around the edges.  And I would be remiss not to mention the conceptual and editing assistance of both cleverpun and Kai Creech, who didn't just help polish this into its current form, but really helped guide it through its infancy.

Well, that's probably enough talking from me.  If you haven't already, go check out the collab, and my entry in it.  I'm very happy with my chapter, and there are some other really great ones in there too--both already published and upcoming.  And if you like what you see--again, from me or others--be sure to let the authors know!  I know writing this was a good experience, and I hope the reading is just as edifying.