Before I spoil the mood by getting snarky, I’d like to give a big thanks to Wanderer D, who moved my first story on fimfiction, “Friends, With Occasional Magic”, to my Bad Horse account. And thanks to Boss Pony, my 600th watcher. He’s not even one of my sock puppets!

Have you ever wondered how I produce these beautifully-formatted blog posts?

No?

I'll tell you my secret anyway. Create a story, "Blog posts". Write your posts in Google docs. When done, create a new story chapter & upload the blog to it using the "Import from Google Docs" green up-arrow. Then Edit, ctrl-a (Select All), Copy, Blogs, Add new blog post, and Paste.

Now, the promised snark.

I’m really impressed by the enthusiasm and commitment of all those folks from the Savannah College of Art & Design who got together and made Double Rainboom. Putting a crew of artists together and keeping it together for an entire year is probably the hardest job in any art. I don’t hold a grudge against them at all for premiering it during my panel at Cloudsdale Congress. Not a bit. And I’m grateful to Hasbro for letting them do it.

(Right in the middle of my panel. Just across the hall.)

But as a writer, it’s a bit of a slap in the face when a crew gathers 40 animators, 34 artists, 10 special-effects experts, 10 voice actors, 5 puppeteers,  4 sound artists, and zero writers. Because writing is just, you know, writing words, and anybody can do that.

Kind of like when you go to a brony convention and the schedule has 4 pages listing the bios of musicians and artists, and one sentence saying there will be some writers. Or like when a big brony convention in England has one panel on writing... and staffs it with musicians who write a little. Or like when you watch most movies from big Hollywood studios. Or like one of my first jobs out of college, with a computer game company whose president, a computer scientist, hired a scriptwriter, then told him what to write. You haven’t heard of this computer game company. Guess why.

Maybe writing really isn’t as hard as animating or composing. People have written excellent stories very very soon after they started writing, like S.E. Hinton, Carson McCullers, AbsoluteAnonymous, and Quixotic Mage. (The bastards.) But it ain’t nothing.

I don’t think the Double Rainboom crew was aware that they spent an entire year slaving over the graphical details of a story that was the literary equivalent of a stick-figure drawing. Animators are great at understanding character and emotion, at devising little bits of business that show you economically what a character is feeling and thinking. They focus on that, just like a composer friend of mine reviews movies by talking about the score. And there’s a long tradition in the animation business of mostly story-free animation, just one-dimensional characters in one silly scene after another (ACME rocket rollerskates, anyone?)

But it’s arrogant to assume that professional studios are just stupid for hiring writers. It reminds me of rock bands made entirely of guitarists, who assign vocals and drums to the worst guitarists. (You’ve never heard of them, either.)