[crow]

Lacuna sighed over her latest draft. It wasn't that it was bad, exactly--- but then, how could it be? At present, it was only even an outline, not even a real piece of writing. But that was part of the problem. She hadn't managed to produce any actual writing in what felt like weeks, and apparently no amount of outlining was helping the issue. She'd tried, too. She'd tried plenty, enough to know that if she kept throwing time and effort at the problem, it probably wasn't going to just resolve itself.

[crow]

On the bright side, it wasn't as if this was her job--- the writing, or more specifically, the making outlines because she couldn't figure out what to write or how to get herself started.

She'd been doing perfectly fine at her actual job, which was an editor. If her frustration with her own work made her possibly a little crankier than usual, and therefore a little harsher than usual, well. They didn't pay her to give people baseless compliments about their writing, did they?

[crow]

They paid her to tell them what was wrong with the stuff that they gave her to look at, and whether it was marketable, if they published it, and sorry try again in case it wasn't, and was moreover beyond the redemption of a few simple edits.

And if you asked her, a lot of what they'd given her this last month really was pretty irredeemable. What was the hot new trend these days? Romance stories involving humans. And everyone knew those were myths.

[crow]

The otherworldly quality about them was supposed to be part of the appeal, but Lacuna couldn't really get behind the idea. Maybe it was because she couldn't help but think about the anatomy problems every time it came up. And it had come up a lot recently, unfortunately for her.

But all that aside, the kinds of people who wrote fantasy romances involving humans tended, on average, not to write very well. There were exceptions, but in her opinion they merely contributed to the problem.

[crow]

If they were talking achievements, even the ponies submitting weird romance drivel were doing better than she was. At least they had managed to finish something for her to sigh at.

She sighed again. It had been a long few hours of staring blankly at the paper, but then it had been a long month.

It was probably for the best that someone interrupted. It still didn't mean she wasn't going to give them the stink-eye though. Which she did, when Maple busted down the door.

[crow]

"Cuna," said Maplesweet, showing herself in without even the pretense of an apology. But then, it was Maple, wasn't it? And they were friends.

Under better circumstances, Lacuna would have been happy to see her, even with that kind of entry. There was no reason for Maple to think that she wouldn't be. But even if she thought there might be, Maplesweet probably wouldn't have apologized. They were friends, and little noise interruptions didn't really register to Maple as something to apologize about to begin with.

[crow]

Possibly this was true even with ponies who weren't her friends, though in that case it probably meant something different--- a disregard for what they thought, rather than the assumption it'd be excused.

"What," said Lacuna, and immediately regretted it, a little. It had come out more hostile than she'd meant it to. Which wasn't to say that she'd meant to convey zero hostility, but there was still a difference between mild annoyance and trying to take the hide off your friend with a word.

[crow]

Maplesweet frowned at her. "Boy, you're in a mood, huh? You've been staring at those papers too long, I'll bet," she said immediately, as if that explained everything.

Of course that was the conclusion that Maple would come to, too. She'd never seen the point of books, very much, beyond their potential as instructive material. And even then, she was mostly interested in how they could be used to instruct others, about matters she wished they knew about, so her work would be a little easier.

[crow]

Maple worked as a ranger, taking care of and monitoring the forests outside their city of Palomino Springs. It was a good thing she liked her job, because on the whole, the pony side of it had a tendency to be pretty thankless.

People didn't mean to be careless, but Palomino Springs was a big city, and there was maybe more traffic through even its surrounding wilderness than was strictly in the wildlife's best interests. And the mistakes of that many ponies added up after a while.

[crow]

A lot of Maple's time was, therefore, spent cleaning up those messes, often quite literally. A lot of her coworkers spent time educating the public so there wouldn't be as many mistakes to clean up. Though to hear her tell it, it didn't seem to be helping all that much.

The ponies who cared didn't do it, and the ones who didn't wouldn't change their minds. And of course the stupid ponies who were prone to accidents were going to have those accidents whether they meant to or not.

[crow]

No amount of instructional outreach was going to change that fact. Many of them meant well too, but it took more than information to solve their problems. The will was there, but...

Maple said the animals side of it was a lot better. That was probably what was keeping her in that line of work, all told. If it weren't for the animals, maybe she would have taken up a position as a cop or something, and vent some of her frustrations that way.

[crow]

As a ranger, she wasn't allowed to arrest anyone unless she caught them in the act, and it'd have to be a real bad crime to boot, not just petty littering.

But she really didn't care much for books, or more specifically, the reading thereof, as pertaining to herself. When they'd met, in the sophomore year of high school, Lacuna had literally caught her defacing the picture of some old Alicorn in her history textbook. She didn't remember which, but it had been somepony important.

[crow]

To be fair, it was her textbook, and she could theoretically do whatever it was she wanted with it. Strictly speaking it had been none of Lacuna's business. But it had still left a bad impression on Lacuna, which worsened when she later found out that Maple liked to play her own version of Mad Libs with some of her other texts.

All of this was to say that Maple really didn't get it about books, or Lacuna's view on them for that matter.

[crow]

It had been a few years since then, they were both adults now and graduated from all sorts of education, not just high school. They had jobs. Maple, at least, had more or less of a career. But in all that intervening time, and in spite of Lacuna's very serious efforts at several points, Maple's opinion on books remained much as it had been.

If she had been in a marginally better mood, Lacuna might have appreciated Maple's words as the concern that they were.

[crow]

Maple didn't mean them badly, even if she didn't think much of Lacuna's career choices either. But she wasn't in a better mood, and she had been staring at papers too long. "Look," she said. "Do you need something?"

"I came in here to check on you, actually," said Maple, nonplussed. That was the nice thing about her. She dealt with enough morons--- no, it wasn't that. She'd been line this for as long as Lacuna had known her, which predated the Dealing With Morons on the Job era.