About

As you may already know, I am Zaggy Norse, alleged horse and actual zorse from South Africa. A zorse, if you've ever wondered, is the offspring of a zebra and a horse. You might know me from such shows as "The Stallion With Five Legs" or "Clip, Clop, Crime: Bucephalus the Horse Detective".

But beyond my award-winning dramatic works, I'm also a longstanding member of the furry community. Due to a surfeit of imagination and funds, I've been very involved in both commissioning enough horny horse art to sink a fairly well-fortified battleship, and writing enough horny horse stories to sink the rest of the fleet alongside it.

In this thesis I will prove that I can answer some questions somewhat satisfactorily, while leaving countless others pointedly unaddressed. Let's begin.

So, uh...hru? do u rp

Moving on.

Where are you from? What do you do?

Like I mentioned above, I'm from South Africa. Born here during the lengthy final death throes of Apartheid. I like it here. Think I'll stay. For work, I'm in the tech industry. I design the little machines that spy on you when you're sleeping to track how many erections you get per night. And since everyone always wants to know when they find out: yes, I do take the footage home, but no, I don't resell it. So you're safe.

When are you going to write more?

When are you?

The answer is, I don't know. I've been fighting medical issues the last few years which have proven far more challenging to resolve than I hoped because apparently my body is a pile of unique problems. Merely keeping up with my professional obligations takes most of my energy. Each time I try new medication, I feel brief relief and get excited that maybe I can finally start writing regularly again, only for the side effects to soon overwhelm me and put me back at square one. So I've stopped setting deadlines for myself. When I'm well again, the words will return. All I'm doing in the meanwhile is working at making that wellness happen, not worrying about whether or not I'm writing.

Any advice for how to write?

"Any suggestions for what things are edible?". There's no single answer that will make you suddenly able to write without having practised. And any description I give of my own process could easily be unworkable for one person and ideal for another. If people want proper writing advice then I'll have to start a formal blog post to write enough to convey my meaning (lemme know on Bsky if you actually do want that, Self-Insert Questioner). But one piece of advice I can give you that always works is very simple: you can't fix what isn't there.

There's various formulations of this idea of course. "Write first, edit later". "Throw away the first draft". "Writing is guessing, editing is writing". It all boils down to the same idea: just write. Don't try to make it perfect first time, especially if you're new to writing. Any brand-new words you put down in each session are probably not going to be there in the final version, so don't treat them as if they will. Don't spend hours agonising over a sentence, don't panic over plot holes, don't try to make anything perfect. It will never be perfect. The government doesn't want you to know this, but you can change a story as many times as you like. But you can't change it if it doesn't exist. So: just write. Put words down. Bad words, words you know as you write them are the wrong words, words that make you cringe. Sketch the horrid bones of the monster first, and then you can go back at leisure to massage it into something beautiful.

There's one more universal piece of advice I can offer: finish things. You cannot sit on a piece for ten years making ever-minor adjustments to make it better and better. That's just an excuse to never finish, to never reach a point where you are forced to confront your own inadequacies and limitations as a writer. And you have to do that, you have to look at your own reflection in your finished words and be dissatisfied, because that is the thing that makes you learn and improve and grow. That much is true for all the creative fields. I personally know when I'm close to being done with a piece because I actively start hating it. Why? Because that's the stage where I'm nearly done with the editing, and all the perceived flaws in the piece are fresh in my mind, but since I know I'm nearly done, I also realise don't really know how to fix them. Or that it would take a huge rework. And I hate that - and by extension the story - because of course I want my works to be the best they can be. But I also know that finishing a piece is a critical part of the puzzle. So I finish it, and I publish it, and I muse on what I learned while writing it, and I do better next time. You have to take that step. You have to draw a line under the thing so that you can start something new, and aim to make it better than what came before. And yes, surprise surprise: it's hard. It's fucking work. It always is. It never becomes trivial. That's just the nature of creative work, the price to be paid for bringing into existence from nothing something that matters.

What's happening with Lord of the Manor?

See the question about writing more. Another victim of my personal issues. My love for Paardenrust is undiminished, and it will be finished someday.

Is that really your son?

Oh my.

Where did the name OnlyFlares come from?

I made the name up over half a decade ago for my story Close as Brothers as the (rather obvious, honestly) name of a stallion porn site. Like so many favourite turns of phrase (I see you, appleslut), it sat in the back of my mind waiting for a ripe opportunity to be used. I originally bought the domain to use on Bluesky, since that lets you use custom domains as your username, but it was when I needed a name for my new personal site that I instantly knew its time had come.