knight-of-heart-and-art

[knight-of-heart-and-art]

i am NOT touching the homestuck cartoon wtih a ten foot pole thank you very much

[knight-of-heart-and-art]

speckled feral pigeon | catahoula cat with vitiligo | appaloosa

black-naped pheasant pigeon | doberman tortoiseshell cat | bay horse

[knight-of-heart-and-art]

writing would be so easy if it didn’t require thinking, typing, reading, sitting, focusing, planning, decision-making, maintaining a linear train of thought, or remembering what the main character’s name is

[knight-of-heart-and-art]

black-naped pheasant pigeon | doberman tortoiseshell cat | bay horse

[knight-of-heart-and-art]

10 & 11 for ray?

a oh they don't allow pasting into these anymore huh. what the hell.

How does your character respond to physical affection? well the most likely thing to happen is that he bluescreens for a second and then struggles to react normally. if you hug the guy he's going to go stiff as a board and then attempt to hug you back in the most awkward way possible. he doesn't HATE it but he doesn't really know how to react to it.

What does your character consider to be cold? How do they dress for it? It has to be below freezing for Ray to actually think it's cold, partially because (like half of my characters) he would literally always prefer to be wearing a jacket. or multiple jackets. he has to be reminded to wear a hat though.

[knight-of-heart-and-art]

been cookin this one for ages😭😭😭 Yet Another OC Ask Game

(pro tip: name some ocs in the tags when you reblog this so newcomers can ask with ease, and be sure to send an ask to the person you reblog it from!)

What's something you and your character would disagree on?

Describe a situation where your character would be particularly helpful.

Describe a situation where your character would be particularly unhelpful.

Your character can teach a parrot to say one thing. What is it?

Your character has a tough decision to make--not a super high stakes one, but they do care about the outcome. What's their decision making process like?

How important is it to your character to be right?

Your character finds a small fly or ant floating in their drink. How do they respond?

You have to go on a road trip with your character. Are you having a good time?

Does your character use coasters?

How does your character respond to physical affection?

What does your character consider cold? How do they dress for it?

What animal would your character most enjoy chilling with?

When does your character usually go to bed?

How does/would your character do being in the car for a long time?

Think of somebody your character has lost. What were they doing when they found out that person was gone? (and bonus: How did they react in that moment?)

Your character is at a hotel that serves breakfast. What are they having?

Name an animal your character doesn't like.

Your character is stuck waiting somewhere for a long time--think waiting room, airport, etc. How do they entertain themself?

Your character has turned into a plushie. Describe what they look and feel like.

Is your character good at sharing?

Something is off with your character's food at a restaurant--wrong side, missing component, something that was supposed to be left out. What do they do?

How does your character smell?

Would you describe your character as assertive?

What's an activity or task you'd enjoy doing with your character?

How is your character's vision?

How far removed from a plate will your character eat spilled food? (Table? Clothes? Counter? Floor? The straight up ground?)

Does your character care about trends?

How helpful is your character during an emergency? Do they panic or keep their cool, or even take charge?

On a scale from one to ten, how anxious is your character on an average day?

Name something your character doesn't like.

[knight-of-heart-and-art]

Just updated my Ao3 profile and realised it’s old enough to legally drive in the US. 😂

Got it in March 2010 and the user ID is four digits long.

Reblog with when you got your Ao3 account and how long your user ID is.

[knight-of-heart-and-art]

so, tagging background ships on AO3. I personally don't like looking for fics ABOUT my OTP and finding 90% fics where my OTP is a background ship and don't even have any moments about them. I feel like it clogs up my results. I know people sometimes want to know what background ships are in a fic for various reasons, but I personally would rather put that information in the summary than clog up tags. I was just honestly curious how many people prefer one or the other or feel the same lol.

I've described ao3 tagging in a few other asks, but I'll give a rundown here again because it's not entirely obvious to people, and people really are just trying their best.

So if you're an author who wants to tag something like minor A/B don't put it in the relationship field. Tag wranglers would have to syn that to the regular A/B tag, thus dropping your fic into the filter results for that ship - that's what anon here is experiencing. Instead, put your minor A/B tag into the Additional Tags field. People will still see it there on your fic, but it won't be filtered into ship filter results.

When you filter for a ship, that filter only applies to the ones tagged in the Relationship field in the work posting form. That's why putting the minor A/B tag in the Additional Tags keeps the fic out of the A/B filter. Same applies for minor Character A. If you put that into the Character field, it will get synned to Character A. If you put it in the Additional Tags, it'll stay out of the filters.

I, personally, don't want minor character information in the summary because I use the summary search trick to find fics where minor characters are actually the main character in the fic. My reasoning is that if their name is in the summary, they must be doing something important in the fic and/or the fic is specifically about them.

If you're someone who wants to try that summary searching trick, I've got a video and text tutorial for it over here.

Also, if you're someone who doesn't want to see A/B or Character A at all, not even in the additional tags, you can remove them by using the Search Within Results box. Just type in -"Character A" and that will remove them.

All of the above is just information for you to do what you like with, but I found it fascinating when I started learning this stuff myself so I hope you at least find it interesting too!

[knight-of-heart-and-art]

For tags at least, you can also add "ask to tag/ask to add tags/feel free to suggest tags to add" to your tags. If I'm more incoherent than usual I'll put that down and I do get people who suggest shit I've forgotten.

I know "I'm bad at summaries" and "I'm bad at tags" are not sentiments to voice in the summary/tags of a fic. But, genuinely, I don't consider myself good at either. (This is background.)

The actual question is, how do I learn these? Especially tagging. My fandom background is sparse, at least far as participation in broader fandom culture is concerned, so I wasn't part of fandom when current tagging practices on AO3 evolved. It's difficult for me to grasp, and I suspect I end up treating the tags more like CWs than search terms as a result.

Great for people who want to filter out particular unpleasant elements. Not so great for people who can't find my fic because I didn't think to tag something someone else might see as obvious. I have severe social anxiety so joining e.g. a Discord to ask for help isn't really a viable option. Tagging fic isn't worth panic attacks.

Tagging fic isn't worth panic attacks.

100% agreed!

When it comes to being "good at tagging" that definition is going to vary from person to person. It will also vary depending on what your goal is.

I'm a fairly minimal tagger myself. I'll tag the fandom and the major characters, the general vibe (e.g. humour, smut etc) and then anything else I might think of. I don't personally like to tag smut fics with all of the various sex acts in them, but I've done it before because I thought I was supposed to. Since it doesn't really feel like "me" though I've since stopped doing that. If folks want to avoid my fic as a result, that's totally fair. If folks who would like it can't find it 🤷‍♀️ maybe it'll be a rec someday.

All that is to say that tagging is not a thing it's possible to be perfect at, so just aim for accomplishing whatever your goal is.

I get what you're saying, though. I wrote a fake dating fic once without tagging it as fake dating because I didn't realize that fake dating was a trope. It was only when a couple of friends started referring to it that I realized and added that tag to my fic.

One way to learn about those kinds of tropes is to pay attention when you see them tagged on other people's fics. You can browse through tags that are similar to ones you already use and see what else people add to their fics and whether those would work for yours or not.

You can also visit Fanlore! It's another project by the OTW (the people who run AO3) and it's a great resource for learning about fandom. You can look up a common tag like Alternate Universe, and it will give you examples of different types of AU and link out to pages that will link out to pages that will... you get the idea. It's wikipedia but for fandom stuff.

As for summaries, there are a lot of ways to go about that too. I'll let folks add ideas in the notes. The way I do it is that I include the name(s) of the major character(s), and outline the inciting incident for the fic. Since I post as I write, I might or might not tease something that happens later on (because I might or might not know yet).

The way to get good at doing it is just to keep practicing. When I was in university, I took a Russian Lit course where we had to write a summary of each novel in 200 words or less, 10 sentences or less - and semicolons were cheating. I did that 13 times in 8 months, and by the end of that I was really good at writing summaries. Add in the fact that I started posting fic back on FF.net where there was a character limit on summaries and you can see why I keep them pretty short.

That's another thing that you can analyze in others' fics, though. Find a summary that you think is well-written for whatever type of summary you like and then look at that author's other fics to see if you can spot a pattern to how they do it. Once you find the pattern, it's a lot easier to replicate it and then it's just a matter of repeating it until it feels natural.

[knight-of-heart-and-art]

Grubbabies for Corvid

i had a fun time drawing all of these babies !! I apologize for taking FOREVER to post these but i do plan to draw more of them from the fics that @knight-of-heart-and-art had written !! (the fics are where i learned about these babies)

[knight-of-heart-and-art]

Do you know what happened to Casualcannibalisms?

i mean i think they got pushed to mobile because of personal tech issues, idk if anything else happened to them?

[knight-of-heart-and-art]

sorry goodreads i will not be looking at your reading list for me. I'm rereading The Finder Library Volume One and projecting on the guy who slept with three generations of the same family

[knight-of-heart-and-art]

he's named after a fantasy writer. i don't actually remember the fantasy writer's name but i clearly remember the thought process of "pick book off shelf."

ray silva is still one of my funniest lil guys. he's depressed. he's incredibly normal. if he takes acid he sees ghosts. it works if he gets drunk too but he didn't realize that because he did not drink even a little bit in college. he's absolutely not cis but he's made some assumptions about how people experience gender that's led to him thinking he is. he was a key part in resurrecting a demigod and then one of his ghost friends killed the demigod.

[knight-of-heart-and-art]

ray silva is still one of my funniest lil guys. he's depressed. he's incredibly normal. if he takes acid he sees ghosts. it works if he gets drunk too but he didn't realize that because he did not drink even a little bit in college. he's absolutely not cis but he's made some assumptions about how people experience gender that's led to him thinking he is. he was a key part in resurrecting a demigod and then one of his ghost friends killed the demigod.

[knight-of-heart-and-art]

Putting together a mood board for this year's art new years reminders:

[knight-of-heart-and-art]

i got informed that there's a slight issue in the coding for a fic that i should probably fix. opened it. and. well. something is very very wrong here

[knight-of-heart-and-art]

Chapters: 1/? Fandom: Homestuck Rating: Not Rated Warnings: Major Character Death Characters: Dave’s Bro | Beta Dirk Strider, Dirk Strider, Auto-Responder | Lil Hal, Jake English Additional Tags: godtier suicide in the first chapter, the ENTIRE concept of this was “what if he had dog ears”, alternate timeline shenanigans, anyway what if bro had to come to terms with what he’d done. and also he had dog ears Series: Part 5 of Post-canon Striders Summary:

“Shit.” Something’s changed, and you half-understand it even before you sit up. For the first time since you entered this place, you’re on a solid and inanimate surface—a dais of carved stone that the scaled coils have withdrawn from, leaving you temporarily alone in the center of this room. There’s a stain on the stone under you—blood. Your blood. Your shirt’s the wrong color, and long-sleeved—you fumble for a minute before you manage to push the fabric up to your elbows.

In some timelines, Bro Strider was not the one to die on the Beat Mesa.

In at least one of those, he ends up with the means to mimic a Time player in at least a few ways.

(hi! I’m not dead. still writing.)