#Why did I choose to podfic such a long fic? because its one of my favourites and I do't do things in half measures!

[stagefoureddiediaz]

Sentences on Sunday!

I have two things I've been working on over the past week to share with you this fine Sunday!

First up - an excerpt from my Buddie fic about Famous Country singer Eddie and Firefighter Buck. This is a small part of the section bout Eddies childhood and how he became a country singer in the first place. Its very much in its draft form (sorry run on sentences I need to fix!) so it may not end up looking like this when I'm done with it, but thats a long way off as this fic is going to take a while to actually write because surprise, surprise it keeps getting longer!

But Eddie was never much good at holding things in for very long.  Oh he could bottle things up like the best of them, but it always ended up badly when he did. Building and building until it exploded out of him at importune moments.  So, when he got suspended from school for fighting with Luis Garcia after Luis had caught him staring at Noah Johnson in the locker room and had, in the way teenage boys do, proceeded to be a dick about it, he found himself on the receiving end of an angry lecture from his mom and sent to his bedroom with no dinner as his initial punishment until she had spoken with his father and they had decided what was to be done about him.  He had angrily sat on his bed, fuming over the injustice of being punished for defending himself against a bully, staring at the guitar propped up in the corner of his bedroom, remembering the words his Abuelo had often said to him;  ‘Music, Eddie, is always with you. It lives in you. Setting it free will help you make sense of the world and of yourself. It is your truth, never lose sight of that.’ He remembered those Sunday afternoons at on the porch. They were his favourite time of the week, the few hours when he felt like his true self and free of the expectations placed on him.  The guitar had stared back at him and he had found himself crossing the room, picking it up and sneaking out of his window onto the roof. Scrambling up the shingles until he was sat with his back to the chimney stack looking out over his neighbourhood, he began to strum. Rusty fingers fumbling with chords he only half remembered.

And the second thing I have to share - a picture - I'm currently mid editing my submission for the podfic fest coming up in October! I've been having a blast giving podficing a go and I hope you'll all enjoy listening to me reading one of my most favourite Buddie fics when its time to share it (even if I'm convinced everyone will hate my voice and how I've read the fic!!)!!

Tagging the following and anyone else who has something to share! @spotsandsocks @exhuastedpigeon @daffi-990 @honestlydarkprincess @princessfbi

@fruityfirehose @hotshotsxyz @theyarnmaidstale @dorkydiaz @theladyyavilee

[some-stars]

Fic writer questionnaire! Tagged by @deputychairman, thank you!

1) How many works do you have on AO3?

65....just waiting for 69 so i can celebrate

2) What's your total AO3 word count?

288,609

3) How many fandoms have you written for and what are they?

okay, so, there's a lot so we're gonna collapse some. So, 16: The Witcher (games and show), Supernatural, Dark Angel, Glee, Stargate (both SG1 and SGA), MCU, Vampire Diaries, Teen Wolf, due South, DC (comics and movies), House of Leaves, Sense8, Harry Potter, Les Miserables (book), Doctor Who, and X-Men movies. Oh, and I wrote a lot of NSYNC RPF back in the day but you will never see it. (Unless you literally read it back then and remember one and want to reread it, I’m not ashamed of them if you were also in the pit with me. If that is the case feel free to ask.)

4) What are your top 5 fics by kudos?  

all some children do is work: this one surprised me, i did NOT think there was this kind of appetite for almost-gen turned-into-a-kid fic, but i do really like the fic itself so i'm contented with its acclaim

method: i mean, it's fake dating, written back when there wasn't much non-modern-AU fake dating in witcher fandom (possibly there still isn't?) so, not surprised

Emergency Pants: this is the one that the Claw chose back in 2012 bc i had written very pornographic tony/bruce about a month after Avengers came out so there was a big appetite for it. i don't much care for it these days except i do still think the tony voice is good

warm you like the sunshine: deeply unsurprised this one is popular (and it's one of my own fics that i reread a lot), it's extremely tender BDSM with a juggernaut pairing, that gets the readers

As often as from thee I go: honestly kinda surprised about this one, which is just a 2500 word confection i wrote for my own satisfaction, but it does have explicit sex and jaskier crying about his feelings so maybe it makes sense

5) Do you respond to comments, why or why not?

I almost always do, but usually just with "Thanks!" unless it's a detailed or lengthy comment.

6) What's the fic you've written with the angstiest ending?

"Long black night, morning frost" (Les Miserables) for absolute certain. One of the very few fics I've written with an outright unhappy and pessimistic ending (although I found it very cathartic to write). For Witcher fics, "Kind" and "go ask alice" are about as sad as I get.

7) What's the fic you've written with the happiest ending?

Almost all of them, honestly. There's a point in happiness of endings where you really can't distinguish degrees. Probably the most--not saccharine, but distinctly Happy Ending-ish is either "Water like a stone" or "Darling, if you only knew," which to my eternal shame are both Glee fics. In terms of Witcher fics...it's still hard to pick! I think the kidfic trilogy ended very, very happily; I think "If you live through this with me" ended TOO happily.

8) Do you write crossovers? If so what is the craziest one you've written?

I do not, and I don't read them, at least not since the days of the late 90s/early 2000s when I once read a really good Highlander/X-Files crossover (oh, and Martha's cosmic horror fic where Stargate and Angel and I think something else all cross over but it feels quite natural and right). I don't like fusions, either, most of the time.

9) Have you ever received hate on a fic?

Never! In 20 years! I've been extremely lucky.

10) Do you write smut? If so what kind?

ahahahahahahahhaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

yes...yes you could say i write smut. on occasion. you know, when the urge comes on me. i write mostly kink or at least kink-adjacent fic, but i've done some vanilla scenes too, and i write m/m and m/f and (occasionally) f/f. fun fact, my only rimming scene to date was in a f/f/f threesome!

11) Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Not that I know of.

12) Have you ever had a fic translated?

I think so? I can't remember, honestly, which sounds dreadful but like...I don't READ the translation, because I am sadly monolingual, but I get a burst of delight when someone asks to do it (or to make a podfic).

13) Have you ever co-written a fic before?

I have tried--me and a friend once got like 12k deep into a co-written Tiger and Bunny fic--but it doesn't really work out for me. I am a massive control freak when it comes to writing and absolutely miserable to work with. (Although I wasn't so bad back when we wrote the T&B fic, we just sort of never got around to finishing it. Which is sad, because it was GREAT.)

14) What's your all time favorite ship?

Max/Alec from Dark Angel. I shipped it when I only started watching DA for Jensen's episodes, I shipped it when I fell in love with Max, I shipped it when I frantically hand-wrote notes about the fic I wanted to write, I ship it right now as I'm typing, I will ship it in my grave. Also it's not a het ship bc neither of them are heterosexual, thank you very much.

15) What's a WIP that you want to finish but don't think you ever will?

I only post finished fics, but in terms of things I haven't posted, I still think my "For A Good Time Call" fem!jaskier/yennefer(/geralt) AU would have been truly incredible. If you haven't watched that movie go watch it immediately so you can share this beautiful idea with me.

16) What are your writing strengths?

Ohhh, this and the next one are hard, because I truly don't know. Well, besides "porn." I am genuinely good at porn, which is HILARIOUS considering how many more sex scenes I've written than participated in. But overall, I have so much angst and neurosis and tenuous self-worth tied up in writing, I'm a very bad judge of my own skills. Also, it depends on the fandom! In some fandoms I'm good at dialogue, in others not so much. In some fandoms I'm good at pastiching the tone of the source and in others...Not So Much.

17) What are your writing weaknesses?

If I had to pick a weakness, though, I'd say concrete imagery/detail. Like, the things that characters are physically doing either out of emotional reaction or just, they're doing something in that scene. Dialogue is usually easier (not sure if it comes out better, but it's easier).

18) What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?  

I used to be mildly annoyed at it but! Now! On AO3! You can put a footnote by the French or whatever, so the reader can jump down to read a translation and then jump right back up. I now feel that if you choose to include dialogue (or any words) in another language from the rest of the story, this is the only acceptable method.

19) What was the first fandom you wrote for?

I remember vaguely in 1996 or so writing a couple pages of Kit whump for the Young Wizards books. I wrote some execrable nonsense in X-Files, but in my defense I had just turned 13. I don't THINK I wrote anything for Star Trek, which was my first fandom. Oh, and I attempted to write fic for Homicide, which I watched in 7th and 8th grade and lied about my age to get onto the good mailing lists (they were actually the bad, racist mailing lists, I would later realize, but again I was 13).

20) What's your favorite fic you've written?

Sorry to disappoint anyone who follows me for Witcher content, but it's either "The absolute absurdity of end-series items" (House of Leaves) or "A quite unlosable game" (Dark Angel). They are both Big Idea fics, and I feel like in both of them I got the Idea across brilliantly, and I'm truly proud of them and think they're the best things I've ever made. (In terms of Witcher fic, it's the kidfic trilogy for sure.)

I am not going to tag anyone because that always makes me mildly anxious, but if you read this and you want to do it you can say you were tagged by me! :D? :D?

[cfiesler]

thoughts on AO3 from a content moderation researcher

A few days ago I tweeted some thoughts about current conversations around content moderation and racism on AO3. I thought I’d reproduce here:

OK I'm going to weigh in on the tagging/content moderation conversation happening right now regarding Archive of Our Own. To be clear, this is me as a content moderation researcher who has also studied the design of AO3, NOT me as a member of the OTW legal committee.

To clarify the issue for folks: Racism is a problem in fandom. In addition to other philosophical and structural things regarding OTW, there have been suggestions for adding required content warnings or other mechanisms to deal with racism in stories posted to the archive.

Here's a description of the content warning system from a paper I published about the design of AO3, in which I used this as an example of designing to mitigate the value tension of inclusivity versus safety:

“Knowing that this tension would exist, and wanting to protect users from being triggered or stumbling across content they did not want to see, AO3 added required warnings for stories. These include graphic violence, major character death, rape, and underage sex. These warnings were chosen based on conventions at the time, what fan fiction writers already tended to warn for when posting stories elsewhere. Warnings are not only required, but are part of a visual display that shows up in search results. One early concern was that requiring these warnings might necessitate spoilers—for example, telling the reader ahead of time that there was a major character death. Therefore, AO3 added an additional warning tag: ‘Choose not to use archive warnings.’ Seeing this tag in search results essentially means ‘read at your own risk.’ Most interviewees found this to be a solution that did a good job at taking into account different kinds of needs."

The idea is certain kinds of objectionable content is allowed to be there as long as it's properly labeled. Content will not be removed for having X, but it can be removed for not being tagged properly for having X. This allows users to not have to see content labeled with X.

My students and I have studied content moderation systems in a number of contexts, including on Reddit and Discord, and I actually think that this system is kind of elegant and other platforms can learn from it. That said, it relies on strong social norms to work.

One of the big problems with content moderation is that not everyone has the same definition of what constitutes a rule violation. Like... folks on a feminist hashtag almost certainly have a different definition of what constitutes "harassment" than on the gg hashtag.

A few years ago we analyzed harassment policies on a bunch of different platforms and usually it's just like "don't harass people" but okay what does that mean? I guarantee you there are people on twitter who think rape threats aren't harassment.

So a nice thing about communities moderating themselves--like on subreddits--is that they can create their own rules and have a shared understanding of what they mean (here’s a paper about rules on Reddit). So you can have a rule about harassment and within your community know what that means.

I've talked for a long time about the strong social norms in fandom and how this has allowed in particular for really effective self regulation around copyright. In fact I wrote about this really recently based on interviews conducted in 2014. HOWEVER -

Generally, I think social norms are not as strong in fandom as they used to be, in part because it's just gotten bigger and there are more people and also some generational differences and we're more spread out. (My PhD advisee) Brianna & I wrote about this for TWC.

So the point here is that without those very strong shared norms, definitions differ - across sub-fandoms, across platforms, across people. Whether that thing we're defining is commercialism, harassment, or racism.

This isn't to say that there *shouldn't* be a required content warning for racism in fics, but I think it's important to be aware how wrought enforcement will be because no matter how it is defined, a subset of fandom will not agree with that definition.

That said, design decisions like this are statements. When AO3 chose the required warnings, it was a statement about what types of content it is important to protect the community from. I would personally support a values-based decision that racism falls into that category.

Design also *influences* values. An example of this was AO3's decision to include the "inspired by" tag which directly signaled (through design) that remixing fics without explicit permission was okay. Another quote from the paper:

“Similarly, Naomi described a policy decision of AO3 that was a deliberate attempt to influence a value. Prior work understanding fandom norms towards re-use of content has shown something of a disconnect, with different standards for different types of work [15,16]. Surprisingly, although fan authors themselves are building on others’ work, some don’t want people to remix their remixes. In Naomi’s original blog post, there is some argument between fans about what AO3 should do about this, with suggestions for providing a mechanism for fan writers to give permission for remixing. Naomi described their ultimate design, and feels that in the time that has followed the creation of AO3, the values of the community have actually shifted to be more accepting of this practice:

‘We had baked in right from the beginning that you could post a work to the archive that was a remix, or sequel, or translation, or a podfic or whatever, based on another work, another fannish work. As long as you gave credit, you didn’t need permission. In fact, we built a system into the archive where it notifies [the original author]. That was because we were coming from a philosophy where what we’re doing is fair use. It’s legal. We are making transformative work. We don’t need permission from the original copyright holder. That’s why fanfic is legitimate. But what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander… So, I think that’s an example, actually, where archive and OTW almost got a little bit ahead of the curve, got a little bit ahead of the broader community’s internal values. That was a deliberate concerted decision on our part.’”

A design change to AO3 that forces consideration of whether there is racism in a story you're posting could have an impact on the overall values of the community by signaling that this consideration is necessary AND that you should be thinking of a community definition of racism.

Also important: content moderation has the potential to be abused. And I know that this happens in fandom, even around something as innocuous as copyright, since I've heard stories of harassment-based DMCA takedown campaigns.

There's a LOT of tension in fandom around public shaming as a norm enforcement mechanism, and I would want to see this feature used as a "gentle reminder" and not a way to drum people out of fandom. (See more about that in this paper.)

That said, I think these reminders are needed. There will be a LOT of "uh I didn't know that was racist" and that requires some education. Which is important but also an additional burden on volunteer moderators who may be grappling with this themselves.

This is more a thread of cautions than solutions, unfortunately. Because before there can be solutions, we need: (1) an answer to a very hard question, which is "what is racism in fanfiction/fandom?" and this answer needs to come from a diverse group of stakeholders, and (2) a solution for enforcement/moderation that both makes sure that folks directly impacted by racism are involved AND that we're not asking for burdensome labor from already marginalized groups.

All of this comes down to: Content moderation is HARD for so many reasons, both on huge platforms and in communities. AO3 is kind of a unique case with its own problems but I am optimistic about solutions because so many people care about the values in fandom.

I’m still thinking about this and welcome others’ thoughts!