#i find it really hard to write things nowadays because of the lack of community/feedback

[alichay]

When you get this, reply with your favourite five fics that you’ve written, then pass on to at least five other writers, if you can. Let’s spread the self-love. ♥️

thank you so much for your ask!! i kind of had a tough time with this because there are three i like, and the rest are kind of i get what i was going for, but i don't think they totally work. the three i really love are for similar reasons - i feel like they're stories where i really nailed a) characterisation, b) ship dynamics (to my preference), and c) plot/worldbuilding elements (especially plot twists):

Clarion | DCEU | Bruce/Clark | 16k | E

Clark’s halfway around the world when he hears the delicate crunch of Bruce Wayne breaking his back.

no church in the wild | Star Wars | Kylo/Hux | 56k | E

Fresh from their supposed victory on Crait, Hux attends a conference of First Order generals at the headquarters on Naboo. Adjusting to the prospect of the ever-volatile Kylo Ren as Supreme Leader swiftly proves to be the least of his problems.

An Uncommon War | Sherlock | Moriarty/Moran | 32k | E

Dishonourably discharged from Afghanistan, Sebastian Moran returns purposeless and freewheeling to London; here he finds himself recruited for a different fight by the most dangerous man in London.

that last one is kind of cringe for being Sherlock but honestly i think it's probably the best thing i've ever written (and i wrote it ten years ago lmao).

for the others there are kind of honourable mentions - some fandoms are really hard to write for and nail the tone/language, so i'm pleased from that perspective with e.g. this JS&MN fic, and the Henry IV Hal/Poins. i'm also very fond of the TTOI Eastbourne series, which was a huge gift for improving my writing (the difference between parts 1 and 3 is astonishing and basically all thanks to placet), but in retrospect i find them a bit OTT and ungrounded.

anyway thank you so much for asking!! i'm always down for chatting shit about fics what i wrote!

[sbooksbowm]

The ‘Does This Make Sense?’ Check - Chapter 4, Part 5, Preservation

Part 1 covers the introduction of Chapter 4, The Bookbinders

Part 2 covers the methodology of this chapter and the bookbinders’ motivations

Part 3 covers how fic binding completes the communication circuit via fan reciprocation 

Part 4 covers how fic binding challenges traditional publishing norms 

The Redundancy of Preservation

Anthony Grafton writes that to understand books, we must interview them in their environment, so to understand bound fic, book historians must attend to two fannish environments: the unstable digital distributing platforms from which fic came, and the material preservation form born in fannish response [1]. The history of fandom media illustrates the instability of digital media in myriad ways: links break, sites crash, URLs expire. Many of the binders have experienced fic loss—returning to bookmarked fic only to find it had disappeared, deleted without any indication of what it may have been—but few said that it wholly or significantly influences their desire to bind fic. In response to the question, ‘Who or what do you trust to build a reliable archive of fic, if anyone?’ the binders unanimously cited AO3, but with trepidation. One binder wrote ‘I do not have unshakeable faith that they will be able to remain successfully funded for the foreseeable future or that laws won't be passed that lead to the site being shut down. The key to survival is redundancy, both digital and offline’. Another echoed, ‘the entire internet is ephemeral, and I have had too many technical snafus to put my entire trust into digital format’. And a third: ‘I’m going through my bookmarks and archiving them to the Internet Archive so they are protected against author removal’. The binders share a general wariness towards relying on digital forms, and while preserving fic is not the only or driving reason for binding fic, it is on the list. Preserving works in print also communicates their legitimacy, especially that of queer works, which historically have been condemned or outright destroyed. Bound fic counters the pitfalls of digital sites, where fan work may be lost without warning, but lacks the real-time feedback in comments and kudos and the links to additional fan works, although those still exist online. Bound fic also counters fallacies of traditional publishing, which tends to ignore fan works. As I discussed in the Introduction and Chapter 3, although works like Pride & Prejudice & Zombies emerge from commercial publishing houses, I reiterate that they are not fanfiction precisely because they were not written in nor attend to a fannish context in the way that bound fic does [2].

The binders change the text in preparing it from digital for print form. All of the binders cut comments and many exclude or rearrange any combination of summaries, author notes, and disclaimers, and kudos and hits statistics. One lacks sentimentality around these excisions: binding fic ‘is less of an archive project than a pleasure project’, so the concern for preservation pales to readability. Binders range in their approach to formatting metadata: two binders include metadata (author, title, tags, archive warnings, etc.) as a ‘copyright page’, with content warnings and research notes as appendices. Another includes summaries and tags because to make ‘these books to feel like a true physical version of what’s there on the web’. One binder of 104 fics has modified their typesetting process to expedite the time from screen to print in attempts to bind as many fics as quickly as possible:

Nowadays I drop everything in and go, for two reasons. I try to do a lot of fics and [editing out Author Notes] is a huge time suck. But these notes are also significant as part of the metatext. In the future these will be of interest to any scholar studying early years of online fandom and just contributes to these books being a time capsule of a phenomenon that is very specific to our time and place.

By favoring production speeds over editing, this binder prioritizes print preservation (and documents a book’s environment for a future book historian); ten binders move metadata and extratextual information to appendices or smaller, side bindings to avoid interrupting reading flow without eliminating the information. Although the lack of text editing seemingly counters the attention to craft, the binders distinguished between the craft of the book—its binding, endpapers, and internal ornamentation—from the content of the text itself. Formatting a text can be the most time-consuming task, so reducing that process expedites the production of a volume significantly.

A few themes emerge regarding losses in transforming fic to print form, including accessibility, interactivity, and malleability. Only people with copies of the fic can read those copies, although the fic remains online for the time being. The loss of hyperlinks and comments strips the fic of its community context. Printed versions inhibit the writer’s ability to edit and update the fic, and one binder noted that ficbinding’s greatest strength and weakness is that it makes fic ‘a fossil of a fixed point in time…It leaves no room to adapt’. But the gain is a hard copy and a sense of long-term preservation independent of online activity: ‘As long as Modern English can be read and the book remains undamaged by water, fire or other problematic time-passing problems, it is here and real’. This kind of preservation aligns with a history of recovering lost works via their textual commentaries; were every copy of Harry Potter to be lost and the internet wiped, one could reconstruct the events of the series via bound copies of Annerb’s ‘The Changeling’ and dirgewithoutmusic’s ‘boy with a scar’ series. Similarly, where the digitally-linked community disappears, it is reforged through sharing the copy with the author, who ‘gets to see how a reader put different materials together to best represent their work’. One binder wrote, ‘I think this is a case of having your cake and eating it too: the electronic copy is still there for the wider audience to read, the text is set in a permanent form which has its own artistic value’. The gains of permanence, the opportunity to create a physical object, and the ability to thank the writer for their work through bound fic outweigh the instantaneous losses of accessibility and digital interactivity.

One of my final questions to the binders concerned the long-term preservation of their library: where will their bound works go if they can no longer take care of them or die? One binder was in discussion with the University of Iowa special collections, which is home to a notable fanzines collection. Four posed sending the volumes to fandom friends, two want to bequeath them to family, and two have explicitly stated their wishes in their wills. One added that he firstly trusts fans to appreciate fan-printed books as both ‘stories worth reading’ and as art objects, rather than non-fans who do not understand the connotations of the works. Binding fic is a momentary win in the long-term battle against information loss, and these personal libraries prolong the question of how and where these works will survive. One binder articulated the long-term value of these volumes: ‘I think that people making fine binding versions of fic absolutely validates this place in libraries, and I have no doubt that some of the books made by the fic binding community will make their way into the special collection libraries or museums and other institutions’. Ensuring that preservation will most likely be a self-undertaken project, in the way that all things fandom are.

Citations

Anthony Grafton, ‘Codex in crisis: the book dematerializes’, in Worlds made by words: scholarship and community in the modern West (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), p.311.

If you actually go back and read the drafts of the Introduction and Chapter 3 that I have posted, I have not yet explained this. Basically, adaptive works like P&P&Z don’t meet Coppa’s criteria (fic made to fannish standards, written about stories currently owned by someone else. Pride and Prejudice is in the public domain, etc.). I’ll have a post next week about this issue with upcoming reimaginings of The Great Gatsby to elaborate further on this really fun question.

[readyplayerhobi]

Player of the Week - Minflix

; Player: @minflix​

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I’ve read Elle’s stories for a long time now, even when she was under different usernames and every story has been just wonderfully written. She has amazing graphics that make me insanely jealous (oh my god I want to have your skills with the editing!) but she’s also so good at writing stories that are slice of life yet with their own little twist.

Elle has stories that also expand upon a wide range of subjects and AUs and I truly love them all. She has such a wonderful way with words and her stories come to life on screen because of her talent with that and characterisations. They remain some of the most memorable characters I’ve ever read and I regularly feel happy when I think back on them!

She also really has the market for poly fics down because she’s got some good ass fics in that area. And the best bit is that you never feel like you want one member over the other most of the time in her poly recs, which is rare. The only exception is The Hills but...we don’t talk about that fic (my poor bby Hoseok). But she feeds my Hoseok love overall, is such an amazing writer and an overall good perseon.

What more could you ask for in an author?!

; High Scores:

Tip 143 - Hoseok x Reader

This remains one of my favourite Hoseok fics on tumblr or AO3. It’s so well written and the characters truly come to life. They make me laugh, whether it’s Hoseok and his terrible jeans or the other members of the crew. You feel a real camaraderie and I enjoy that the MC does her camwork with no shame. And no shame from Hoseok either, who obviously has his own camming days.

The MC’s little group of friends who cam are also so supportive along with her everyday friends, and I just enjoy the dynamics of them all. But it’s the relationship between Hoseok and the MC that I truly love. They are just so, obviously in love with each other for so long and yet neither realises it for so long either! And you just want to scream at them because oh my god, you love each other!

I’m so excited to read the final part of chapter 4 (I’ve been reading on AO3) and then to see where it goes after that. I wait for every update with bated breath, full of anticipation to see where these dorks go!

See Both Sides Like Chanel - Hoseok x Reader x Namjoon

This is one of those perfect poly fics I was talking about earlier. All three characters are insanely rich and vain. The kind of rich and vain that you’d probably 100% despise in real life because they don’t really live in the real world, you know? So rich that life is a playground.

But you can feel the hurt from the MC as Namjoon ignores them and then the worry turning into anger from Hoseok when he realises it too. After all, they’re all best friends but they’re also lovers. And it’s abundandtly clear to me that they all love each other in a romantic sense, not just a friend sense. So their hurt at being frozen out was sad, especially when she was actually doing something for him!

You then get the scene after that, the smut scene and it’s just as hot as you’d hope it would be! It’s got two insanely attractive men who are willing to do everything to please their girl, knowing that her pleasure will bring them both pleasure. The scene is hot yet intimate too, as you know that they love each other and are hurting. Namjoon’s admission shows his own worries and fears, but they soothe it over easily. They may be rich brats, but they’re rich brats who can at least communicate well!

Blue Kiss - Hoseok x Reader

So if you like the 80s aesthetic and all of that good stuff, then Blue Kiss is the fic for you. It combines that nostalgia that us 90s kids somehow have for a decade we never experienced with phenomenal writing and beautiful characterisation. Hoseok and the MC in this are just true life goals. Like...I want to be as loved as they are. The drabbles after it are equally worth reading to help enhance your experience but it’s overall just such a good, fun and casual read.

For those who wants to get their Stranger Things fix or anything else stereotypically 80s that’s in fashion nowadays, definitely give this phenomenal fic a chance!

Break The Ice - Jimin x Reader x Jungkook

I believe this was the first fic of Elle’s I ever read, way back when she was under different names. I don’t know why we all love ice hockey fics so much, particularly considering I’ve never even seen a game of ice hockey and it’s not popular here in the UK, but I loved this fic all the same.

Jungkook is that sweet, adorable best friend who’s a bit of an idiot when it comes to the MC whereas Jimin just seems so smooth and suave. You think the whole way through that it’s going to be a Jungkook x Reader fic and then suddenly, boom. Jimin is all up in Jungkook’s grill and it is hot. A good one for any of the maknae lovers out there with again, excellent writing and characters that you love and feel for.

A Lack of Colour - Jimin x Reader

Another fic that I maintain is a tragic masterpiece. Tragic because it starts off hopeful and sweet you know? They’ve got each other, even if they still can’t see colour. They love each other and neither cares that they’re not each other’s soulmate.

And then Jimin finds his soulmate and it all goes wrong. It’s heartbreaking to read and you feel so, unbelievably sorry for the MC even thought everyone knew it was coming. But then to read the MC’s struggles regarding her own soulmate was equally hard. I can’t imagine how horrible it must be to be in a permanent bond like that with someone like that. I hope the ending, whenever Elle finishes it, will be happy for them both because they deserve it!

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Minflix is my Player of the Week!

Make sure to follow her and read her stories! Not only the ones I’ve recommended here but everything else on her masterlist. Please reblog, like and send her comments and feedback if you enjoy her work!