#in my fandom there is a very popular ship that can get plenty of kudos

[random-shit-writing]

i saw a post talking about how getting 100 kudos or more per fic was normal for their fandom and i was sitting there like. bro. im lucky if i get 10 kudos

[mecachrome]

probably very out of context, but how do you get into the nhl fandom? before i got interested in f1 i was looking for what sport to watch (other than football) and i wanted to go there because a few years ago it became a popular topic in m/m romance books (which i read a lot at the time, now i mostly read fics xd) and i found… nothing, i mean, on twt there didn't seem to be a community, i didn't see people interacting about the players, and there weren't high numbers in the posts either, i found a bit of the same thing here on tumblr and other apps, probably it's more popular on tiktok which is what is used the most? the thing is, in the end i couldn't get interested because i didn't understand anything and i ended up watching formula 1 thanks to the noise made by the stans of other fandoms that migrated there lmao

LOL anon a lot of the things you mention here that you considered to be barriers of entry are honestly a great overview of why user-restriction is more commonly practiced in the hockey archives...!

anyway i actually did some sports fandom analysis last year and i really think a large part of it is >nhl fandom is much more accessible to people in na and >football fandom is a lot more accessible to people in europe... for me personally, i've spent Most of my life in places with local hockey teams + part of my family is from a classic market so getting into hockey as a sport was like a pretty natural thing, and i loooveee going to hockey games and actually watching the sport—plus it's way cheaper, if you're in a shitty market with a shitty team you can go to one game and see the players all up close during warmies for like $20 vs. $1283749492347 to go to an f1 race. that being said though, there are definitely people from all over the world who are into the nhl and i do think it's really easy to get into! i've actually seen a lot of f1 fans migrate to hockey recently and i'd argue that it's a lot more public/mimics f1 fandom culture on twitter now (for better or worse haha) if you ever want to get back into it... i'd also say that there's lots of fic to read as well, but admittedly if you were only trying to consume hockey during the height of its like booktok surge, it probably wasn't the same landscape i was working with when i first started reading hockey fic 11 years ago. the thing is that BACK_IN_THE_DAY, hockey WAS the top-producing sports fandom on ao3, so it was super easy to invest in current narratives without feeling like you were part of some tiny grassroots community (ok exaggerated on my part but i'll get to this in a bit lol)... honestly if you just sort by kudos on ao3 while logged in there's plenty of old classics that are fun to read even if you don't understand everything! see an old graph i made below:

anyway 1) i truly think hockey is the best sport ever like as an actual sport in terms of Sportish Entertainment (forgetting the rpf for a second) and you can learn it pretty easily just by watching with a good commentator! hockey isn't like f1 where you watch a race with everyone on the grid, so that's why as an overall fandom it's more quiet and it helps to pick One (1) team you're interested in getting into and just watching their games and not worrying about the rest of the league for the moment.

for ex i'm primarily a dallas stars fan, and my main hockey blog 39oa is entirely meant for them, and they're the only team i watch All 82 Games For. i also have montembeault for other teams i like (mainly habs/nux) but i don't really update it that much anymore...

2) hockey rpf has definitely had phases with strong formative ships and the problem with it currently is that there's kind of a dearth of like active, marketable material to work with... at its peak and during the early ao3 days there was sidgeno, ship i won't name, bennguin (in some ways we still have 2 of these but it's not like at the same level of course), nickovi, i mean i could go on... tragic kings yaoi... and then the 2015 draft class revitalized things majorly (this is when i got into hockey rpf properly lol i peddled mcstromarner when they were still in juniors so hard... not many people know this) and a lot of rpf for the following years depended on them, and then of course we had the Summer of tknp which is what REALLY got things going again..... but that ship is functionally over and there's also a really prominent rivalry ship that has much less pull now that they're not actually on rival teams lol and then another ship that had rookie and_they_were_roommates narratives got separated so now it's like WHAT IS THERE TO SHIP!!! and i mean hockey is SO spread out truly, i actually have another old stats post about degrees of separation in hockey shipping but anyway... nowadays there is actually a Hawt New yaoi ship that kind of models jdtz (rookie rommates) that many people are into! so that's a fun place to start if you want to try somewhere trendy. i'm 100% sure if you sought out sharks fans on twitter in like a fandomy environment you could do so pretty easily...

3) i think part of it as you said is that hockey is a much smaller community, especially when you're interacting in the subfandoms for each individual team. some teams have HUGE markets on an IRL fandom level (canadian teams like toronto and montreal for example), but my team's being from dallas where the primary sport is american football means it has an absolutely tragic amount of news coverage and no one really cares about them much. the #southernbias in hockey is so strong 💔 and then on top of that even teams with big irl fandoms might not really have the equivalent attention on tumblr because it also depends on whether they have compelling yaoi to keep the fujos interested......... but to ME that's also beautiful because even if your team's fandom is just 10 people liveblogging and making gifsets with 40 notes, it's a special sense of community and the wank/drama levels are like insanely lower, and there's more of a sense of We're in this watching sports together than like We're all going to be really mad at everything and argue about team orders all day even though the race ended 5 months ago 🥲 yes the fic outputs will be much slower than you might like but that's what i mean by the grassroots feel haha like there's really a sense of support for the fandom creativity!!! f1 can kind of feel lonely sometimes because there's so many people but they're all silent lurkers/likers :'(

also playoffs hockey will change your life. so you gotta stick around until april!!!!!!!! that's all i've got...

[cacodaemonia]

You seem to know a lot about AO3, do you know how to engage more of your readers? I’ve been trying to get comments on my fics but all I get is kudos. I just want to know if people are enjoying my writing

Hi there! I definitely wouldn't say I'm an expert when it comes to AO3, but I find the fandom culture around AO3 to be really interesting, so I do talk about it a lot, haha. I've only been posting works there since 2019, though, and I'm sure folks who have been doing so for longer or have volunteered as tag wranglers or on the policy & abuse committee, for example, would know a lot more than I do. <3

But I'm really sorry to hear that you only get kudos and no comments on your fics! That really sucks. :( Like you said, you have no idea what those people actually think about what you made—just that they consumed it.

Honestly, I'm not sure I'm a good person to ask about getting readers to interact because I post both fanart and fanfics, which isn't super common, at least among people I know. I'm pretty sure that most of the folks who comment on my works followed me from Tumblr to AO3 back when I used to post art here. If I wanted to share nsfw images, I could only post cropped versions of them on Tumblr, so I would sometimes do that and link to the full image over on AO3. I suspect that's a big reason why I even have subscribers on AO3, haha. My writing certainly isn't better than that of plenty of people who also write for very niche ships and don't get as many kind comments as I do.

I also started out in my current fandom making art and writing about more popular characters until I quickly shifted focus when I found some that I like much more 😂 But I'm sure that quite a few people found my stuff because of those old works, and some of them probably stuck around.

Speaking of popular... This isn't something I do because I'm only motivated to make things that I like, but of course, there's always the 'write stuff for popular ships/characters' option. :/ Even now, when I happen to include fan favorites in my fics or art, all kinds of people come out of the woodwork to comment on them. And because I'm a contrary ass, that then makes me not want to create works featuring those ships or characters XD;;; But anyway, that is one option, haha.

A friend recently told me that they started asking little questions in the notes of each chapter of their fics, and that seemed to encourage readers to respond in the comments, so maybe that would be a good thing to try? I haven't tested it, so I can't say.

One thing I have tried that I think has made a difference is adding a blurb in the end notes of my works that I got from @longlivefeedback! They have a great template that you can customize and try out if you like (just make sure to read the bug fix part about curly/smart quotes versus straight quotes, since the curly quotes will kill your html).

One tried and true method to get more people commenting on your fics, of course, is to get to know people who also like the fandom/characters/ships you write about. Read some of their stuff or comment on their art or just chat about headcanons etc. And maybe they'll check out what you wrote.

(My caveat to this would be: do not do this with the sole purpose of getting someone to comment on your fics. I've had plenty of people do this to me, and it was so transparent that they had no interest in me as a person, but just wanted me to draw their OCs or scenes from their fic, or reblog their art, etc. Trying to manipulate someone like that just for your own gain is such gross behavior, and of course, I'm not saying you would do it, but it's common enough that I wanted to mention it 😓)

Okay, unsurprisingly, this got very long and rambling, haha. Sorry I couldn't be more helpful, but I hope you get more folks interested in your writing!

I'd be curious to know if other people have advice for @sonofhighrock! :)

[optiwashere]

Fanfic Writer Questions

Yay, thanks for the tag @askweisswolf! 💜

I'm gonna tag a few folks to do this if they want, but anyone that sees this and wants to join in can consider me tagging them! @bottombatch @jasminethetransvampire @centaursniper @underworldobsessed @quitefair @siyurikspakvariisis @riteontime

1. How many works do you have on AO3?

89, but that's not quite telling the whole story. I've written a number of one-shot collections, and those have upwards of 200+ short fics in them.

2. What's your total AO3 word count?

As of right now, my stats page says 829, 334 words, but that's not correct really. I've abandoned/deleted/orphaned some works. The real number is probably over 1M.

3. What fandoms do you write for?

I only write for Baldur's Gate 3 at the moment and that's gonna color the rest of the questions. Once I find a fandom that I like writing for then I tend to stick to that fandom for years. I'm interested in dipping my toes into the Pathfinder WOTR ficdom eventually, but probably only a little because my Golarion knowledge is real slim. If Dreadwolf is good, I'll probably wind up writing something for that as well. I wasn't very interested in video game fandoms for a long time, which is odd because it's only become more compelling as I've gotten older when I'm also playing fewer games.

4. What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

Currently? I'm actually not at all surprised by this order, except for the one OC fic that managed to find its way there. That is pleasantly surprising, and I'm glad it's one that I also like a fair bit. 1. Take Me Under Your Wing (E-rated Aylin/Shadowheart/Isobel) 2. Black and Red and Smoking All Over (E-rated Shadowheart/Karlach) 3. Her Private Shore (E-rated Shadowheart/Asheera) 4. Arcane Mishaps (E-rated Shadowheart/Karlach -- yay, some t4t made it!) 5. Tasting Moonlight (E-rated Aylin/Isobel) Now, this tells a certain story on its face, but you have to remember that 4/5 of these were posted in Kinktober only two months after the full release of the game. That was the height of its popularity on AO3, and I highly doubt if these fics were released today they would have hit the same numbers. That also includes the Shadowheart/Asheera fic, by the way. I could see that one barely breaking 40-50 kudos these days. P.S. Stats are silly

5. Do you respond to comments?

Yes, all of them. I get quite a few, and with so many fics across a fresh fandom it means that I occasionally get newcomers to various niche fics. Sometimes people stumble into a pile of fics that they like in one of the ships, and it's so delightful when I see it. Same with people that I see reading Light Casts a Shadow in order :') Most of the fun in fandom is interacting with like-minded people, anyways. Kudos and such are also people saying they like the thing, but people actually coming out to talk to me are my #1 priority. I like to hear y'all's thoughts and even wind up chatting a little in some cases :)

6. What is the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?

When Everything is Dark and Guided Through Gardens Gray both have fairly angsty endings, but I think Melpomene might be one of the darker endings of my smutty fics. Fragrant is My Many Flower'd Crown is absolutely my angstiest non-smut ending though.

7. What's the fic you wrote with the happiest ending?

Almost certainly it's the final ficlet of my headcanuary collection, The Missing Piece. It's open-ended, but it's overwhelmingly saying that things will be all right.

8. Do you get hate on fics?

Yeah, occasionally. The open stuff is a lot less common now, but there are a couple fics that have gotten pretty ugly comments. I moderate those away without locking down because my skin is plenty thick. I get a fair few anons, again thankfully reduced these days, that absolutely despise me. They make me laugh more than anything now because I've blocked so many. I've also seen some passive aggressive vague posting about me here and elsewhere, which is always hilarious.

9. Do you write smut? If so, what kind?

Oh yes. Kinky, vanilla, descriptive and action heavy, flowery and emotive. All kinds, really. Usually trends towards loving and hopeful and sweetly emotional.

10. Do you write crossovers? What's the craziest one you've written?

I haven't for BG3. Yet. There's a BG3/WOTR crossover that I really want to write, but I need to find the time for it between everything else.

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Yep, twice. And it was way more than one fic both times!

12. Have you ever had a fic translated?

I don't think so? At least, not that anyone has ever told me. I'd love for someone to feel the urge to do that, though.

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

I don't think so? Technically, at least? I've certainly had writing brainstorm sessions that could count for this, but never anything where either of us wanted to call it co-writing.

14. What's your all time favorite ship?

Ouch. I don't really have an answer for this tbh. I like to compartmentalize ships to fandoms. BTW, it's Shadowheart/Original Female Character for BG3. Yeah, all of your Tavs and Durges. Asheera's my favorite, of course, but I've never been so invested in a Canon/OC ship.

15. What's a WIP you want to finish but doubt you ever will?

There's a fantasy AU I wrote for Parks and Rec with April Ludgate as a witch/vampire that I know I'll never get back to.

16. What are your writing strengths?

Emotional forwardness, probably. Maybe solid grammar? Writing speed? Anyways, I like to explore emotions explicitly with characters where they really feel everything to extreme degrees. It's hyperreal, but I think it's also compelling to both write and read.

17. What are your writing weaknesses?

Plotting, weak metaphors, and consistent characterization.

18. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language in fic?

I do it fairly often in fantasy fandoms without qualms. Also, I tend to use the italicized text in fiction to indicate that it's a different language, not that it's "wrong" or anything like that. Doing that in nonfiction, however, feels pretty gross. Real world languages? I don't do it unless I'm familiar with the language or know someone that can beta it.

19. First fandom you wrote for?

Technically wrote for? That's really hard to remember for me, but it was probably something like R.A. Salvatore Drizzt fanfic tbh. Could have been any number of fantasy series at that age though. The Dragonlance books, Black Company, or Discworld, maybe? Hard for me to really think back that far because I know for a fact that I used to write stories as a kid, but it's all very foggy and I lost all that stuff in a flood years ago. Posted for? A fandom I don't really want to associate with anymore.

20. Favorite fic you've written?

Bend to Break to Mend is my favorite thing I've written for BG3, followed closely by It Is the Wound She Gave Me and Like I Am Safe Again.

[lynne-monstr]

Fic author interview! I was tagged by the fantastic @glorious-spoon. thanks, this was so fun!!

No-pressure tagging: @afincf-tirwer @shadaras @undead-robins @tka-trashfire @hils79, @nyelung, @vampirenaomi, @prince-of-elsinore

How many works do you have on AO3?

As of yesterday, 202!

2. What’s your total AO3 word count?

678,560 words. which i have mixed feelings about because. i'm proud i've managed to write so much but at the same time, i've been at this for over 10 years i wish the number was higher for all that time.

3. What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

Things Best Kept Between Three People (Leverage, Eliot/Parker/Hardison) - 1,389 kudos

Escalation of Commitment - (Leverage, Eliot/Parker/Hardison) - 1,360 kudos

I say goodbye but mean hello - (Leverage, Eliot/Parker/Hardison) - 1,283 kudos

This is the Place Where I Sit - (Leverage, Eliot/Parker/Hardison) - 1,006 kudos

In Possession Of - (Leverage/Supernatural crossover) - 715 kudos

looking at these fics, it's very obvious that another way of asking this question is: "what's the most popular ship you've written." though i am very amused that an actual crossover made the top 5, considering how deeply those have fallen out of favor in the past twenty years.

4. Do you respond to comments? Why or why not?

I try my best! some years i am better at it than other. but even if i'm in a low energy moment, i appreciate every single comment <3

5. What’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?

The leverage theme continues, apparently.

Just One Last Time (Leverage with Highlander elements. Eliot is immortal. Parker and Hardison are not).

I'm not usually a sad ending person but every one in a while I indulge.

6. What’s the fic you’ve written with the happiest ending?

Basically all of them lol. But I guess I'll say that ghost story fic because it got really sad before the happy ending.

This is not a ghost story (The King's Avatar, yuhuang, magical realism)

7. Do you write crossovers?

Yes! They are my original fandom love and such a wonderful self-indulgence. I should try to write more of them in 2024.

8. Have you ever received hate on a fic?

Not on a fic, but I got plenty for my silly ramblings back in the shadowhunters fandom, sadly.

9. Do you write smut? If so, what kind?

Yes! yay smut. I prefer mine with some kind of kink in order to hold my interest. (not that i don't enjoy non-kinky smut but when i do i tend to enjoy it for the emotional payoff rather than the sex itself)

10. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Not that I am aware of.

11. Have you ever had a fic translated?

Yes! How cool is that!? Love fandom translators and the amazing work they do <3

12. Have you ever co-written a fic before?

No. I don't think co-writing is a thing that I would enjoy. Trying to merge my writing style with someone else sounds stressful and also i think i might be too much of a control freak for that kind of collab.

13. What’s your all-time favorite ship?

Whatever my ship of the moment is!

14. What’s a WIP that you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?

I'm pleased that all my big recent wips have been finished! I've been working on a little "troubling rain is cursed" fic for a couple years now. it's only a few thousand words long so not sure it qualifies for wip status, but i would like to finish it so I can post it!

15. What are your writing strengths?

I think characterization and silly jokes.

16. What are your writing weaknesses?

Description. Despite my efforts I will never be one of those beautiful prose writers.

I think of my style as very "what you see is what you get" and I consider that to be both a strength and a weakness.

17. What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

It's a hard no almost 100% of the time. And something I will likely use the back-button on.

18. What was the first fandom you wrote for?

My first posted fic was hetalia (germancest) and I had such a wonderful time in that fandom!

19. What’s a fandom/ship you haven’t written for yet but want to?

Still really want to try and wrangle my onmyoji ot3 ficlet thing.

20. What’s your favorite fic you’ve written

That question is cheating! But I'll go with my de-aged ywz fic because I never thought I could write a story over 10k words and I'm still very proud that I managed something nearly 70k!

Means of Transportation (The King's Avatar, yuhuang, de-aged ywz)

[cecilysass]

20 Fanfic Questions

Thanks for the tag (days and days ago now) @randomfoggytiger.

1. How many works do you have on AO3? 21 as of today, which is kind of wild. (I have some on Gossamer, too, because: old.)

2. What's your total AO3 words count?306,501. Working on another longer-ish one that will bump that up.

3. What fandoms do you write for?The X-Files by and large. One time I wrote a fic for a very popular fandom of the 00s I never actually posted, and now I feel differently about that fandom and never will. I can imagine a world where I might write for another fandom, but I am pretty XF-centric right now.

4. What are your top 5 fics by kudos?Chicken Dinner, Pause, The Boy on the Beach, The Kaleidoscope, Unobserved.

5. Do you respond to comments? Why or why not?I do respond to comments, but not all the time. I get behind in responding, and then I have to not respond to any of them to make it consistent, if that makes any sense at all? (Because someone might wonder—why did she respond to that comment and not to mine?) I know, I know, I'm sorry.  I honestly love every single comment, and I prefer to respond to them. When I have my life together, I have had great conversations in comments before. 

6. What's the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?As I read over my work, I have not done a lot of angsty endings, although I have plenty of angst. I have a very old fic written the summer between season 7 and 8 called Opposition and Synthesis (one of many post-Requiem fics) that is on Gossamer and ends angsty, but that’s not a widely read piece any more, lol. I would say of my more recent work, probably Ice Water ends the angstiest. 

7. What's the fic you wrote with the happiest ending? I have lots of happy endings. I couldn’t say.

8. Do you get hate on fics?Nooooo, not per se. I have gotten very critical comments from people who are disappointed by the turn the fic has taken, or comments taking issue with my interpretation of canon. I remember someone didn’t like the idea of Scully going on dates at all in the break-up era, and they complained about that in the comments on End of Story. That’s a difference in headcanon, so sometimes it’s frustrating when people feel theirs should prevail. But I haven’t really received what I would call “hate” exactly (so far) for which I am grateful.

9. Do you write smut. If so what kind? I have, but it’s not my favorite. It’s completely hypocritical of me because I like to read it, but it’s not my most comfortable area of writing. I think it’s a problem of not being terribly visual.  I do feel sometimes it’s necessary to a story, and my betas peer pressure me into including it sometimes, too.

10. Do you write crossovers? What's the craziest one you've written?I haven’t. 

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen? No.

12. Have you ever had a fic translated? Yes. People translated some of my fic into Russian one time.

13. Have you ever cowritten a fic before? No. I would like to do that. 

14. What's your all-time favourite ship? Mulder and Scully. Duh.

15. What's a WIP you want to finish, but doubt you ever will? Okay, I have told this story a few times, so bear with me if you’ve heard it, but I had a WIP I hadn’t finished between 2000-ish and 2021. That’s right. Twenty years. It would be very reasonable to assume I was never finishing that fic, as the first two parts had been up on Gossamer for years and I had not been seen or heard from in decades. Then during the pandemic I came back to thinking about the show, and when I came back to the fandom there were oddly people who still knew my fic. And I remembered this WIP and still had some of the ancient Word files of later chapters on my Google drive, so I decided to make a little project of finishing it and posting it to AO3. And now it’s finished. (It’s called Bloodline. You can read it and see if you can tell where the narrative is written 20 years apart.)  So I don’t believe in doubting you’ll ever finish WIPs. Never say never.

16. What are your writing strengths? I think dialogue. I would not have said plotting when I restarted this hobby, but I do think I have gotten better at plotting. And I do plan things out. I do a lot of research.

17. What are your writing weaknesses? Smut. Logistics in moving around in general – like when someone is standing or sitting and how they move from one place in the room to the other. I write in present tense a lot but past tense sometimes, so sometimes I mess up tense absent-mindedly. I’m also a very slow writer who rewrites a lot. When I see people get a prompt and then post the fic a few days later, my mind is blown, because I could absolutely never. People who do Fictober also have my deep respect, because that would be a very, very hard thing for me.

18. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language for a fic? I would only do it very sparingly or with extensive help, as I’m not a fluent speaker in anything but English. I could probably write a little French or Spanish dialogue to understand (I think I did write a tiny bit of Spanish dialogue in We’re Not Here To Get Involved In Personal Problems). But I would really want a more fluent speaker to look it over if I were doing any significant amount.

19. First fandom you wrote for? The X-Files, really, if you don’t count that middle school Victoria Holt romance novel sequel I wrote for English class.

20. Favourite fic you've ever written? I’m going to choose three, okay? Is that egotistical? I’m sorry if so. I’ve always really liked Jackson Van De Kamp’s Not-So-Final Repose. It’s not perfect, but it’s quirky and fantastical and sentimental and has a special place in my heart. It’s also more like a play, which is probably one of the genres my writing is most influenced by. I also really like The Boy on the Beach, which took a year to write and involved so, so much research, which was fun and a positive experience. Finally, I like How To Eat Pleasant Holiday Meals With Co-Workers, which was a prompt for a holiday exchange (early MSR Thanksgiving) that I expanded into a series of Thanksgivings over the years. I ended up really enjoying imagining each of those Thanksgivings, especially the last one. That last one is my forever post-revival headcanon now lol.

Would anyone like to do this? I'm going to tag @mollybecameanengineer if she hasn't yet, but anyone should.

[yallemagne]

Writer Asks

Tagged by @bluecatwriter

I think I've done this one before!! There's more questions this time, but this is an interesting blast to the past to see how I've changed.

1. How many works do you have on AO3?

59 works

2. What's your total ao3 word count?

300,805 words

3. What fandoms do you write for?

Right now, Dracula. In the past: JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Jesus Christ Superstar, Sanders Sides, Castlevania, Elisabeth, etc.. If you fuse the fandoms that intersect it's about 18 fandoms.

4. What are your top five fics by kudos?

Orice (Dracula, Jonathan has A Time; unsurprising, it is my longest by far)

When Providence Favours Witches (Castlevania [specifically Netflixvania], Trevor gets adopted by Lisa; also not surprising, very popular fandom)

Lückenbüßer (TF2, Trans Scout talks to Ally Medic; shocker!! that's a single-chapter fic!!)

Pseudo-Asthma (JJBA: Battle Tendency, Joseph has a heart-to-heart with his mom; woah! that was only 3 chapters!!)

Bewitching (JJBA: Phantom Blood, Dio genderbend; of course, I can never escape it even if it is a hiatus fic)

5. Do you respond to comments? Why or why not?

Yeah, sometimes even if it is just to say "thank you!!" I like to talk about my writing a lot and comments are the place I get to go into detail about my thought process.

6. What's the fic you wrote that has the angstiest ending?

Vulture in Saviour's Robes, I had people yelling at me for this one (in a good way), so it's really no competition, huh.

7. What's the fic you wrote that has the happiest ending?

It's gotta be one of the one-shots iojegp. To suggest a less well-known one: A Pitiable Performance, J&H and Dorian Gray crossover, Utterson and Lanyon go to see a play and Sibyl Vane is the lead actress.

8. Do you get hate on fics?

Not much. Oh wait--- oijegpioerg trauma engaged. Orice got a LOT of hate at some point, someone in the fandom really wanted me dead so they rallied a bunch of people against me. My crimes were: 1. writing a Jonathan POV story 2. supposedly writing Renfield to be a bad guy. None of it reached my comment section thankfully, but when I found out I was very paranoid that someone would dox me over fanfiction.

9. Do you write smut? If so, what kind?

For a period of time, I swear that was all I wrote iojgepri. My specialty is dom/sub with plenty of aftercare, though I've also written some dubious consent stuff. Silver Crystal Carousel (Dracula, John/athan dom/sub) is my most recent smutfic, it was so hard to get back into the dirty groove especially since I was writing in first person.

10. Do you write crossovers?

Yeah, but not much. I get plenty of ideas for crossovers, but they're pretty difficult to write.

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Not to my knowledge.

12. Have you ever had a fic translated?

Yeah. I'd say lost and you'd say love was translated into Russian and posted on ficbook.

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

Same answer as before: Only one (The Apostles), and it was mostly a self-imposed research project with my friend. They did the research, and I wrote the incorrect quotes and a short Jedas one-shot.

14. What's your all-time favorite ship?

How could I possibly choose. If you go by fic count it's Jesus/Judas ijopegij. I'd say... JonMina and JonEri. I really like writing already established relationships.

15. What's a wip you want to finish, but don't think you ever will?

So many. So many of them. There's some that are barely started!!! To name one y'all will be familiar with: the continuation of An Odd Doctor.

16. What are your writing strengths?

I've been praised for my characterization a lot recently!! Specifically with VH in Orice, I've gotten a lot of compliments on his characterization being complex. I'm really happy about that.

17. What are your writing weaknesses?

Everything-- *gets shot* I don't know how to articulate!! Sometimes I get ideas and I try to write them, but it's all in pieces, and I don't know how to fix it into a fully-fledged narrative.

18. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language for a fic?

I have gotten help with that in the past for Lückenbüßer. I don't do it often, it is difficult to pull off in a way that doesn't take the reader out of the story. I suggest a translation key in the notes. If you aren't familiar with the language and don't have a buddy who is, I'd say it's perfectly acceptable to write the dialogue in your native language and put it in italics.

19. First fandom you wrote for?

There is no way of knowing, truly. On ao3, Greek Mythology and JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Phantom Blood. Why both? The Daffodil's Echo was written first but The Shocking Absence of Grief was posted first.

20. Favorite fic you've written?

How does one choose!? I'm very proud of what I've done with the Orice series. Of course, it's not done tho. I'm very proud of finishing Perfidy (Elisabeth and Rudolf crossover)!

Get your ass over here @fitzrove!! You too @company-and-co!!

[infiniteeight8]

Fic Writer 20 Questions

Tagged by @sweaterkittensahoy

I have two AO3 accounts (infiniteeight and crimsonquills) because I switched pseuds due to a troll in a fandom like, 10 or 15 years ago. So for AO3 stats questions, first number is infiniteeight, second number is crimsonquills, total in parentheses. The crimsonquills number is misleading, though--only about half my works written under that pseud are uploaded.

How many works do you have on AO3? 426 + 235 (661)

What's your total AO3 word count? 584,163 + 721,769 (1,305,932)

What fandoms do you write for?

Currently, IronStrange (MCU), Steter (Teen Wolf), and LazyTown. I have a lot of formerly serious fandoms, and I've dabbled in even more. There are 21 listed on infiniteeight and 28 on crimsonquills, to give you an idea, and that's not a complete list.

Top Five Fics by Kudos

For infiniteeight AO3 handle (all of these are Clint/Coulson, which makes sense, since it's the biggest fandom I've been in for the past 12 years):

Trump Card 

Relief 

Made Omega 

A House is Not a Home 

Five People Who Flinched From Phil and the One Person Who Never Did

For my crimsonquills AO3 handle (this is a little misleading--I have some very popular stories on this handle that aren't on AO3, though I keep meaning to upload them):

Full Body Workout (Steve/Tony, comic Avengers)

A Meeting of Minds (Steve/Tony, comic Avengers)

Beneath the Armor  (Steve/Tony, comic Avengers)

A Light To Guide You (Obi-Wan/Qui-Gon, The Phantom Menace)

Doubts  (Steve/Tony, comic Avengers)

Good grief, only now have I realized that my most popular Man from UNCLE fic (The Mirror, Mirror Affair) is not on AO3! I was certain it was. It looks like *none* of my MFU fics are on AO3. Oops? I really have to fix that...

Do you respond to comments?

Yes! I went through a period where I was very sporadic about it, but now I reply to them all. I'm even going through and answering old comments that have been there, unanswered, for years. The responses I've gotten from folks receiving a reply anywhere from a few months to 8 years later have been lovely. :D

What is the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?

Definitely no heartbeat detected (IronStrange, true Drabble). I don't normally write much angst, and when I do, it's always with a happy ending. But that one was a prompt.

What's the fic you wrote with the happiest ending?

I don't think I can actually pick one? Almost all of my fics have happy endings!

Do you get hate on fics?

Nope. Which surprises me, honestly, because I've written plenty of tropes that other people get hate for all the time.

Do you write smut?

Yes! In fact, before I started writing the daily ficlets, I was primarily known as a smut writer. Almost everything I wrote was smutty. I find it kid of amusing that the drabbles have changed that.

Craziest Crossover?

Has to be the Band of Brothers/Terminator crossover. It's only posted on my old livejournal, but I'll upload it to AO3 one day and just watch people goggle at it. LOL.

Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Not that I know of. The closest that I know of is someone who copied the entire first chapter (or couple of chapters?) of one of my more popular fics and then took it in a totally different direction. I contacted them and they were apologetic--the meant to go back and rewrite the beginning once they were done with their version, but they never finished it. They put a note and an inspired by tag on it after I contacted them, and that was fine with me.

Have you ever had a fic translated?

Many times! Translations are always welcome.

Have you ever co-written a fic before?

Yup! A couple times, although it's not something I do regularly.

All time favorite ship?

Hmmm. Difficult question. Longest lasting active ship is Steter, but all time favorite? I think it might be Marcus Cole/Neroon (Babylon 5).

What's a WIP you want to finish but doubt you ever will?

This is a weird question for me, because I don't really work on more than one thing at a time, except for brief pauses on epic fics to knock out something short. And if I start to lose steam on a story I'm writing, there's not really a "doubt" phase. I either believe I will finish it, or it gets trunked and I don't consider it a WIP anymore, because it is no longer "in progress", it's just abandoned.

What are your writing strengths?

Characterization! I've had many compliments in this area.

What are your writing weaknesses?

Visual description, definitely.

Thoughts on dialogue in another language?

Peppering in other language words to remind me of a character's background and for flavour is useful, but writing entire sentences in another language knock me right out of the story. If I have to check a footnote or hover text to know what they're saying, I instantly lose immersion.

Other language text that you can figure out from context is better than footnotes, but in my experience people rarely do it well.

First fandom you wrote in?

Star Trek: The Next Generation. It was on paper (one of those yellow note pads), but I never shared it with anyone. First fandom I actually posted in might have been Star Trek: Voyager? Or possibly Stargate: SG1. I'm not actually sure which came first. I have the stories (I think), but they aren't dated.

Favorite fic you've written?

Oh, gosh, I'm not sure. Maybe Patterns (Marcus/Neroon)? I've written better stories and more popular ones, but I have a soft spot for that one.

Tags (very optional): @airas-story. Um, anyone else? I am bad at remembering people.

[sineala]

How would you say fandom culture has changed over the years? What are some differences you notice between older and younger fandom folks?

I’ve been thinking for a while about how to answer this, and I’m not sure I have a really good answer, but I’m going to try.

I’ve been in fandom since approximately 1995. Maybe 1994. At that point, the world wide web was a relatively new part of the internet, and the fandoms I was in had most of their activity on privately-hosted mailing lists (predating eGroups/OneList/Yahoo Groups) and on Usenet newsgroups, with fiction beginning to be available on websites as part of either fandom-specific or pairing-specific archives as well as authors’ individual pages. Fanfiction.net did not yet exist. LiveJournal did not exist. AO3 definitely did not exist. If you wanted real-time chat, there was IRC. I was coming in basically at the tail end of zine fandom; zines were no longer the only way of distributing fanfiction, as fandom started to move online. So I have a selection of zines from 90s-era Western media fandoms but even by then zines weren’t where I was doing most of my reading.

I think in terms of generally “what it was like to be in fandom,” the big-picture stuff hasn’t changed. Fandom still produces creative fanwork and likes to, y’know, get together and talk about fandom. Also, almost every fight or complaint that fandom has about something is a thing that has been going on for actual years. People complain that, say, the kudos button is ruining comment culture because back in the LJ days the only way you could comment on a story was, well, by leaving an actual comment, or sending an email on a mailing list, and this might mean that people who would have otherwise commented have left a kudos instead. But back in the LJ and mailing list days, people were complaining that commenting was going downhill since the days of zines, when in order to comment on a story you had to write a real paper letter and mail it and because you had to do that, the quality of feedback was so much better than you got nowadays because people could just dash off a quick email or comment. You get the idea. Top/bottom wars are not new either. Pairing wars are not new. If you’ve been in fandom a while, you will pretty much have seen all the fights already. I think one thing that is new, though, is the fandom awareness of things like privilege and intersectionality and various -isms, as well as things like “providing warnings might be nice” (do you know how much unwarned deathfic I have read? a lot!) and I sure won’t say we’re perfect at any of this now, but I think fandom is trying way way more about all that stuff than it used to.

There are some fights we actually don’t have anymore, as far as I can tell. I feel like it’s been years since I’ve seen the “real person fiction is wrong” battle, but also I don’t hang out in a whole lot of RPF fandoms, so it’s possible that’s still going and I just don’t see it.

There also used to be a recurring debate about whether gay relationships that were canonical were slash or not. When slash started, obviously this wasn’t a question because there weren’t canonical gay relationships in fandoms, period. But as gay characters began to appear in media, people started to wonder “does slash mean all same-sex relationships, or does slash mean only non-canonical same-sex relationships?” Now, you may be reading this and think that sounds like an incredibly weird thing to get hung up on, but that’s because what appears to have happened is that the term “ship” (originally from X-Files Mulder/Scully fandom) has, as far as I can tell, come up and eaten most of the rest of the terminology. Now people will just say, “oh, I ship that.” For any pairing, gay or not, canonical or not. Fandom seems to have decided that for the most part it no longer actually needs a term specific to same-sex relationships as a genre.

Similarly, there are a few genres of fic that we used to have also pretty much don’t exist anymore. There are also plenty of genres that are well-entrenched now that are also extremely recent -- A/B/O comes to mind. But there are some kinds of fic we don’t write a lot of now. Like, I haven’t seen smarm in years! I also haven’t seen We’re Not Gay We Just Love Each Other in a while. There was also a particular style of slash writing where you’d basically have to explain, in detail, what made you think that these particular characters could be anything other than straight. You’d have to motivate this decision. You’d have to look at their canonical heterosexual relationships and come up with a way to explain why all those had happened in order to reconcile how this one guy could have romantic feelings for another guy. When had he figured out he wasn’t straight? Who might he have been with before? How does he interact with people in ways that make you think he’s not straight? That kind of thing. You had to, essentially, show your work. And these days a lot of fanfic is just like, “Okay, Captain America is bisexual, let’s go!” It’s... different.

Fandom also used to skew older, is my sense. A lot older. I don’t know, actually, if it really was older, but I get the sense now that there are some younger people who are surprised that adults are still in fandom. I have seen people saying these days that they think they’re too old for fanfiction because they are not in middle school anymore. And I think a lot of this has to do with the fact that the barriers to access fandom are a lot lower than they used to be. You used to basically have to be an adult with disposable income (or know an adult with disposable income who was willing to help you out; but even then if you were reading explicit fiction you also had to swear you were 18+, usually by sending in an age statement to whoever you were buying the zine from or to the mods of the list you wanted to join, so a lot of fandom was very much age-gated). Internet access was not widely available. Even if you had internet access, you maybe didn’t have your own email address, so you couldn’t sign up for mailing lists; free email providers didn’t exist. If you wanted to buy zines, you had to have money to buy them. If you wanted to go to cons, you had to be able to afford the cost of the con, travel to the con, et cetera. If you wanted to have a website you had to know HTML. Social media did not exist. You want to draw art? Guess what, you’re probably drawing it on paper! You might be able to upload a picture to your website if you have a digital camera or a scanner, but both of those things are expensive, and also a lot of people don’t have the capability or the money to download pictures from the internet (some people have data caps with overage charges, and some people have text-only connections!), so they won’t get to see it. Maybe you can sell your piece at a con! You want to make a fanvid? We called them songvids, but, anyway, you know how you’re doing that? You’re going to hook two VCRs together and smash the play and record buttons very fast! If you want anyone else to watch them, you are either making them a tape personally and mailing it to them or bringing your vids to a convention. Maybe you can digitize them and upload them, but it’s going to take people hours to download them!

(Every three hours my ISP would kick me off the internet and I’d have to dial in again. If it was a busy time of day, it might take me 20 or 30 minutes to get a connection again. And that was assuming no one else in the house needed to use the phone line. Imagine if your modem went out every three hours now.)

And now, for the cost of my internet connection, I can read pretty much whatever fanfiction I want, whenever I want it. I can see all the fanart I want! I can watch vids! Podfic exists now! Fanmixes exist! Gifsets and moodboards exist! If I want to write fic I can write it with programs that are completely free, and as soon as I post it everyone in the entire world can read it. If I want to draw or make vids that may require some additional investment, but I may also be able to do it with things I already have. Do you have any idea how good we all have it?

There are a couple of kinds of fan activity that don’t seem to exist anymore, though, and I miss them. I know that roleplaying still goes on, but I feel like these days most people who do real-time text roleplay have switched to things like Discord. I know that in the LJ days, RP communities were popular. But I really miss MU*s (MUDs, MUSHes, MOOs, MUXes..), which were servers for real-time text-based RP with a bunch of... hmm... features to aid RP. There were virtual rooms with text descriptions, and objects in virtual rooms with descriptions, and your character had a description, and they could interact with the objects as well as with other characters, and you could program things to change descriptions or emit various kinds of text or take you to different rooms, and so on. Just to, y’know, enhance the atmosphere. It was fun and it was where I learned to RP and I’m sad they’re pretty much gone now.

I also don’t think I see a lot of fanfiction awards in fandoms. Wonder where they went.

Going back to the previous point, the barriers to actually consuming the canon you are fannish about are way, way, way lower now. You can pretty much take it for granted that if right now someone tells you about a shiny new fandom, there will be a way to read that book or watch that show or movie right now. Possibly for free! Of course you can watch it! Why wouldn’t you be able to?

This was absolutely, absolutely not the case before. I’m currently in Marvel Comics fandom. If there is a comic I want to read, I can read it right now on the internet. I have subscribed to Marvel Unlimited and I can read pretty much every comic that is older than three months old; the newer ones cost extra money. But I can do it all from the comfort of my own home right now. I was also, actually, in Marvel Comics fandom in the nineties. If I wanted to read a comic, I had to go to a comic book store and hope they had it in stock; if they didn’t, I had to try another store. Not a lot of comics were available in trade paperback and they definitely weren’t readable on the internet. I used to read a lot of Gambit h/c fic set after Uncanny X-Men #350. I never found a copy of UXM #350. I still haven’t! But I did eventually read it on Unlimited.

Being in TV show fandoms also had similar challenges. Was the show you were watching still on the air? No? Then you’d better hope you could find it in reruns, or know someone who had tapes of it that they could copy for you, otherwise you weren’t watching that show. It was, I think, pretty common for people to be in fandoms for shows they hadn’t seen, because they had no way to see the show, but they loved all the fanfic. The Sentinel had a whole lot of fans like that, both because I think it took a while for it to end up in reruns and because overseas distribution was probably poor. So you’d get people who read the fic and wrote fic based on the other fic they’d read, which meant that you got massive, massive amounts of fanon appearing that people just assumed was in the show because it was a weirdly specific detail that appeared in someone’s fic once. Like “Jim and Blair’s apartment has a small water heater” (not actually canonical) or “Blair is a vegetarian” (there’s an episode where his mother visits and IIRC cooks him one of his favorite meals, which is beef tongue).

Like, I was in The Professionals fandom for years. I read all the fic. I hadn’t seen the show. As far as I know, it never aired in the US, and it certainly never had any kind of US VHS or DVD release. I’d seen a couple songvids. I eventually saw a couple episodes in maybe 2003, and that was because my dad special-ordered a commercial VHS tape from the UK and paid someone to convert it from PAL to NTSC. I didn’t get to see the whole show until several years later when I got a region-free DVD player someone in fandom sent me burned copies of the UK DVD releases and then I special-ordered the commercial release of the DVDs from the UK myself. But if I were a new fan and wanted to watch Pros right now? It is on YouTube! For free!

I think also one of the things about fandom that’s not immediately evident to new fans is the way in which it is permanent and/or impermanent. There are probably people whose first fannish experience is on Tumblr or who only read fanfic on FFN and who have no idea what they would do if either site, say, just shut down. But if you’ve been in fandom a while, you’ve been through, say, Discord, Tumblr, Twitter, Pillowfort, Imzy, DW, JournalFen, LJ, GeoCities, IRC, mailing lists. And sure, if Tumblr closed, it would be inconvenient. But fandom would pack up and move somewhere else. You would find it again. It would, eventually, be okay. Similarly, if you’ve been in a lot of fandoms, if you’ve made a lot of friends, drifting through fandoms is like that. You’ll make a friend in 1998 because you were in the same fandom, and then you might go your own ways, and ten years later you might be in another fandom with them again! It happens.

But the flip side of that is that I think a lot of older fans have learned not to trust in the permanence of any particular site. If you like a story, you save it as soon as you read it. If you like a piece of art, you save it. If you like a vid, you save it. Because you don’t know when the site it’s on will be gone for good. I have, like, twenty years of lovingly-curated fanfic. And I feel like people who have only been in fandom since AO3 existed might not understand how much AO3 is a game-changer compared to what we had before. It’s a site where you can put your fic up and you don’t have to worry that the webhost is going out of business, or that the site might delete your work because they don’t allow gay fiction or explicit fiction or fiction written in second person or fiction for fandoms where the creator doesn’t like fanfiction, or whatever. Because all of those things have absolutely happened. But, I mean, I still save pretty much everything I like, even on AO3, just in case.

So, basically, yeah, fandom is a whole lot more accessible than it used to be. I think fandom is pretty much still fandom, but it’s a lot easier to get into, and that has made it way more open to people who wouldn’t have been able to be in fandom before. There is so, so much more now than there ever was before, and I think that’s great.

[olderthannetfic]

Antis are mass reporting fics on ao3 to get them (temporarily) taken down.

https://twitter.com/Lala_Zee/status/1408915178935173124?s=19

This is a very popular fic that hit 24k kudos this month and the author started in 2017.

https://twitter.com/Lala_Zee/status/1405141401134829579?s=19

That sounds highly alarming. I do wonder if there's more to it though. I haven't been officially involved with OTW since 2014, but the guidelines were set up to thwart mass reporting. (I think they thwart it on a technical level too these days, but there was also a policy that the Abuse team can disregard extra reports of the same work and/or potentially treat them as harassment.)

If things are working properly, the work would only get hidden once the team makes it to that report and is actively investigating (so a short period of time). I wonder if that's the case here or not.

My big question is whether this person posted commercial spam. They do have a fic patreon where people get early releases of their famous fic that antis hate them for. If they were so monumentally stupid as to mention the highly text-searchable word 'patreon' on AO3, then they have only themself to blame. This is one of the only ways to open yourself to FFN-style grudge reporting on AO3 because almost nothing is against the rules there.

(Grudge reporting = reporting legit rules violations but choosing which fics to report based on you hating the author/the ship/the fandom/etc.)

There are also plenty of people, including me, who now and then get sufficiently pissed at commercial spam to go report a bunch of it without any other motivation than that.

It takes two seconds to put 'patreon' or 'ko-fi' into AO3's works search. You can even narrow it down by number of kudos or hits or whatever else. Nobody had to "comb through their work" if this really is what happened, nor is posting commercial spam a minor violation of AO3's rules.

If, as they imply, AO3 is really screening their work for ages while hunting for problematique shit antis hallucinate is there, that awful, and AO3 should be held accountable. I'm just a little skeptical since most people who get hit with the 'no commercial spam' rule behave similarly to this.

AO3 staff cannot and will not post their side of the story because Abuse cases are confidential.

[easilydistractedbyfanfic]

fic writer interview

I was tagged by @aadmelioraa, and though I’m late answering, this couldn’t have come at a better time since I’ve been thinking a lot about writing (in general) lately. Thank you! <3

1. How many works do you have on AO3?

60, with 58 of them in one fandom

2. What’s your total AO3 word count?

719,515. This number really blows my mind and I am determined to get to a million words before too much longer. 

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

Only 3 at this time. Primarily t100, and one fic each for Bridgerton and Wu Assassins (coincidentally both Netflix shows). I also have an upcoming fic that will be in another (new-to-me) fandom (The Last Kingdom - clearly I have a thing for Netflix Originals).

4. What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

All are t100 Murphy/Raven fics, since that’s primarily what I write. It’s so funny to me but I don’t think there’s any rhyme or reason about what gets the most kudos. I love all my story-babies (even the ones that aren’t as good), but for sure some of the fics that I am most attached to as a writer don’t equate to popularity.

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

Yes, I reply to every single comment. I don’t get massive amounts of comments, so of course that makes it easier for me to engage, but I find it very meaningful when people take the time to give positive feedback and praise, and it genuinely motivates me to keep writing. By engaging with readers of my works, I’ve become more friendly with a lot of great people.

6. What’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?

Hmmm. Personally, I find “angst” difficult to define in fanfic. I tend to use that word almost interchangeably with “emotional”, and I know not everyone does. Although I don’t write a lot of open-ended or open-interpretation endings, I do enjoy reading those. But usually my characters at least have hope at the end of the story, if not a typical ‘happy ending’. So I guess that means I’ll say that Ashes Will Scatter as well as A Well Made Mistake are my angsty-est endings, because they are very much... open. Both Murven stories, though that’s probably obvious.

7. Do you write crossovers? If so, what is the craziest one you’ve written?

I don’t have a rule not to write them, but so far I have not. I have to care a LOT about the characters in a story to write a fic focused on them, so I am more inclined to take settings & plot from one show and incorporate it into a fic focused on another show rather than to merge two shows (and their characters) together.

8. Have you ever received hate on a fic?

I would not categorize it as hate, but I have gotten anti-Murven comments on my fic, which is mostly amusing to me. Look at my fic list - does it really look like I’m going to stop writing them any time soon?! LOL!

9. Do you write smut? If so, what kind?

This question made me laugh. Oh yeah, I write smut. Typically hetero smut, though relationships of all types & genders are in my stories.

10. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

I don’t think I’ve had a fic stolen, per se. But I have been asked in a comment if someone could take my story, change the character names and post it to another site for another fandom. I don’t think the commenter meant to be rude (likely different customs/culture in their country), but that was a big NO for me.

11. Have you ever had a fic translated?

No, but I do know that at least one lovely reader told me that they translate my fics for their personal reading, which is incredibly wonderful.

12. Have you ever co-written a fic before?

No, but I am not completely opposed to it! I’m a bit of a Type-A so I’d really have to trust the person I was writing with & feel like we interpreted characters similarly though.

13. What’s your all-time favourite ship?

I had never felt an urge to write anything before Raven and Murphy came along. I liked plenty of ships and fandoms, and read fanfic for years. But nothing sucked me in like them and compelled me to start typing. I don’t usually obsess to this level, so while I can’t say what I’ll answer in the future, I really can’t ever imagine these two falling out of favor in my book.

14. What’s a WIP that you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?

Oh man... I want to say NONE because I really would like to finish the two stories on ao3 that I categorize as WIPs (A Simple Plan & Only Then You’ll See). I do expect both of them to get done at some point, but Only Then You’ll See is for sure my biggest and most ambitious story. I also do have plans to write sequels to a few of my fics, although I don’t count them as WIPs since the stories already on ao3 are what I consider to be a finished work and any continuation/sequel will be a stand alone story too.

15. What are your writing strengths?

Characterization, original ideas and to some extent, plot. Sometimes dialogue. I can’t say that anyone else would consider them strengths in my writing, but they are usually things that I am proud of in my works.

16. What are your writing weaknesses?

Cutting out unnecessary dialogue because I am super-freaking wordy. I cut out what I think is a lot sometimes but am still left with a very wordy fic. Emotional dialogue is particularly difficult. Also I am very much a pantser and I often rely too much on my ability to pull a rabbit out of my hat in a fic I’ve started where I don’t always know where things are going. I don’t hate this because it’s my style, but I do think I need to get better at PLANNING my fics rather than just diving in and “see where it goes”.

17. What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

I don’t think too much about it. I’ll put in a necessary language if that’s what a character is speaking or what the story calls for.

18. What was the first fandom you wrote for?

t100

19. What’s your favourite fic you’ve written?

This question is always too hard! I can’t pick a favorite child and it’s the same for my stories. Objectively I can see & say that some are better than others, and there are some where I might change things if I re-wrote them now, but they were all necessary for me to write at the time I wrote them. So MY favorite story will likely always change based on a lot of factors. Today I’ll say Across The Ocean Wild And Wide because I made a point of trying to get better with description in that story, and I feel like I accomplished that. Also it’s very fairy-tale and I’d never tried anything like that before.

I’m gonna tag @jarleene @hopskipaway @she-who-the-river-could-not-hold @osleyakomwonkru and anyone else who wants to fill this out! Happy writing!

[azaleablueme]

20 Questions: Writer’s Edition!

@remedialpotions, thanks for the tag ❤ !

How many works do you have on AO3?

18 so far  (I am yet to transfer all my fics from FFN -that’s another WIP)

What’s your total AO3 word count?

265,067

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

Only Harry Potter!

What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

When Fate Decides Fly Away Home Beyond Words A Moment Lost Unspoken Promises Honourable Mention : In Search of Hermione (it’s partly (8/60 chaps) posted on AO3 but it’s my all-time most popular fic

Do you respond to comments, why or why not? I used to try and reply to all. I can barely do that anymore as I get very little spare time now and try squeezing in a chapter update when I do. Also, I get pretty tongue-tied when I see all the lovely reviews so I try saying thanks by writing some more...

Fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?

All that I want to tell you For all the angst in my stories, I do prefer to have only happy endings. Not for this one though - this is the saddest fic I have ever written.

What’s the fic you’ve written with the happiest ending?

I’d say Stranger Stranger . the fic itself is pretty angsty at the start which makes the ending all the more happy? Does that make sense? (it does in my head)

Do you write crossovers? If so what is the craziest one you’ve written?

Nope. Not my thing.

Have you ever received hate on a fic?

Oh, plenty. Still do.

Do you write smut? If so what kind?

Yes, when I am in the mood for it. Mostly smut with a lot of feels. (Mostly)

Have you ever had a fic stolen? Not that I know of...

Have you ever had a fic translated?

I have been approached for translating a few in Chinese and Russian.  Did request them to credit me and send me a link. But I haven’t heard back so I don’t really know 🤷‍♀️

Have you ever co-written a fic before?

Not exactly co-written but Fly Away Home was @jenn582​‘s plot baby which she allowed me to adopt and I’ve had loads of fun working out the details with her.

What’s your all time favorite ship?

Ron/Hermione of course 💕 What’s a WIP that you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?

Oh, it’ll take me a while but I will wrap up all of them for sure. Unfinished work gives me a lot of anxiety 😬

What are your writing strengths?

Honestly, I have zero clue. Plots, I guess? Being able to stuff in a lot of crazy WTF moments? (Is that a strength at all?!)

What are your writing weaknesses?

commas and em-dashes. 🤐

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

Never tried but wouldn’t mind with a language that I know thoroughly. Since I speak/read/write three languages I know google translate messes up rather miserably at times. So I wouldn’t dare rely on it. 

What was the first fandom you wrote for?

Harry Potter.

What’s your favorite fic you’ve written? As strange as it may sound, it’s a one-shot I wrote just a few days back.  Inexplicably Fond. It came out exactly as I had envisioned.    Loved doing this! tagging @aloemilk @honouraryweasley12 @trademarkblue 

[bettsfic]

You may have answered this before, but what happened your experience been like writing for/getting traffic to fics for dead or old fandoms? Eg breaking bad or the secret history. I always find myself thinking it’s not worth writing for an old fandom even if i have ideas but i’ve never actually done it so idk if that’s accurate

i love writing for small/old fandoms and rare pairs. my westworld fic is the only one in the caleb/dolores tag somehow, even though i shipped it so hard it launched me into breaking bad. i spent nearly all of last year hopping around in old/nonexistent fandoms and i had a really great time. if you look at the comments on my small fandom fics, they’re amazing. they’re so thoughtful and insightful and personal. i really love them. 

i’m not going to sit here and tell you traffic doesn’t matter. it matters to all of us to some degree, although possibly in different ways and for different reasons. it’s hard not to see traffic as a metric of belonging. you put yourself into something, you give it a platform, and perhaps its reception allows you to feel accepted or loved, or less alone, or briefly reassured that your existence has meaning. there’s nothing wrong with that. there’s nothing wrong with wanting to be seen. 

when i started writing fic, traffic and comments meant everything to me. i was absolutely in it for the attention, because i’d never received good attention before. i’d been accused all my life of “attention-seeking behavior” like it was a bad thing, like the solution to that often destructive behavior was to just ignore me until i suddenly grew a sense of self-acceptance and existential security all on my own, like getting mad at a plant for dying without any sunlight. a plant can only stretch toward a window so far.

my relationship with traffic was not a healthy one. for a long time i couldn’t separate myself from the work, so negative comments hurt me and positive comments defined me. i mistakenly believed that people who liked my writing liked me, when that’s the very opposite of the purpose of pseudonymous community writing. it took me a long, long time to realize and accept that nothing is about me. but that’s probably a post for another time.

after a few years of writing and posting fic, and attending workshops and receiving good mentorship, a very unexpected thing happened: i got enough attention. i didn’t think it was possible. i thought i’d just spend my life wanting more and more and never being satisfied. i couldn’t conceive of what “enough” of anything looked like. enough time, enough money, enough love. some of us spend so much of our lives hungry that we don’t know what fullness feels like. we don’t know what it means to be able to bear moments of emptiness because we know the things we need will always be in our reach. many of us, maybe even most of us, do not know what it means to trust that all our needs will be met on any given day, at any given time. 

something similar happened with sleep. i’d lived most of my life in a state of extreme sleep deficiency. waking up was the hardest part of every day of my life. then when i was 23 i was finally in a position where i could sleep as much as i needed to. for months i slept for 10 to 12 hours a day, and then slowly as i made up for all those lost hours of sleep, it slipped down to 9 and then 8. i fell asleep when i was tired; i woke up when i was ready. i let myself nap, but i found that i no longer needed to. i’d never known a life without fatigue, and then finally i was awake.

once i’d received enough attention, i started to see everything differently. whenever i wrote something, i started seeing it, not in terms of fearing its failure, but readying for its potential success. because i’ve found success is much, much harder to deal with than failure. once you separate yourself from failure, once you don’t let it affect your self-perception, success becomes terrifying. i have never met a single person who is emotionally prepared for the harrowing fallout of success. 

whenever i post anything, a tweet, a text post, a fic, i ask myself, “what if this goes viral?” what happens if i post a multi-chap fic in a new fandom that ends up becoming the next juggernaut? what happens if that fic gets 10k kudos and a thousand comments? 

a viral tweet or post eats up your activity feed for days. you don’t get anything for it, except every once in a while you might see yourself on a buzzfeed listicle. once, a student showed me a screencap of one of my own tweets that she’d seen on facebook. writing a popular fic is fun but it’s also, for me anyway, overwhelming, because i don’t see writing fic as a content/consumer situation. i see myself as a member of a community, and when you’re placed too high on a pedestal, you’re no longer a member of that community. you’re a content creator. it’s the difference between telling a story to your friends over drinks and acting on stage. when you’re done telling the story to your friends, they speak back to you. when you bow at the end of a play, all you can hear is applause. both are good things, but conflating the two is a bad idea. you’ll never be happy if you’re seeking applause but getting conversation, and you’ll never be happy if you’re seeking conversation but getting applause.

there are plenty of people well-suited to entertaining, who thrive on popularity and strive for fame. i’ve learned that i am not one of them. nor am i one of those people with a billion sock accounts, who hates attention so much they drop fics anonymously, or maybe don’t post them at all. i’m in a place where no matter what i post, i’m content with the reception i get. if i post a fic that gets 10 kudos and 2 comments, i’m grateful to those people who kudosed and commented. if i post the kind of wip that, when it updates, people tweet “X JUST UPDATED” and drop everything they’re doing to read it, and each chapter gets 50-100 comments, i’m grateful for that too. it’s very fun, waking up to lots of excited and kind comments. either way, i’m doing the work i enjoy: helping people, or myself, feel something, or escape, or believe in love and kindness and beauty if they’re in a dark enough place to doubt it. to me it doesn’t matter if that’s for me and two other people, or two thousand, or twenty thousand. it’s all good and worthwhile work to be doing.

[kbstories]

I usually do a fic rec list of personal favorites every year on Fanfiction Writer’s Appreciation Day (August 21st) and I realized I didn’t do one in 2019 so here’s a list of my personal

One Piece Fanfic Favs 🏴‍☠️🌟!!

Keeping up with the tradition, this list exclusively features works that could use more love thrown their way! OP is a pretty big fandom, so I set the limit at max. 300 kudos. Please enjoy and leave plenty of kudos & comments if you can (๑˃ᴗ˂)ﻭ

Previous rec lists: Metal Gear / The Witcher

***

burn before the fire by shishiswordsman (@shishiswordsman)

Kicking this list off with one of my absolute favorites. This is a Wano Arc look into Luffy’s headspace through Law’s eyes, and it’s amazing. Stellar characterization, great pacing, I truly adore this fic.

(Sneaky double rec with shadow rises (and you are here) by the same author because my god do I burn for the Luffy-used-to-be-a-slave AU and this is my favorite rendition of it hrghhh my heart)

Stasis by ImperialMint (@imperialmint)

Pure Strawhat nakamaship hurt/comfort goodness. This was one of the first fics I read for this fandom and it scratches an itch for Luffy sacrificing himself for his crew and his crew taking care of Luffy in turn so wonderfully. Please mind the tags, though!

At The End of The Day by Artificial_Starlight

Bending the 300 kudos rule for this one because it’s a longfic and it’s criminal how few kudos this has. This is a true feast of a LawLu Modern AU if I’ve ever seen one. I adore everything from worldbuilding to plot to characterization. It’s one of those stories that makes you run to AO3 whenever it updates. You won’t regret catching up with it, I promise.

Scrapyard by Milo (@musasuchus)

SCREAMS FROM THE ROOFTOPS this is the first kidkiller fic I came across and it lit a fire under my ass for this ship y’all I can’t even describe it. It’s a collection of snapshots from Kidd & Killer’s lives with an ace!Killer HC I?? adore?? Anyhow if I could delete my memory and read it with fresh eyes I would hhhh

The storm ended already (so you should stop shaking) by Amazaria (@amazaria)

Listen. This fic has everything I needed from a post-Water 7 scenario and more because it’s focused on Usopp & Nami and I just. I’m so soft. This made me so soft. It’s so good. Please read it.

Illness on the High Seas by mydetheturk (@mydetheturk)

I’m one of those idiots who is so focused on the Most Popular Boys that I get tunnel vision from it and then there comes a fic that shows me what a monumentally stupid move that is. Myde writes those fics by the regular and I adore all her writing but this fic specifically is so very good and so very underappreciated. It’s a Coby-and-Brook story about shipwide illnesses and those who keep things together. It’s sad and hopeful and wonderful, my heart is so full.

sacrifice by wbtrashking (@quillifer)

This one is a swift but deadly roundhouse kick to the heart. It delves into an aspect to Law’s powers that makes me anxious to even think about in the context of Wano (or any fight with high stakes, really) and Ash sharpened that potential to its best possible effect. Straight to the point, absolutely heart-wrenching, join me in Law feels hell please!!!

(Ash also wrote a kidkiller one-shot called familiarity for me and I’m aware this will sound very biased but it’s the best thing I’ve ever witnessed with my own two eyeballs. Timeskip Kidd & Killer being soft around each other, my crops are forever watered... thank you...)

Breathing Easy (And All Its Associated Complications) by Trixree (@trixree)

This fic gave me a lot of emotions I didn’t know where the fuck to put, it’s just so good and unique and my soul burns just thinking about this. I never really considered the monster trio as an OT3 constellation before this but I certainly am since I read this. Pre-timeskip figuring out of feelings and polyamory, my god my heart aches.

Scrapyard Remnants by threesipsmore

Another kidkiller classic in my eyes. It’s an exploration of pre-canon Kidd & Killer, how they grew up and came to be and I just love this a lot. It was written before the Wano revelations of late, and I can’t express enough respect for tackling these characters in such a believable way with how little we knew of them back then.

toragara by Origamidragons (@oriigami)

This is one of those tattoo-it-across-my-body-this-is-amazing kind of reads where every line is so good and hits so deep and it stays with you for a long time. It’s an AU where Zoro is a tiger shifter... person roaming Goa where Luffy stumbles upon him, and I’m a little mad it’s not actually canon because it’s so unique and I adore the idea. Anyhow. Read it or die by my sword(s).

God’s gonna trouble the water by hongmunmu (@dragonkov)

Reading this is an experience that’s so visceral it’s hard to describe. It’s a what-if scenario for Water 7 where Usopp dies before he can grab Luffy’s hand and escape with the crew, and it’s exactly as emotional and harrowing as that sounds. This author’s grasp on Usopp and the entire crew is unparalleled and I literally haven’t stopped thinking about this fic ever since I read it.

***

That’s it for now! Feel free to add to this list if you like and as always a huge THANK YOU to the writers of this fandom for their amazing work c:

[electricshoebox]

writing tag

Tagged by the lovely @adventuresofmeghatron, thank you!

Tagging: @junemermaid, @molliehaswords, @desynchimminent, @valkyriejack, and @mercurymiscellany​, if you’d like to do it!

1.  How many works do you have on AO3? 

39. Holy shit. 

2.  What’s your total AO3 word count?

533,274 words. Holy shit.

3. What are you top 5 fics by kudos?

How to Share a Bed Without Killing Each Other: a Love Story (Dragon Age: Inquisition, Dorian/Iron Bull, 5 Chapters, Complete) The trials and tribulations of literally sleeping together.

Rivers in the Sand (Dragon Age: Inquisition, Dorian/Iron Bull, Oneshot, Complete) The Hissing Wastes unsettles Bull’s memories, and when he and Dorian are trapped together by a fallen pillar, Dorian helps him deal.

a soft place to land (Dragon Age: Inquisition, Dorian/Iron Bull, Oneshot, Complete) When a letter from his father sets him off, Dorian turns to Bull for a distraction.

Always Good at Bad Ideas  (Dragon Age: Inquisition, Dorian/Iron Bull, Oneshot, Complete) Bull gets injured fighting a dragon, which leaves Dorian frantic enough to blurt out the one thing he was trying to keep to himself.

Flashpoint (Dragon Age: Inquisition, Dorian/Iron Bull, Oneshot, Complete) “One time he got so excited he set the curtains on fire.”

4. Do you respond to comments?  Why or why not? 

Yes, always! I’ve seen various opinions on whether authors should, but to me, engaging with and getting excited with readers is half the fun and half the point. I also just really want people to know how much it means to me not only that they read, but that they take the time to leave a comment. Comments are hard to write. I completely sympathize with that, sometimes you just don’t know what to say or how to say it, and I absolutely don’t begrudge anyone that doesn’t. It just means a lot to me when people do, even when it’s literally just “This was cool!” or something, and I want them to know that it’s appreciated!

5. What’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?

Hmmm. I guess that sort of depends on your definition of angsty. None of them have directly tragic endings, it’s just not in me to write that way, but I have one or two with open or less definitely, obviously happy endings. The rarepair DA2 oneshot I wrote for Merrill/Orana, Counting the Cost, has the most open ending, left completely up to interpretation. The Inception AU DAI fic I wrote for Dorian/Bull, In the Shadow of Dreams, has what I think of as an optimistic ending, and less a happy one. I tried to end that one with more romance, but it just didn’t fit the tone of the rest of the fic, so a quiet ending that signals a road to recovery was what I chose instead.

6. What’s the fic you’ve written with the happiest ending?

Most all of my oneshots have pretty happy endings. I guess I’m tempted say A Line in the Sand, my Deacon/MacCready start-from-scratch slow burn novel, just because it goes from antagonists to lovers and has the longest road with the most earned happy ending. I feel like the long struggle to get there makes it feel happier. 

7. Do you write crossovers?  If so, what’s the craziest one you’ve written?

Not really. Instead I’m sometimes tempted into AUs based on other media, but not full blown crossovers with actual different characters meeting. Even then, I’m really picky in what I enjoy. I’ve only written one, the Inception AU for Dragon Age that I mentioned above. Honestly, it requires no knowledge of Inception at all. I really just stole a bunch of concepts from it and then made my own modernized Thedas around them.

8. Have you ever received hate on a fic?

Thankfully no! I’ve received one or two kind of odd comments, but otherwise I’ve been very lucky and everyone’s been really nice.

9.  Do you write smut?  If so, what kind?

Hell yeah! I’ve written many kinds, really, whatever I feel like or whatever fits the fic. I’ve done plenty of your typical smut. I branched out into light BDSM with several of my Dorian/Bull fics, as well as waxplay and praise kink. I’ve also done some roleplay in the vein of “established relationship pretending to be strangers meeting at a bar” for Deacon/MacCready with By Any Other Name.

10.  Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Not that I know of. 

11. Have you ever had a fic translated?

I have! Two of my Dorian/Bull fics, Wishing Stars and No Patron Saint of Silent Restraint, both by the same lovely person: landanding on AO3. I don’t think I stopped flailing for a solid day when I got the request for permission either time.

12.  Have you ever co-written a fic before?

Not since pre-AO3 days, beyond collaborating in a tabletop setting. I’m not completely opposed to the idea but it would have to be someone I felt really, really comfortable with and with whom I have really good communication. I’m really particular about my writing, and I’d need to know someone’s emotional comfort level with trading and changing and even eliminating ideas.

13.  What’s your all-time favourite ship?

Oh god that’s honestly really hard. I’ve written the most for Dorian/Bull and that ship will always have a special place in my heart. But I did write my first full-length novel for Deacon/MacCready, and they’ve already got me in the middle of my second. So they’re the ship that taught me I could do that, and they’re my beloved rarepair. There are a few more I absolutely love, but I think those are my top two right now.

14.  What’s a WIP that you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?

Definitely Uprising. It was the first time I tried longform fic, and it was meant to be an entire retelling of DA2 with Velanna as the Justice-bearing character, rather than Anders, because after learning the developers almost took DA2 in that direction, I couldn’t get it out of my head. I had a lot of plans for it, for how Justice might develop differently, for what it might have looked like if elves had been more of the battleground issue instead of mages vs. templars, for some angsty bittersweet long distance Nathaniel/Velanna and some complicated Fenris/Hawke and Merrill/Orana. But I drifted away from Dragon Age fandom in interest a long time ago, and I’m not sure I’ll ever get the steam back for it. I’m proud of how far I did get, though.

15. What are your writing strengths?

I feel pretty confident with dialogue, I can usually make a scene flow with it pretty well and I spend a lot of time trying to be meticulous about character voice. I’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback on my descriptions, which I appreciate and wouldn’t have considered a strength, but my readers have been kind. I think I’m pretty good at including body language, too, though maybe to a fault.

16.  What are you writing weaknesses?

Much as people have been kind on the feedback, I really feel like action scenes are a weakness for me. I don’t enjoy writing them and I struggle a lot to make them feel like they’re flowing over just bulletpointing. I also feel like I struggle to make them exciting. I feel like I struggle with exposition scenes as well, and keeping them interesting over info-dumping. 

17.  What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

I’m generally in favor of including them, but with the caution of doing thorough research if it’s not a language I speak. I shy away from it if I can’t be completely sure it’s accurate, because I don’t want to risk putting off a native speaker reader, or saying/doing something offensive. I’d expand that to include anything about another culture, really. For example, I’ve been slowly picking away at writing a Fallout fic for my Sole Survivor Anthony and Preston, and part of what has been slow going is just making sure I’m getting Anthony’s culture right. His parents immigrated from Vietnam, and I want his experiences with them and with his culture to be as accurate and respectful as possible, not falling into any stereotypes but also being allowed to be complicated. 

18.  What was the first fandom you wrote for?

Depends on what we’re measuring. The first fandom I ever wrote fic for of any kind was Sailor Moon. The first fandom I actually put fic on the internet for was Lord of the Rings, on good old fanfiction.net. The first fandom I published on AO3 for was Dragon Age.

19.  What’s your favourite fic you’ve written?

God this is such a hard question to answer, my feelings on my writing change so often. I think it’s hard for A Line in the Sand not to be my favorite for the reasons I’ve already mentioned, it’s my first successful novel-length fic, I accomplished a lot with it and learned a lot from it, and it’s a rarepair I got to kind of develop from scratch in my own way. 

But if I look back at my whole repertoire so far, just to branch out from the usual answer, I’d say I’m also really fond of To Have and to Hold, which was the first time I ever participated in a minibang, or really any kind of writing challenge. It’s a Dorian/Bull established relationship fic set during Trespasser, and it’s kind of a meditation on Dorian’s past and present and how they’ve shaped his feelings on love and commitment and marriage, all while he’s trying to decide his future. I’m proud of how it came out, and I think my Dorian voice still holds up okay. Plus I had two incredible artists working with me who put together stunning work for it, and how could I not be super grateful for that? 

It’s funny, most of the top ones up there for kudos are ones that I don’t personally think are my best, it’s a lot of my very early offerings for Dorian/Bull that I think I could improve on a lot of if I tackled them now. I’m grateful people like them but I feel like they’re more an accident of timing, being published early in the ship’s popularity. 

[im-the-punk-who]

20 Questions - Writer’s Edition

Tagged by @myrmidryad​ <3 <3 <3

1. How many works do you have on AO3?

40, which seems...low. lmao. but mostly because i never end up posting things i write LMAO

2. What’s your total AO3 word count?

     96,197! which....is hilarious considering one of my eternal WIPS also jut hit 90k last week woops.

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

On AO3:

Black Sails (20)

Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019) (11)

Captain America (Movies) (5)

Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling (2)

Kingdom Hearts (Video Games) (1)

The Umbrella Academy (TV) (1)

Marvel Cinematic Universe (1)

On ff.net/LJ i had more Harry Potter stuff and i know there is still some Zim fanfic on my DA....

4. What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

Memories, Like Water, Can Be Tainted or Distilled; Sometimes Will Evaporate

is unfortunately always going to be first because it was written at the height of Stucky fandom and you just don’t recover from those sort of numbers xD

The Trouble With Jersey (Working title) - same deal. CapFam/Stucky fic at the height of CapFandom whoops

Between Breath and Love, I Choose Him - Okay I’m actually pretty happy this is number three because Black Sails fans are sluts and I love that journey for them <3 Also choking kink my beloved. <3

The Corner Booth - Drarry fic (antagonistic). what else is there to say.

Play, Boys - oh, abandoned WIP, my beloved. You deserved better but alas the hyperfixation wants what she wants.

5. What’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?

Ohhhhh god i don’t know. I know the angstiest ending I ever *planned* was for I Couldn't Get The Boy To Kill Me but I never posted the rest of that. Hmm, otherwise maybe the On Purpose series, which is a Black Sails post London series about Miranda and James so like. Angst angst angst angst.

6. What’s the fic you’ve written with the happiest ending?

Bold of you to assume I’ve written an ending to any of my fics. Okay well, Tying Rockets To Shoe Strings  is going to have a happy ending if it kills me. Most of my one shots end ...fairly happily....? I think....?

7. Do you write crossovers? If so, what is the craziest one you’ve written?

I don’t only because if I don’t hyperfixate on something the brain simply Turns Off.

8. Do you write smut? If so, what kind?

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA almost exclusively. BUT I am very very into kink smut and D/s, A/B/O fic(although I don’t think I’ve ever posted any...) ot so much into the more vanilla smut - most of my explicit fics will have some level of light kink even if it’s just a little bit of choking play or like. Brat Michael.

9. Do you respond to comments, why or why not?

Oh god. You know how you go ‘I will do this when the Brain Returns From War’ ? Yeah. I do try to respond to comments but I’m....so bad at it. If I didn’t respond to your comment it’s not because I don’t appreciate it, it is that The Brain Turned That Function Off.

10. Have you ever received hate on a fic?

You know what I actually don’t think so which is weird but maybe I’m just not popular enough to receive that kind of attention. xD Although I have gotten plenty of hate on meta I’ve written so maybe that balances it out?

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

God Bless if I have.

12. Have you ever had a fic translated?

Nope <3

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

I had co-written or started co-writing a couple things but they never got published for one reason or another. I would really love to, though!

14. What’s your all time favourite ship to write for?

I don’t think i could ever pick a favorite but honestly Axel/Roxas will always get me. But Malex is right now the favorite child.

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

Did You Mean, All Of Them? I am notoriously so bad at long fics that I feel like this is All Of Them but the one I absolutely know I will never finish is Play, Boys (Umbrella Academy) and I Couldn't Get The Boy To Kill Me (Captain America)

16. What are your writing strengths?

Dialogue, I think? Also I think I’m pretty good at writing smut.

17. What are your writing weaknesses?

Finishing my goddamn fics, honestly. I also tend to be not great at keeping a consistent verb tense and...if I let myself go on an internal character monologue I *will* ramble for one thousand words without any physical indicators.

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

I LOVE it, i love it i love it i love it, although same as Gin, because I’m not *reaaaally* fluent in anything but french and english i haven’t written much actual dialogue. Although in Doubting Thomas I play around with how the language barrier affects the communication and such by using other indicators other than typing out hte dialogue, which has been a really fun process. (Although none of that part is posted because.....see ‘weaknesses’ LMAO

19. What was the first fandom you wrote for?

Neopets. I said what I said. (actually it was probably Sailor Moon or Tamora Pierce’s Protector of the Small series.)

20. What’s your favourite fic you’ve written?

God okay listen I love all my children equally but honestly Doubting Thomas   and Tying Rockets To Shoe Strings, the parts i’m working on right now are just REALLY GOOD okay i know i’m never probably going to post them but they’re SO GOOD. Posted, I am actually REALLY please with how Sound Garden turned out, and Sometimes A Family and Into The Blinding Sun both just HIT that found family vibe that sets me off. Special shoutout to Hand In Unloveable Hand   and Some Boys Do for being my own personal comfort fics <3

UHHH TAGGING???? YOU WANT ME TO TAG???? PEOPLE???? lmao @queer-crusader, @angrycowboy, @ladynox, @bydayornight, UHHHHH literally anyone in the black sails discord please i know none of your tumblr handles but I know you’re all fantastic writers. @haloud IDK EVERYONE?????