#when ao3 email subscription exists

[celestie0]

imma be so fr taglists are the bane of my existence i am one more chapter update away from discounting them 💀💀

[megansabode]

I’m A Gamer, I Swear

He sits down next to Hawks and grabs the laptop, pulling it in front of him.

Dabi glares at Hawks as he plays the game. “You should’ve worn this skirt.” He turns the laptop to face Hawks and points at a pleated skirt. “That fits with ‘School’ better.”

Hawks deadpans, staring at Dabi. “I-I’m sorry?”

“And—“ Dabi moves the character around. “—this necklace. Don’t layer them.”

Hawks blinks once, then twice, then manages to say, “You—how do you know this?”

-

Hawks has spent over half of his earnings on Roblox, is definitely mentally ill, and has a lot of problems with ‘PuppyLoverXx235’.

And Dabi is good at Dress To Impress.

OR

very short crack fic in which hawks and dabi win a game of dress to impress together

wc: 612

dabihawks oneshot. originally posted on ao3 @megansabode

contains: dabihawks, roblox, dress to impress, hawks being silly, dabi needs a hug, fluff, swearing

((i came up with the name for the random kid on the spot, don’t go looking for it 😭😭😭))

Hawks plays Roblox.

That’s about all people need to know to know that he’s fucking out of it.

He plays Dress To Impress, scams kids on Adopt Me and yells at them in mental hospital servers on Maple Hospital.

He also has about 15 accounts with hundreds of thousands of yen put into them all, because he gets banned so much.

The first time he thought he was truly mentally ill was when he spent half of his earnings as the number two hero (and a spy at the League Of Villains) on Robux and subscriptions.

Everyone’s out today. So, he sits at the bar on his laptop and plays Dress To Impress, arguing with children that get more stars than him.

But, honestly, ‘PuppyLoverXx235’ should not have gotten 15 stars for that absolute fucking abomination.

“Are you playing fucking Roblox?” The lid of the laptop slams down as Hawks swivels in his chair, and comes face to face with Dabi, who’s staring at him in disbelief. “Was that Dress To Impress?”

“No.” Hawks says. “I was, uh, looking at emails-“

“Looking at emails my ass, you were playing Roblox.” Hawks purses his lips as Dabi stares him down. “And you weren’t even on theme.” He sits down next to Hawks and grabs the laptop, pulling it in front of him.

Dabi glares at Hawks as he plays the game. “You should’ve worn this skirt.” He turns the laptop to face Hawks and points at a pleated skirt. “That fits with ‘School’ better.”

Hawks deadpans, staring at Dabi. “I-I’m sorry?”

“And—“ Dabi moves the character around. “—this necklace. Don’t layer them.”

Hawks blinks once, then twice, then manages to say, “You—how do you know this?”

“Because I wasn’t a sheltered kid?”

“No, like, how do you know…fashion. And this game. And school.”

The burnt villain’s eye twitches. “None of your business. Now, do you want to place first or not?”

“Uh, yes, yes please.” Hawks says, his hands holding the cushion of the barstool as Dabi makes an outfit to match the new theme—‘Pink’.

Before this, Hawks didn’t even know if Dabi knew that the colour pink exists.

And before this, Hawks only talked to Dabi for all of five seconds before the latter would start aggressively making out with him. Which Hawks didn’t mind, not at all, but this version of Dabi was a lot…calmer.

It almost didn’t feel like Dabi was a villain. Just a kid playing a stupid game with stupid children.

“Fucking disgusting.” Dabi snarls. Hawks looks at the screen, and laughs a little at the dumbass outfit some kid has created. “Do these kids actually know fashion or are they taking the piss?”

“Do you really need an answer to that question?” Dabi looks at Hawks, and Hawks swears he sees a little bit of a flicker at the edge of Dabi’s mouth.

“It was rhetorical.”

“No shit.”

The voting continues, and then the curtain falls. And Hawks…

Gets first place.

Dabi punches the air and Hawks just stares at him as he actually…smiles.

Oh, shit.

That looks good.

“Yes! See, I told you I could-“ Dabi’s voice fails as he clears his throat. “Yeah. You won.”

He gets up and walks away, but Hawks grabs his arm. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” Dabi says. “Leave it.”

Hawks tightens his hold. “No, seriously. What’s wrong?” He gets up and looks up at Dabi (because Hawks is incredibly short for his age and gender, unfortunately) and says, “That was fun.”

He sees a flicker of something other than hatred or rage or annoyance in Dabi’s eyes for just a second.

And then they make out.

[sapphosewrites]

It's time again for my one true love... an ask game. Thank you for the tag @o0anapher0o! This is one I have done before and I am sure as hell not going to let that stop me from talking about myself.

How many works do you have on AO3?

143! The next big milestone will be 150 if I ever post again lol

2. What's your total AO3 word count?

436,802 holy cow that is a lot of words.

3. What fandoms do you write for?

It's DS9 all day over here right now! I have also written for Good Omens, Queen's Thief, Tales of Symphonia, and Next Gen and Lower Decks.

4. Top 5 Fics By Kudos

I'm always interested in if the answer to this has changed, because sometimes it does in unexpected ways. Confess Nothing always tops the list, but this time it's only ahead by 2 with All's Fair in Love, War, and Show Business close behind. I'm really surprised to see Personnel Review in third place, because Garak doesn't even personally show up in that one and I always got the sense TNG was much less popular. Fourth place is Lost in Translation, which is not at all surprising. But fifth place does surprise me: It Isn't Perfect (But It's Ours)! Those Good Omens fics really snuck up there while I wasn't looking. (I think Season 2 release, even if I haven't posted anything new, did drive a spike in that fandom.)

5. Do you respond to comments?

I try to and I want to but there are 200 unread comments in my inbox right now and I simply have too much ADHD to deal with that, and then I don't respond to new ones because it's overwhelming and the problem is self-perpetuating. I've read them all in my email notifications, and they've made me smile and laugh and experience great joy! But I am overwhelmed about the idea of trying to reply.

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

Last time I answered this I hadn't ever written something with an angsty ending, but now with certainty I can say it's Like a pain, the truth is mine in the Terok Nor AU, which is all about Garak's developing addiction to the wire and exploration of self-harm to trigger it. Second place goes to I'd Like to Give Up Now and When All Kindness Has Gone. The interesting thing about all of these, though, is that they exist within the larger framework of what the reader already knows will happen next in canon, which is Garak will survive and make connections with others on the station and it isn't the end of the world that it feels like for him. So does that still count?

7. What is the fic you wrote with the happiest ending?

Not coincidentally, I'd probably say it's my two most kudos'd DS9 fics, Confess Nothing and Lost in Translation.

8. Do you get hate on fics?

The closest I've ever come to hate is someone commenting that I had a major tonal shift in the middle of a piece of writing, and they were correct. I have found the fandom to be incredibly kind, supportive, and generous.

9. Do you write smut?

SO once upon a time the answer to this was no but now we are inching our way towards a yes. I made a sock puppet account where I could experiment with writing more explicitly (it's lovely to have so many user subscriptions but also feels like a lot of pressure) and what I've found is there's simply not much more explicit that I'll go, but I'm trying.

10. Craziest crossover

The entirety of Thief Space 9, and of those specifically probably Spaceships and Gods.

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Not that I know of. Again, lovely fandom, beautiful people! I also have a standing policy that my works are a sandbox anyone can play in, so I have had remixes and things inspired by my work, but that's done with full permission and people bringing their own creative twists.

12. Have you ever had a fic translated?

No, that's the last thing outstanding on my 'bucket list', so to speak! My dreams were to have my fic inspire art, other fic, podfic, and translation, and we've achieved all but the last.

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

Yes and I'm a very bad co-author because there's a fic that's sat unfinished for actual literal years now and I'm not doing my part to finish it.

14. All time favorite ship?

I think I have an all-time favorite ship dynamic, which is any ship where one character could with both deep love and complete sincerity say to the other "I hate you, you're the worst person I know" as a form of foreplay.

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

I fear we're living in a world where I never finish anything ever again, but in particular there's one fic I posted to aforementioned sock puppet account specifically because I thought it might get permanently abandoned and I didn't want people knowing it was me if that happened because I am a coward

16. What are your writing strengths?

You know, the answer to this has changed! It used to just be dialogue, but now I'd like to think it's also my willingness to experiment with form/format and use even little moments to poke at big questions.

17. What are your writing weaknesses?

Look, I'm never going to be a writer of lush descriptions. We've come a long way, but settings are actually the worst.

18. Thoughts on dialogue in another language?

Hasn't changed- translate it if your POV character would understand it, leave it untranslated if they wouldn't. The point of how you write is to communicate information and convey emotion and whatever else to your audience, not to show off your conlang abilities.

19. First fandom you wrote in?

I think I've shared this before, but I wrote a self-insert ship fic with Shadow the Hedgehog for my older sibling for Sonic Adventure 2 Battle when I was far too young.

20. Favorite fic you've written?

I can't answer this. This is a cruel question. Um, at this exact moment in time, possibly Comparative Literature?

Well, there's more information than anyone wanted or needed, but now you have it! You all should do it too so I look slightly less narcissistic. @hellostuffedtiger @ectogeo-rebubbles @ernmark but also you know, anyone who wants to! Whenever I have to tag I immediately forget every single person who exists on this website.

[novaliae]

sappy appreciation post for @bunfloras 'cause it's his birthday and they are very cool <3

hi bun beloved! happy birthday you are so cool

sappy time now <3 under the cut 'cause i have a feeling this could get long

cool. so! as you know i found you through iwhia in some of the first chapters (mid april 2021? i think? wild to think that's almost two years ago now). my friends had got me into dsmp a bit before and i was reading emduo. that school year was a Time—we were hybrid for most of the year and it meant that i didn't have lunch with any of my friends. so during those periods i ended up at a shitty little desk in my school cafeteria, angling my phone this way and that to try to pick up an extra bar of cell data, and browsing ao3.

i was obsessed with iwhia from the beginning. i gushed about it to a friend. i still smile when i see your name in my ao3 subscription box because it reminds me of the little thrill i would get checking my email to see you'd updated during lunch one day. i would read a chapter and the bell would ring and i'd have to traipse up three flights of stairs with my heavy backpack and i wouldn't even notice because i was so consumed with brainrot over the story you'd created. i've read iwhia more times than i can count, and it will always be very special to me. i remember screaming in my friend's dms when i found out it was ending, followed by more screaming when i realized you were starting bones. i didn't know you at all, but i already looked up to you. i hadn't written anything in years when i clicked on the first chapter of iwhia. i started working on fics again, and it was partially because of how inspired i was by your works.

and then i joined burrow in something like august of that year!! i was so nervous—proximity to cool writing person!! intimidating!! but you were so friendly and welcoming and i started to come out of my shell and it was amazing! i went from losing my shit the first time you Perceived my existence to rambling in the bones channel to you after every chapter, making memes about the iwhia bot and infodumping about boats. i was super insecure and anxious at that point in my life and you treated me very kindly and i appreciate it to this day.

i am very grateful for you, and for the community you built around burrow, and for the incredible people i've been able to meet through you. it has been so fucking nice as a young queer aspec person to be surrounded by other aspec people, to see qprs normalized, and to just get to nerd out over the block guys with people who are just as insane about them as i am. the LL era has so many of my fondest memories; i'm close with so many wonderful friends because we worked together on the iwhia project. and you have been so fucking patient and supportive through it all too—dealing with my random bullshit in your dms, the constant angsting of warrior ocs, and encouraging me when things go well :D

you are genuinely such a bright light, bun. you've brought joy to so many people's lives through your incredible writing and the community brought together by it. you've inspired writers to create beautiful things because they want to mold themselves in your image. you're always looking out for your friends. the ideas you come up with are so fucking creative and brilliant it makes me bounce up and down with glee. you have such a gift for words that i don't know how to express the power of. you people have been so awful to you and you've remained resilient despite it all. you got back up. you kept writing. you're still here. i consider myself ridiculously lucky to know you—the nova of two years ago would never believe that you even know i exist—and you deserve all the good things in life and more.

i hope you have a wonderful birthday bun <3 we're all here for you and we always will be.

[not-poignant]

Hi I wanted to know if you had any tips for authors like yourself who write fanfics as well as original stories. I am having a bit of trouble regarding whether to use my established fanfic accounts on Wattpad, tumbler, A03 and twitter as a way to promote my original stories. I am okay with making separate accounts, but I'm not sure if I'm ready to start building an audience all over again. But I think using the accounts I already have with help me build a better community. Whats your opinion ?

Hi anon!

This can be rough and ultimately it's a personal decision. You haven't said whether you want to do this as a paying job or not, but this is mostly how I'm answering. Here's some things to keep in mind and reflect on (and obviously - just my opinion, you can ignore whatever you want!):

You can't 'market' or easily promote your original writing on AO3. You can never mention a Ko-Fi account or Patreon account or similar there. No direct links to anywhere that allows you to sell your writing directly (so not Amazon, not other buy links etc.) Not in your profile, not in comment replies, not anywhere. If you get reported, you must remove the references, and if you don't, you can have your account suspended. It's against AO3's TOS. So AO3 is actually not an ideal space to launch original writing if you want to make it into a career.

I don't know if you want to go into writing as a job, but if you do, you will probably want to look into self-publication of e-books first, because that is the quickest/fastest way to start getting paid and finding an audience willing to pay. Not all reading audiences are the same. Like, e-books + subscriptions via Ko-Fi and Patreon are probably the very best way to set up. Please keep in mind that AO3 readers don't actually like reading original fiction proportionately to fanfiction, which is one of the reasons why none of my original fiction has ever done as well proportionately as my fanfiction. Overall, original fiction is not a super popular category, you can't list by 'classic' genres, a lot of people don't even know it exists on AO3, and it's not why most people visit AO3. Even most of your current readers. So onto my next point:

You cannot guarantee that your fanfic readers will want to read your original fic, so you don't necessarily already have a 'built in audience' for your original writing. Like, hopefully you do! But this is something to really keep in mind. I ended up doing things this random way because interest was shown in the OCs I put in fanfiction. When I launched 'cold' characters that had never been in my fanfics (Mosk and Eran) they were the least popular characters of any I'd ever written. And that was after a lengthy background writing original fiction already with original fiction readers. Just keep it in mind re: AO3.

It's normal to use Tumblr / Twitter and other socials to promote original writing, there's no issues or conflicts with that at all. But you might want to consider having dedicated socials for these things. The not-poignant account is my main account just for my writing, writing connected things, and stuff that feels relevant overall to my readers (and me, lol).

I have other Tumblrs under another email where my main + side blogs are (this account is obvs not a side blog and I run no side blogs out of it). I don't think it's great to market original writing on an account where you're posting 50 irrelevant-to-your-writing posts every day, because it just means people can't find what they're looking for as easily, or at all, and will be less likely to follow you, because they might not want irrelevant 'spam' type posts in their feed. There are authors I love on AO3 who I would never follow the Tumblrs they link, because they post like 60 things a day about stuff I can't keep up with and/or don't really care about. And I just don't want to constantly scroll when I can avoid that completely.

As to Wattpad, you can definitely put original fiction there, and it can do pretty well because Wattpad was mainly made with original fiction in mind. That being said, these readers are also not always accustomed to paying for fiction, so if you're wanting to go commercial eventually, you'll probably need some pretty huge stories re: popularity to convert a tiny percentage of readers into folks who can give you income. But if you're already popular on Wattpad, you can 100% use your fanfiction account for your original writing. Just make sure you include your original fiction name somewhere in the summary. And remember if you do want to go commercial + publish books, you will eventually have to take those stories offline.

-

If I was doing this all again to build a career, I would do it completely differently. But if I was doing it all again for fun, I wouldn't.

So it's worth just sitting and reflecting on what your motives here are, because I can't tell from your ask, and if it's 'just for fun' that's different to 'actually also for income.' Knowing what your actual goals are - for yourself - will probably determine the best way to go forward.

Be honest with yourself about why you want to put original fiction out there and what you want to get out of it, but since you mentioned 'promo' I'm assuming there is a commercial bent, which in that case, I don't always think that AO3 is the best place for it unless you're just writing straight up smut or longfic with a lot of smut, which tends to do the best in the orig-fic category.

Oh! And finally, like... if you do want to do original fiction for profit, I'd just point out that even I made two completely separate AO3 accounts because I wanted a space where I could still relax and write fanfiction, and I found that doing it on the 'official original writing account' was very restrictive for me. As a result, most of my fanfic readers find out that I write original fiction through my Tumblr, because I don't want it all on the same AO3 account. (It also means some of my original fiction readers don't know I have a bunch of fanfic over at thespectaclesofthor on AO3).

Just some things to keep in mind!

[sunshinebunnie]

🫘, ✍️, and 🪩 please!

Thank you so much for the delightful ask, @muserepeats!!

🫘 : Spill the beans. What's a new project you're doing this year?

Ooooo! I have a few, although I guess they might be more continuations? I have 2, possibly 3, new one shots that I'm planning to add to my Hellcheer series (I Can Make You Smile Better Than He Ever Could) and I'm definitely planning to get my Fic Writers for Reproductive Justice fic put out this year. (I have started work on it!)

✍🏻: Which stat matter most to you (if at all!): subscriptions, kudos/favorites, comments, bookmarks, word count, or hits?

👀👀👀 So.....I'm gonna be hella shady and cheat a little bit because several of these matter to me, but for different reasons. lol

(1) Comments are probably my #1 thing because one of the big reasons I write is to participate in fandom spaces. I'm not super active in the Tumblr tags and most of my gc participation is around writing, so comments on my fics are really where I get most of my fandom engagement. It's where I flail about my head cannons and what I like about my stories/my characters, and I absolutely recognize the people who comment frequently on my work and really look forward to seeing their names pop-up in my AO3 emails.

(2) kudos/favorites are also super important because I know not everyone has the time or, let's be real, the energy to post a comment on a fic they like. (I know I certainly don't!) So for someone to even give that "hey, I think you did a good job here!" signal is still really awesome. Also, I know as fics "age" people who might've left a comment before might be a little less willing to do that, but they'll still leave a kudos, and so that helps me know that what I've put out there in the universe is still resonating with people. 🥰🥰

(3) bookmarks/fic recs. I willing admit that I go through the bookmarks on my fics and I love seeing the notes people leave about my fics in their bookmarks. (Although, it also makes me a little paranoid when people privately bookmark my stuff because I kinda assume they're flaming my work, but they're just being polite about it... lol This comes back to my default assumption that people generally don't like me/don't take notice of my existence. 🤷🏼‍♀️🤷🏼‍♀️) Same thing when I see my stories show up in Tumblr fic recs. It absolutely makes me turn into a melty pile of goo!

(4) Then there are subscriptions, which are super fun because it shows me how many people are as invested in the universes I'm creating as I am. People who want to know when a story gets updated and don't want to dig through the AO3 tag or check their bookmarks to see if something's updated????? 😍😍😍😍

🪩: Do you have any "good" writing habits you want to cultivate?

Mmmmmm....I'd like to get better about having more of a multi-chapter story written/finished before I start publishing. I do feel really really bad when people have to wait months between updates, and I'd like to be better about that. (Alas, I do fall prey to the trap of either (a) wanting the satisfaction of people interacting with my stories and/or (b) drastically underestimating how long it's going to take me to write subsequent chapters....)

Writer Goal Asks

[geneeste]

I just realized that I meant to talk about something really important and useful about FanFicFare but forgot - getting story URLs from email!

I sort of just said it was a thing, but didn’t elaborate on what it is or how it works, which is a disservice because it’s actually really powerful and takes a lot of work out of saving fic.

Basically, you connect FanFicFare to the email you use to receive fanfic subscription notifications from AO3, FF.net, and other archives it supports.

Then, when you tell FanFicFare to get story URLs from email, it will look at all new emails in your inbox and determine if those emails contain story URLs from archives it supports. If so, it will compare those URLs to those in fanfic already in your Calibre library and if the story is new, it will download and add it your Calibre library. Even better, if it’s a chapter update to an existing story in your library, FanFicFare will update the existing ebook with the new chapter. It’s magic, basically.

One important note: I followed FFF’s recommendation and created a separate free GMX email account just for fanfic subscription notifications, something I strongly recommend you also do. Even if you only use your fannish email for fannish things, keep this separate. It might be an irritating extra step, but your fannish email getting compromised because some jerk on the internet got your credentials off a Calibre plugin is probably more annoying.

Creating a personal fanfic archive using Calibre, various Calibre plugins, Firefox Reader View, and an e-Reader / BookFusion / Calibre-Web

A few years ago I started getting serious about saving my favorite fic (or just any fic I enjoyed), since the Internet is sadly not actually always forever when it comes to fanfiction. Plus, I wanted a way to access fanfic offline when wifi wasn't available. Enter a personal fanfic archive!

There are lots of ways you can do this, but I thought I'd share my particular workflow in case it helps others get started. Often it's easier to build off someone else's workflow than to create your own!

Please note that this is for building an archive for private use -- always remember that it's bad form to publicly archive someone else's work without their explicit permission.

This is going to be long, so let's add a read more!

How to Build Your Own Personal Fanfic Archive

Step One: Install Calibre

Calibre is an incredibly powerful ebook management software that allows you to do a whole lot of stuff having to do with ebooks, such as convert almost any text-based file into an ebook and (often) vice-versa. It also allows you to easily side-load ebooks onto your personal e-reader of choice and manage the collection of ebooks on the device.

And because it's open source, developers have created a bunch of incredibly useful plugins to use with Calibre (including several we're going to talk about in the next step), which make saving and reading fanfiction super easy and fun.

But before we can do that, you need to download and install it. It's available for Windows, MacOS, Linux, and in a portable version.

Step Two: Download These Plugins

This guide would be about 100 pages long if I went into all of the plugins I love and use with Calibre, so we're just going to focus on the ones I use for saving and reading fanfiction. And since I'm trying to keep this from becoming a novel (lolsob), I'll just link to the documentation for most of these plugins, but if you run into trouble using them, just tag me in the notes or a comment and I'll be happy to write up some steps for using them.

Anyway, now that you've downloaded and installed Calibre, it's time to get some plugins! To do that, go to Preferences > Get plugins to enhance Calibre.

You'll see a pop-up with a table of a huge number of plugins. You can use the Filter by name: field in the upper right to search for the plugins below, one at a time.

Click on each plugin, then click Install. You'll be asked which toolbars to add the plugins to; for these, I keep the suggested locations (in the main toolbar & when a device is connected).

FanFicFare (here's also a great tutorial for using this plugin) EpubMerge (for creating anthologies from fic series) EbubSplit (for if you ever need to break up fic anthologies) Generate Cover (for creating simple artwork for downloaded fic) Manage Series (for managing fic series)

You'll have to restart Calibre for the plugins to run, so I usually wait to restart until I've installed the last plugin I want.

Take some time here to configure these plugins, especially FanFicFare. In the next step, I'll demonstrate a few of its features, but you might be confused if you haven't set it up yet! (Again, highly recommend that linked tutorial!)

Step Three: Get to Know FanFicFare (and to a lesser extent, Generate Cover)

FanFicFare is a free Calibre plugin that allows you to download fic in bulk, including all stories in a series as one work, adding them directly to Calibre so that that you can convert them to other formats or transfer them to your e-reader.

As with Calibre, FanFicFare has a lot of really cool features, but we're just going to focus on a few, since the docs above will show you most of them.

The features I use most often are: Download from URLs, Get Story URLs from Email, and Get Story URLs from Web Page.

Download from URLs let's you add a running list of URLs that you'd like FanFicFare to download and turn into ebooks for you. So, say, you have a bunch of fic from fanfic.net that you want to download. You can do that!

Now, in this case, I've already downloaded these (which FanFicFare detected), so I didn't update my library with the fic.

But I do have some updates to do from email, so let's try getting story URLs from email!

Woohoo, new fic! Calibre will detect when cover art is included in the downloaded file and use that, but at least one of these fic doesn't have cover art (which is the case for most of the fic I download). This is where Generate Cover comes in.

With Generate Cover, I can set the art, font, dimensions, and info content of the covers so that when I'm looking at the fic on my Kindle, I know right away what fic it is, what fandom it's from, and whether or not it's part of a series.

Okay, last thing from FanFicFare -- say I want to download all of the fic on a page, like in an author's profile on fanfic.net or all of the stories in a series. I can do that too with Get Story URLs from Web Page:

The thing I want to call out here is that I can specify whether the fic at this link are individual works or all part of an anthology, meaning if they're all works in the same series, I can download all stories as a single ebook by choosing For Anthology Epub.

Step Four: Using FireFox Reader View to Download Fic Outside of Archives

This is less common now thanks to AO3, but the elders among us may want to save fanfic that exists outside of archives on personal websites that either still exist or that exist only on the Internet Wayback Machine. FanFicFare is awesome and powerful, but it's not able to download fic from these kinds of sources, so we have to get creative.

I've done this in a couple of ways, none of which are entirely perfect, but the easiest way I've found thus far is by using Firefox's Reader View. Also, I don't think I discovered this -- I think I read about this on Tumblr, actually, although I can longer find the source (if you know it, please tell me so I can credit them!).

At any rate, open the fic in Firefox and then toggle on Reader View:

Toggling on Reader View strips all the HTML formatting from the page and presents the fic in the clean way you see in the preview below, which is more ideal for ebook formats.

To save this, go to the hamburger menu in the upper right of the browser and select Print, then switch to Print to PDF. You'll see the URL and some other stuff at the top and bottom of the pages; to remove that, scroll down until you see something like More settings... and uncheck Print headers and footers.

Click Save to download the resulting PDF, which you can then add to Calibre and convert to whichever format works best for your e-reader or archive method.

Step Five: Archiving (Choose Your Own Adventure)

Here's the really fun part: now that you know how to download your fave fanfics in bulk and hopefully have a nice little cache going, it's time to choose how you want to (privately) archive them!

I'm going to go through each option I've used in order of how easy it is to implement (and whether it costs additional money to use). I won't go too in depth about any of them, but I'm happy to do so in a separate post if anyone is interested.

Option 1: On Your Computer

If you're using Calibre to convert fanfic, then you're basically using your computer as your primary archive. This is a great option, because it carries no additional costs outside the original cost of acquiring your computer. It's also the simplest option, as it really doesn't require any advanced technical knowledge, just a willingness to tinker with Calibre and its plugins or to read how-to docs.

Calibre comes with a built-in e-book viewer that you can use to read the saved fic on your computer (just double-click on the fic in Calibre). You can also import it into your ebook app of choice (in most cases; this can get a little complicated just depending on how many fic you're working with and what OS you're on/app you're using).

If you choose this option, you may want to consider backing the fic up to a secondary location like an external hard drive or cloud storage. This may incur additional expense, but is likely still one of the more affordable options, since storage space is cheap and only getting cheaper, and text files tend to not be that big to begin with, even when there are a lot of them.

Option 2: On Your e-Reader

This is another great option, since this is what Calibre was built for! There are some really great, afforable e-readers out there nowadays, and Calibre supports most of them. Of course, this is a more expensive option because you have to acquire an e-reader in addition to a computer to run Calibre on, but if you already have an e-reader and haven't considered using it to read fanfic, boy are you in for a treat!

Option 3: In BookFusion

This is a really cool option that I discovered while tinkering with Calibre and used for about a year before I moved to a self-hosted option (see Option 4).

BookFusion is a web platform and an app (available on iOS and Android) that allows you to build your own ebook library and access it from anywhere, even when you're offline (it's the offline bit that really sold me). It has a Calibre plugin through which you can manage your ebook library very easily, including sorting your fanfic into easy-to-access bookshelves. You may or may not be able to share ebooks depending on your subscription, but only with family members.

Here's what the iOS app looks like:

The downside to BookFusion is that you'll need a subscription if you want to upload more than 10 ebooks. It's affordable(ish), ranging from $1.99 per month for a decent 5GB storage all the way to $9.99 for 100GB for power users. Yearly subs range from $18.99 to $95.99. (They say this is temporary, early bird pricing, but subscribing now locks you into this pricing forever.)

I would recommend this option if you have some cash to spare and you're really comfortable using Calibre or you're a nerd for making apps like BookFusion work. It works really well and is incredibly convenient once you get it set up (especially when you want to read on your phone or tablet offline), but even I, someone who works in tech support for a living, had some trouble with the initial sync and ended up duplicating every ebook in my BookFusion library, making for a very tedious cleanup session.

Option 4: On a Self-Hosted Server Using Calibre-Web

Do you enjoy unending confusion and frustration? Are you okay with throwing fistfuls of money down a well? Do you like putting in an incredible amount of work for something only you and maybe a few other people will ever actually use? If so, self-hosting Calibre-Web on your own personal server might be a good fit for you!

To be fair, this is likely an experience unique to me, because I am just technical enough to be a danger to myself. I can give a brief summary of how I did this, but I don't know nearly enough to explain to you how to do it.

Calibre-Web is a web app that works on top of Calibre, offering "a clean and intuitive interface for browsing, reading, and downloading eBooks."

I have a network-attached storage (NAS) server on which I run an instance of Calibre and Calibre-Web (through the miracle that is Docker). After the initial work of downloading all the fic I wanted to save and transferring it to the server, I'm now able to download all new fic pretty much via email thanks to FanFicFare, so updating my fic archive is mostly automated at this point.

If you're curious, this is what it looks like:

Pros: The interface is clean and intuitive, the ebook reader is fantastic. The Discover feature, in which you are given random books / fic to read, has turned out to be one feature worth all the irritation of setting up Calibre-Web. I can access, read, and download ebooks on any device, and I can even convert ebooks into another format using this interface. As I mentioned above, updating it with fic (and keeping the Docker container itself up to date) is relatively automated and easy now.

Cons: The server, in whichever form you choose, costs money. It is not cheap. If you're not extremely careful (and sometimes even if you are, like me) and a hard drive goes bad, you could lose data (and then you have to spend more money to replace said hard drive and time replacing said data). It is not easy to set up. You may, at various points in this journey, wish you could launch the server into the sun, Calibre-Webb into the sun, or yourself into the sun.

Step Six: Profit!

That's it! I hope this was enough to get you moving towards archiving your favorite fanfic. Again, if there's anything here you'd like me to expand on, let me know! Obviously I'm a huge nerd about this stuff, and love talking about it.

[naryrising]

You mentioned you know about AO3's structure: do you know if they'll soon implement a block button that could be used to filter out tags and/or specific users? (I've heard of 'Skins' being used for this purpose, but why not a more user-friendly system like that of multiple social media platforms: one click away and definitive) Or if there's a way to more easily navigate Subscriptions in the same way you would the Bookmarks? Thank you.

First - while I do know about this because I'm co-chair of the support committee, I cannot speak on AO3's behalf, I can't make accurate predictions on when various features might be added, I can just give my own impressions. Please do not take this as gospel.

1. Blocking is in development but it's extremely complicated and it takes time to (hopefully) get it right (by which I mean: it does what it's intended to do, and doesn't break the site in a dozen other ways). Those "multiple social media platforms" have dozens if not hundreds of paid employees, while AO3 has volunteers working for free in their spare time (during a global pandemic, with all the other attendant problems that brings.) Blocking is a complex enough feature that it's likely paid contractors will be employed for its development as well at some stage of the process, but the coding and design team volunteers (the ones who have been building the site for years, who know it inside and out, and who have the final say over what features look like) will be inextricably involved in the process, which means it takes more time. Yes, it's being worked on, and has been being worked on for a long time; no, I don't know when it will be ready.

2. Subscriptions were intended for email delivery of notifications - at the time they were developed, that was their intended purpose, because Bookmarks were the feature that existed for being able to tag and organize works you wanted to keep track of. They're just a 'send me an email when X story updates' reminder. Making them sortable and filterable would require completely redesigning the feature from the ground up, which is something that could theoretically happen in the future but there are a lot of things that are higher priorities (see above, re. blocking). In the meantime, if you want to be able to sort and filter, use Bookmarks, which already exist and do that.

(I think a lot of site users do not conceptualize things this way because they just see it from the front end, so let me explain a little further: - people say "why can't we sort/filter bookmarks by all the same things we can works" and "why can't we sort/filter/search subscriptions" and "why can't I sort/filter/search my marked for later/history page?" and the answer is, because those things are not works and don't hold all the same information as a work. You see Story A that you've subscribed to and bookmarked and are like, "all these things represent different ways of looking at Story A". On the back end of the site, that's 3 different (although related) things: a work, a bookmark, and a subscription. The bookmark and the subscription are not exact duplicates of the work - they don't contain all the same information that the database holds for the work. So for instance, a bookmark of a work doesn't contain the word count of the work. You can see it there on the bookmark because it's pulling that information from the work's own record, but the bookmark record doesn't have a little field of its own that says "this work is 5000 words". It records the date you bookmarked it and the date updated, which is why you can sort bookmarks by those things, but being able to sort by word count (or any other various metadata of the work) would require that information being part of the bookmark, which would require making considerable changes to the bookmark feature, which would require storing more data, and filtering a bunch more data through our search engine every day. So it isn't just a matter of slapping a filter sidebar on every page and suddenly having this new capability, the various other types of records themselves would have to be redesigned for that to work.)

[lilydalexf]

Old School X is a project interviewing X-Files fanfic authors who were posting fic during the original run of the show. New interviews are posted every Tuesday.

Interview with Marasmus

Marasmus only has a handful of fics left at Gossamer, but you can find more X-Files fics at AO3 (as finisterre). Some of my favorites of her stories I've recced here before, including one of the most clever fics you could read, Cellphone (here at AO3), and the lovely, London-set A Candle for Katherine (here at AO3, bonus commentary at LJ). Big thanks to Marasmus for doing this interview.

Does it surprise you that people are still interested in reading your X-Files fanfics and others that were posted during the original run of the show (1993-2002)?

Mine, yes, older XF in general, no — some of that stuff is amazing. Though I wonder how well fandom operates now there is not a plethora of rec sites. I know of yours and one more Tumblr blog and that’s it.  I find it really difficult to find good stories in any fandom unless someone whose taste maps to mine recommends something.

What do you think of when you think about your X-Files fandom experience? What did you take away from it?

I look back on it fondly, but it was one of the first things that really hammered it home to me that every grouping throughout life follows the pattern of school.

A lot of people are really talented and funny and kind. Then there are absolute ego-rampaging nightmares who act like lady bountiful in public but do cruel things in private, or chuck their toys out of the pram at the least provocation.

And like school, fandom brings together a disparate group of people who you’re friendly with, but once you leave, the ones you stay in touch with are your friends.

Social media didn't really exist during the show's original run. How were you most involved with the X-Files online (atxc, message board, email mailing list, etc.)?

Thank God.

I watched the show pre-widespread internet and mostly when I had almost no money. I didn’t have regular internet access until the third season, and that was only at my incredibly conservative workplace. I didn’t get home internet access until midway through season six. You couldn’t download episodes easily, you couldn’t stream, you just had to wait until it aired overseas. I decided I didn’t care if I was spoiled and that worked for me. In fact for some particularly annoying episodes, I was glad.

I was a newsgroup and mailing list sort of person. Never really did message boards unless a newsgroup counts, though I had a Haven account.

What did you take away from your experience with X-Files fic or with the fandom in general?

Mostly, how talented people are. I know some are now professional writers, but so many people who didn’t do it as anything but a hobby were also amazing.

What was it that got you hooked on the X-Files as a show?

I always liked science fiction, oddness and urban legends, so it was kind of made for me. But it was the relationship between Mulder and Scully that kept me around, and after season six, it was the fandom that kept me around. I loved Scully in particular, cos let’s be honest, Mulder can be kind of a twerp at times.

What got you involved with X-Files fanfic?

I hung out on alt.tv.xfiles.analysis (a newsgroup), which was one of the smartest boards I’ve ever been on. The threads were full of well-read, erudite people. That led to a site which collated reviews of XF episodes. They mentioned alt.tv.xfiles.creative, and I got there the summer after Gethsemane, which was pretty optimal timing.

I’d take floppy disks into conservative workplace and quietly download the most gloriously filthy fanfic onto them for reading at home on my ancient second-hand Mac.

After that I joined Scullyfic, a mailing list, which was a lovely place to hang out for a while, and got stories through a couple of other mailing lists.

What is your relationship like now to X-Files fandom?

Like my relationship to ice hockey: glad that activity exists and that some people enjoy it, but not watching and not involved myself.

Were you involved with any fandoms after the X-Files? If so, what was it like compared to X-Files?

Reading, yes, and writing the odd bit of feedback, but any other fandom involvement didn’t really take. I’ve never found a bunch of people I liked as well as I liked some of the people in XF.

Who are some of your favorite fictional characters? Why?

I am usually more interested in female characters than male ones (the Doctor, Mulder and Jack O’Neill notwithstanding), which is why I only read a bit of m/m slash. I usually develop a perverse dislike for any woobie the fandom loves.  

Some favourites are: Samantha Carter and Jack O’Neill, Granny Weatherwax, Furiosa, everyone from The Good Place, Donna Noble, Sarah Jane Smith, Martha Jones and Yasmin Khan, Maia from The Goblin Emperor, Cordelia Naismith and Miles Vorkosigan, General Leia Organa, Rey and Finn, and lately all of The Old Guard, even Booker...

I like nerds, pining, best friends discovering feelings for each other, second chances, redemption narratives, people being sneaky for good ends and stoics who stay stoic through all kinds of misery, only to crack and start crying when they get a happy ending.

Basically, you know Eleanor at the end of the Emma Thompson Sense and Sensibility? That.

Do you ever still watch The X-Files or think about Mulder and Scully?

No. I had about four years there where I made up stories about Mulder and Scully on any commute where I’d forgotten a book, but that’s gone now. I watched two episodes of the revival, but it wasn’t for me.

Do you ever still read X-Files fic? Fic in another fandom?

I occasionally wander in and read a bit on AO3, but nothing that deals with anything past season seven. Not interested in William, not interested in domestic fiction, not even interested in post-col any more, which was 100% my crack during XF fandom days. I did read By the Dim and Flaring Lamps [Lilydale note: by @sunflowerseedsandscience] earlier this year. Love a bit of AU historical.

I read lots of different fandoms, though I am between intense enthusiasms at the moment, which always feels a bit odd.

Do you have any favorite X-Files fanfic stories or authors?

Yes, but they’re all about 20 years old. Is there such a thing as fandom classics any more?  There used to be a litany of stories that ‘everyone should read’. I wonder how well they hold up now.

I think there are waves of writers who come into a fandom and then leave again: I think I was part of a second wave, with the first wave being Mustang Sally, RivkaT, Karen Rasch, Lydia Bower, Nascent etc.

Then there must’ve been a third wave for the revival (and mini-waves in between). I don’t know that group of writers, so I am probably leaving out people who are really good.

One of my favourite Scully voices is Five Years and One Night [Lilydale note: by Shalimar], because of the contrast between her inner monologue as written and how little she actually says.

I really like quieter, thoughtful authors like Michelle Kiefer, Cecily Sasserbaum, Scullysfan, Cofax, Anjou, Maria Nicole, Kipler.  Love everything Kel ever wrote.

At one point there were also about three authors called Rachel who were knockout. I like to think Rachel Howard is writing professionally because it’s a waste of talent if she’s not. Rachel Anton had a crazy gift for pacing and wrote a good Krycek.

I really liked Branwell’s strange AU novels, which riff off The Field Where I Died (a wretched episode but so much good writing came from it.) [Lilydale note: Condemned to Repeat It by Branwell is a really long story involving The Field Where I Died.]

Everyone who is reccing other people’s stuff here is also a good writer. (and their taste in recs is — mostly — excellent): http://www.thebasementoffice.com/museaxfnet/museans/TitlesAF.html

What is your favorite of your own fics, X-Files and/or otherwise?

I like The Flexible Concept of Tomorrow. I loved trying to work out the timelines. I like the one about airships and cross-dressing which only exists on my iPhone and in my imagination right now.

Do you think you'll ever write another X-Files story? Or dust off and post an oldie that for whatever reason never made it online?

Only an AU, if ever. I am completely at sea with canon.

Do you still write fic now? Or other creative work?

In my head. Mostly AUs. Everyone has daemons! It’s an airship! They’re exploring space! It’s mediaeval Slovenia!

Most of my creativity is sucked away by work. Which is good I suppose, as writing fanfic never paid my Netflix subscription.

Where do you get ideas for stories?

Reading long-form journalism and non-fiction books.  

What's the story behind your pen name?

Well, I changed mine. The first one was picked out of a magazine article about Branwell Bronte, and I liked the shape of the word. Then I got to feel uncomfortable with it because it was a real illness that made people suffer. The current one comes from the shipping forecast when I was a kid.

Do your friends and family know about your fic and, if so, what have been their reactions?

No, and also absolutely not. Over my dead body. Over YOUR dead body.

Is there a place online (tumblr, twitter, AO3, etc.) where people can find you and/or your stories now?

I took my stories off Gossamer but I don’t remember why. They’re on AO3 now and there are probably stray copies on some archives out there.

Is there anything else you'd like to share with fans of X-Files fic?

I have made all of these mistakes. All of ‘em.

— On no account offer unsolicited concrit. In fact, do not provide concrit EVEN IF THE PERSON ASKS FOR IT, unless you know them reasonably well and it’s in private.

— Avoid the wank. If you have the perfect riposte to something awful, write it and file it to drafts for two days. If you still want to send it after that, godspeed.

— Write anything you want, and when you start keep going. You can edit later.

— Never put any story into the public sphere unless you’ve had a second pair of eyes on it, preferably the eyes of someone who is willing to say “are you SURE about that?”

Finally, just have fun. Being in the grip of love of story is a wonderful thing, and you never know how long it will last.

(Posted by Lilydale on September 29, 2020)

[antivirus-mh-au]

Antivirus - Chapter 2

TW: None Chapter 1 here Ao3 link If you like this, please leave a like, reblog, or send me an ask! It encourages me so much.

He blew the smoke from his mouth around the cigarette, the morning sun catching all the particles as they floated into the air. Tim drew the J on top of the fresh carton and dropped the pen onto the dashboard. Pulling the cigarette from his mouth, he drew in a deep breath of fresh air, fresh as you could get at a gas station by a highway. Looking around the parking lot, at the people filing in and out, he shook his head and gave a wry smile. Hard not to be in a good mood when you got some decent sleep for once.

Becca and Lukas were okay. Lukas's leg had been taken care of, and the two had set back off for Idaho, back to the families that loved them. Another success case for Timothy Kane. Another group of people adding to the myth of his existence. Seemed like every month there were more of them. The Operator never tired. The sickness never eased. In fact, it only grew worse.

But like hell was he going to start off a good morning with that depressing shit. He'd gotten paid, gotten rest, and he'd found out where the nearest library was with free internet. He was not going to let a rare moment of peace escape him. He'd lost too much for that.

The library wasn't far away from the gas station he'd refilled at. By the time he pulled into the parking lot, it was open, as were the windows on the front of the building. He spoke briefly to the clerk at the front desk, making sure he understood their internet rules and that it was okay for him to bring in his thermos of coffee, before finding a convenient spot by a power outlet. 

His laptop was getting old, it took a while for it to boot up. As Tim waited, he thumbed through a newspaper. Experts predicting a war with China for the third time in as many years, conflict in the Middle East, the royal family in Britain getting roped into some scandal or another. That was why he didn't read the news much, it was always the same. By the time he got to the comics (never his favorite part of the newspaper), his laptop had finished, and Tim traded the two without a second thought.

He could and did check his email on his phone but he was old-fashioned and preferred to use his laptop when he had the chance. Earlier Becca's mother replied to his report about her daughter returning home, a message he'd saved in a special folder he looked at when he felt particularly shitty. 

Another email was waiting for him now, from a 'Meridith Frederickson'. Another client, looking for her son and his missing best friend. He replied to that one, offering to schedule a Zoom meeting later that same day. By now he knew all too well what happened if he wasn't on top of his cases. 

And of course, he had new messages in the spam folder. Tim glanced over the subjects of the emails without opening any of them. Some didn't have any, but most were vaguely threatening, the kind he usually got from trolls and kids. 'Always watching', 'there's no escape', 'how could you', and on and on and on. People thought they could get a rise out of him by acting like totheark, but none of them even came close to what Brian had been all those years ago. 

Tim glanced at the tab next to his email, frowning. There was no sense in trying to put it off, even if he hated doing it. Everything on that site made him feel worse, and today had been a pretty good day. But if he didn't look, he'd regret it later, falling into a rabbit hole of updates that was guaranteed to fuck him over. So he opened YouTube.

The videos were taken down years ago, the channels involved with Marble Hornets wiped from the website. But that didn't mean they were gone, just hidden away on Google Drives and shock sites. What was on YouTube was... the fandom.

It made his skin crawl thinking about it. People from all over the world were obsessed with what he and Jay had been through. He'd seen hundreds of articles about the videos, from five minute listicles to long analysises about the events and the people involved. He'd seen other things, too, things he'd rather not remember. Like the fanart...

Out of everything, though, it was the YouTube community that unsettled him the most. The passionate, wide eyed college kids. The naive high schoolers. The older people, with their backgrounds in criminal science and forensics and cryptids and God knew what else. They picked over the videos and tweets and codes like vultures at a pile of bones. Like it was just a fictional web series, like people he knew and once liked weren't dead. And they spread the disease. It didn't take all of them, leaving the YouTubers alone, but claiming their followers. It made him sick thinking about all the people he couldn't save, the people who had no one left to try and find them, the people who vanished into Rosswood Park and were never seen again. It made him sick, watching these ignorant people talk about his pain as if they were all insects under microscopes.

But if he didn't pay attention, who knew what might happen. The Operator was watching all of them. One slip up was all it took.

He scrolled through both the front page and his subscriptions. The videos were, in the end, all the same. Speculation, discussion, analyzation. Some of them he could watch later. Others needed his attention now.

Tim’s eyes landed on a video, and his heart clenched. The Neophyte was streaming again.

The still image didn’t show much. Neophyte_Calling didn’t put much work into his channel. It was just a shot of what the streams normally showed, pale, unkempt hands poking free from black robes, resting on an old plastic table. That was what he expected to find once he opened the stream.

And he’d be correct, that was what awaited him once he got the courage to click. The hands twitched and clenched and dug at the table. It wasn’t the hands that were special though, it was what the owner of those hands were saying.

“Autumn after firestorm, the nights don’t listen and the butter is on the corn. Ten days or twenty paces of living guts wrapped around an old man’s neck. The water comes up to your waist but you don’t feel the attitude of denial inside the bastard daughter’s heart. Oh, god, eureka, industry was never so smooth…”

Complete nonsense. The ramblings of a man on some kind of drug, or lost to some unknown mental illness. Despite this, the chat flooded with messages. Donations popped up occasionally, attempts to get the Neophyte’s attention. He didn’t notice. He never noticed. He just kept talking. And he would keep talking until the stream ended on its own, or he passed out on the table.

People called him a prophet. Claimed every word he spoke had a double, or even a triple, meaning. They recorded every word he said and discussed them among themselves, coming up with ‘translations’ for his maddening dialogue. And to be fair, they could have a point. Sometimes, what the Neophyte said did seem to foretell events that happened not long after he spoke them. But the god the Neophyte channeled was not one Tim would ever ask someone to worship.

Silence. The man stopped talking, his fidgeting hands resting flat on the table. Dread filled Tim’s body. Speak of the devil, he was doing this again?

The Neophyte spoke again, his voice deeper now. The words came clumsy from his mouth, uncomfortable, heavy, as if he had never spoken before. The emphasis, the tone, it was all wrong. Tim had no trouble understanding them, however.

“You always fight,” It said through the Neophyte’s mouth. “You always resist. You tire, and exhaust, and fall. You continue to fight despite.”

The robes shifted, the head hidden from the camera’s view tilting.

“Tim,” It said. “You are a grain of sand. I am eternal. I am here. I will always be here. You understand. You continue despite.”

On the side of the screen, the chat surged with messages. It raced so quickly, Tim couldn’t have read any of them even if he tried. He didn’t look away from the livestream. 

“Tim,” It said again. “Enough. You have fought hard. You are getting old. That’s enough. It’s time to come home. To us. To all of us.”

The hair stood up on his arms, on the back of Tim’s neck. He shuddered.

“Like hell,” he whispered, and closed the tab.

But even though he closed the livestream, he could swear he heard the Neophyte, the thing puppeting him, whisper in his mind.

“Coward.”

When 2pm rolled around, Tim was back in his van in the library parking lot. Obviously he couldn’t do a Zoom call inside the quiet space, but their internet reached well past the parking lot. He sat on his bed, now folded up like a couch inside the converted van he lived in. His laptop open before him, the program open and ready. Now he just had to wait for her.

Hard to say what this Meredith Fredrickson would expect a private investigator like him to look like, but Tim did his best to look presentable anyway. Hair combed, beard trimmed, leather jacket kept to the side out of her line of sight - leather jackets weren’t worn by authority figures, and that was what he was trying to be right now. Not anyone could do this job, but who’s to say she knew that? If she didn’t like the way he looked, she could try to find someone else to find her son and his friend. And if she did that, by the time she realized only Tim could help her, it would be too late.

Thinking about it that way made him shudder.

Of course, while he was prepared to deal with what she thought he would look like, he wasn’t as ready for what she herself would look like. As the call began, and Meredith’s face came on screen, Tim hesitated. He looked at her closely again. Had he seen this woman before?

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Fredrickson,” He greeted.

The woman shook her head, her curly brown hair tossing around her slim shoulders.

“Meredith is fine,” she said. “I haven’t been called ‘Mrs’ since my husband died. I changed back to my maiden name - my son’s last name will be his, not mine.”

“Of course,” Tim said. Odd information to include, but people tended to ramble when they were nervous.

He looked at her again, at the frown lines developing around her lips, and the worry and pain in her wide-set eyes. Behind her was a normal looking home, a few windows with pale curtains, a kitchen kept clean from what little he saw. Something was nagging at him. What was it?

“Did you fill out the information packet I requested?” He asked.

Meredith nodded.

“Yes.”

The file appeared, Tim half-listening to her as he opened it.

“I know this is a very strange thing to ask from you,” Meredith said. “But circumstances have changed in a way I really didn’t expect. I know it’s hard to believe that after ten years my son could be alive, but I don’t have any other explanation for…”

She trailed off. Tim didn’t look away from the document she’d sent. The names written on the very first line.

Missing People: Jay Merrick and Alex Kralie

Motherfucker, had he been tricked?

Tim shot the woman a sharp glance, examining her expression in seconds. She was not the first person to ask him to track down Jay and Alex, but she was the first he hadn’t screened out before it got this far. Most people were upfront about their intentions, or were obviously trolling, or he otherwise got weird vibes from them. This Meredith had slipped him by, and wasted his time in the process.

“He is my son,” Meredith said. “I’ve included his birth certificate, since I thought you might not believe me.”

“I don’t need it.” A birth certificate? Those weren’t easy to fake, but Tim was no expert on Photoshop either. 

“I would’ve included Alex’s, too,” Meredith continued. “After all the years he and Jay knew each other, you would’ve thought I’d have it too.” She laughed, and there was pain within it. “But his parents died in a car accident about six years back, and…”

“Wait.” Tim refocused. “Alex and Jay knew each other?”

“Since the first year of middle school,” Meredith said with a nod. “I have a lot of photos of them. You know, Jay went through a phase, where he wore all black, and listened to rock music with singers I couldn’t understand. He got a tattoo of one of the bands on his ankle behind my back. I was so angry...”

She laughed again, and her eyes went distant. Tim stared at her, his mind flashing back to all the conversations he’d had with Jay, things that didn’t go into the videos. Being Alex’s childhood friend, since middle school - the phases he went through as a teen - that damn tattoo he was so embarrassed of. None of these were known by the fandom.

Oh god, this woman was the real deal. Even her face, now that he looked at her, was just like Jay’s. The distant look in her eyes as she thought… Jay got that same expression.

“Meredith,” he said, his voice softer, kinder. “Do you know about Marble Hornets?”

“I can’t bring myself to watch them,” she said. Meredith folded her hands together. “But I know what… what was shown on the videos. I know that they are…” She swallowed. “Considered dead by most people. I was one of them.”

His gut twisted. By most people, including her. “But something… changed.”

“Yes.” She took a deep breath, and moved to wipe her eyes. “I got a package in the mail about a week ago. Inside was a flashdrive and a few printed photos. It had been placed in my mailbox - I don’t know who sent it.”

Oh no, Tim thought. Not this again. Please, don’t play this game with people again.

“What were the photos?” He asked, aware of the sound of his own voice more than anything else.

“I’ve included most of them in the document,” Meredith said. “I… I still can’t believe what I’ve seen, but… But they don’t look like they could’ve been faked.”

Dread pressed down on his shoulders. Dread and something else, some kind of energy buzzing through his nerves. Tim looked at the document, scrolled down, and opened the photos.

Some were blurry, taken from a distance and zoomed in before being printed. Some were clear as glass. It took him several seconds to process what he was seeing, what the subjects of the photos were. Tim blinked, looked again, and his pulse quickened.

Alex, standing on a street corner, gray in his hair, exhaustion on his face. Jay in a dark cloth jacket with a hood, looking over his shoulders. Alex, and Jay, Alex, and Jay, in all the photos, in every single one. The clothes were different, the faces aged, but there was no denying what he was seeing, and like Meredith said, no way to fake what he was looking at.

“Oh my god,” Tim mumbled.

Jay and Alex were alive.

[pebblysand]

[writing rant - on the monetisation of fanfiction]

a couple of months ago, when i updated my long fic, one of the people on the comments wrote to me the nicest possible review (one of the ones that you keep in your feel-good 'saved' emails - you know the ones), which, amongst other things also said: 'If I could pay you for this...believe me, I would.'

in the moment, i kind of smiled and laughed, and thanked the person for their kind words before moving on with my life. yet, since then, i have to admit that this sentence has kind of been living rent-free in my head. i think it is also because since diving back into fandom a few months ago, i've noticed something that kind of shocked me at first: more and more fanfiction writers seem to be monetising (or attempting to monetise) their craft.

now, back when i started writing fanfic, we wrote fanfic on ffnet and livejournal. it was accepted that thou shalt never (ever) charge money for your writing or else the author and their mean, angry lawyers will come after you for damages and you will die a slow and painful death. we wrote disclaimers at the start of all of our posts and thanked the gods every day when we did not get sued.

i have seen this change gradually over the years. first, in the mid 2010s, the disclaimers went. then, i noticed that people were getting 'tipped' for fanart, sometimes even charging commission. from what i understand (though, don't quote me on this, i'm not an ip lawyer and this post is not intended as legal advice), this is because the way the concept of fair use is framed under us law makes it easier to monetise fanart than it does fanfiction. maybe this is why visual artists came first on this trend. later still (and more recently) i've noticed fanfic writers, doing the same thing.

to be fully honest, the first thought i had when i saw this trend, considering the fear of god (and his lawyers) that was instilled in me in the past, was: how on earth is this even possible? (i'll come back to that in a bit). the second, though, was: fuck, i wish i had the guts to do that, lol.

because, yeah, i will admit, the idea of getting paid for writing what i love to write does appeal, to a certain extent. i won't lie. dear fanfiction writers who've tried to do that recently: i one hundred per cent get it.

looking back at the last fifteen years, i would say that for me, writing fanfiction has been (in terms of time commitment and energy consumed) the equivalent of having an on-and-off part time job. a job that i have held for one or two years at a time, then quit for a while, before coming back to it when i needed (wanted) it again. i obviously can't realistically give you a number re:the actual total of hours i have spent at this since i started out, but i can give you an idea. recently, i started clocking my hours out of interest and calculated that a chapter of my current long fic takes roughly between one hundred to two hundred hours to produce (and they're around 10,000 words). at that rate, i'm probably working 20 hours a week-ish? sometimes more, sometimes less? something as small as a three-sentence fic (like this for instance), takes roughly two/three hours. i'll be honest, i have cancelled plans to write fic. when i'm working on a long project, i do tend to organise my life to give myself the time to write, so i opt for socialising after work during the week rather than on weekends, as i've found this is when i write best. i won't lie: it is - for me (i know some people write quicker, bless them) - a huge time suck.

so, yeah, i understand, in the capitalist society we live in, wanting to make that time count. our world has unfortunately, repeatedly taught us that time is money and getting more does seem like a nice bonus (as long as you have an audience for your art that's willing to pay, obviously). after all, year after year, i've seen a lot of my friends try and monetise their passions as side hustles, with varying success. at first, glance, i look at the time i spend on writing fanfiction and think: man, i wish i could get a bit back from that too. i couldn't even draw a stick figure to save my life but i assume that the time commitment and energy put into that kind of work is roughly similar for visual fanartists as well. i thus very much understand the sentiment, both with fanart and fanfiction.

additionally, though i appreciate this is a bit tangential, the fact that fanfiction is free, i would argue, hinders its potential to be as representative as it could be. it's a bit sad because on the one hand, the fact that it is free makes it completely accessible to the masses but on the other, it makes fanfiction quite exclusive to rich, privileged people who can afford to spend the time and energy putting content out for free. if i spend this much time writing fanfiction, just because i like it and it makes me happy, it's because my full time job pays me enough to cover my bills. if it didn't, i probably would have to forgo writing and get a proper side gig. if you look at my periods of inactivity on ao3, those also kind of coincide with the times in my life when i had to have more things going on to put food on the table.

so, now, assuming that monetisation is a thing that, as a fic writer, one might want to look at, the next question is: how do you go about monetising it? obviously, the law hasn't changed since the days where we were all terrified of getting sued (although enforcement has been quite lax over the years) so it's more about finding workarounds around the law as it is, rather than actively seeking payment for fanart.

from what i've seen: two main solutions seem to exist.

first, there's the tipping/buy-me-coffee technique. as i understand it, this involves either setting up a page on one of the dedicated websites or just putting up your paypal account link on your tumblr posts. with these links, people can then send you however much money they want (however much money they can afford/think you deserve?) on a one-off basis. they're not actually paying for fanfic because there is no actual exchange of services, it's basically like them giving money to charity, except that charity is a fanfic writer/ fan artist whose work they enjoy.

there are two main issues i see with this: one, legally, i'm not sure how much ground this actually holds. assuming you're quite prolific/successful, if every time you're producing new content, you receive dozens of tips, although you're not actively charging for your fanart, making the argument that your content isn't what these people are actively paying for seems hard. imo, the fact that this method sort of holds is that realistically, you're going to make very little out of this. even if you're really good, you might make what? a couple hundred dollars. now, sure, that's a lot of money for a lot of people but in the grand scheme of things, no one sues anyone for such a low amount. as long as you're not making 'proper' money from it, it is highly unlikely that anyone would come after you.

this being said, the second issue, from my perspective, is that this is not in any way, shape or form, a reliable income. it also does not represent, at all, the cost of the time and investment actually put into said fanfiction (or fanart, i assume). for example: if you're going to tip someone who's worked on something for, say, fifty hours, ten dollars, that's very good of you, but that isn't going to be 'worth' their time. it is only worth their time if tipping is done at as scale, which imo is quite unlikely considering you're putting your content out for free anyway. there are kind souls who will tip you, but not that many, meaning that ultimately, you're not working for free anymore, but you're still working at a huge loss.

additionally, because this income is not even reliable on a monthly/weekly basis, it isn't something that anyone can actually rely on, even if only to fund their coffee habit. it's nice to have, don't get me wrong, but from my perspective, is the legal risk outlined above worth the trouble for the $20/30 tips i'd get every once in a while - not really. such low amounts also don't help diminish the class issue that i talked about earlier. again, if you're going to spend fifty hours on something, you might as well work a minimum wage job - even that will pay you more and will be dependable.

second, there's patreon (and patreon-like sites). here, the income is monthly, people pledge on a subscription basis, which does solve the last point above. it might not be much, but at least it's regular.

the main issue i see with patreon is that it is contingent on the author providing more services on top of what they already provide. in most cases, the author will keep putting their usual content out for free + provide their patreons (depending on tiers) with more content, specifically for them. this, to me, makes this scheme even less appealing than the previous one because a) if i can't provide fanfic to potential patreons (again, you can't sell fanfic), i'm not sure what on earth i could give them (original content? that's not really the same market) and b) that's even more work on my plate. honestly, considering the amount of time i already spend writing fanfic, i have neither the energy nor the willpower to provide extra content for an amount that, regardless, will probably pay me less than a part-time job would. again, you'd have to scale this (i.e. have enough patreons) to make it all worth your while, and even in very big fandoms, even for someone waaaaay more successful than me, i doubt it would be likely.

lastly, as a side note, both of these "methods" are solely accepted if they occur on tumblr/writer's own website, rather than on the writer's ao3 page/fic. there was a post going around explaining why that is (nutshell: it endangers ao3's status as a non-profit archive) but as with all things, i seem to have lost it. [if you do have the link to that post/know what i'm talking about, hit me up and i'll rectify this]. this, regardless, supposes driving traffic from wherever you post your fics towards tumblr/your own website which, again, decreases your chances of scaling this.

so, in the end, where does that leave us?

i think, at this point, we've kind of reached a crossroad. ultimately, i see two ways to look at this:

option one: if you believe that fanfiction writers should be paid for their art, you also probably agree that the methods outlined above, while they do offer some sort of solution, are less than ideal. the ideal solution (for this option) would obviously be to allow fanfiction authors to be properly paid for the publication of their work through 'normal' publishing/self-publishing deals, without the need for a licence from the author (bar - perhaps - the payment of royalties). that would create a proper 'market' for fanfiction, treating it as any other form of writing/art form. it would mean a complete overhaul of the laws currently in place, but why not? ultimately, in a democracy, laws are meant to be changeable.

this being said, though, while my personal knee jerk reaction would be to shout 'hurray!' at this solution, i do not actually think i want this. or, maybe, only part of me does. the part of me who has been writing fanfiction for free for fifteen years is like 'hey, yay, maybe i could get paid!'. but then, there is another part of me that would like, maybe, one day, to write more original fiction (i already do a bit, but not much). that part of me is feels frankly a bit icky about giving up her ip rights.

would i be comfortable with people writing fanfiction of my original work? hell yes. that would be the dream. imagine having your own ao3 fandom, omg. however, would i be comfortable with people profiting from writing fanfiction of my work? honestly, i'm not sure. to me, the answer to that is: it depends (how much time investment was put in? how original the concept is? etc.) which, in fact, kind of brings us back to the current concept of licensing. and yes, maybe the current frame imposed by copyright law has also shaped the way i view the concept of property, and maybe i should be more of a communist, free-for-all kind of person, but unfortunately, i'm not that revolutionary.

also, and slightly tangentially, i find it interesting how profiting from fanficition/fanart is seen as more acceptable i certain fandoms rather than in others. taking the hp fandom for instance, even prior to jkr expressing her views on transgender rights, i often read things like: 'ah, she's so rich anyway, she doesn't need the money.' now, that argument has not only gained traction but is also reinforced by: 'ah, she's the devil and i don't want to fund her. it'd rather give my money to fanfic authors/buy things on etsy.'

while i completely understand the sentiment and do not, in any way, shape or form, support jkr's views, i do find that argument quite problematic. if you set the precedent that because someone is too rich, or because they've expressed views you disagree with, you don't believe that they should be entitled to their own intellectual property rights, i do wonder: where does this stop? this being justified for jkr could lead to all sorts of small artists seeing other people stealing/profiting from their original work without authorisation. 'i don't pay you 'cause i disagree with you,' would then act as a justification, with i find highly unfair. the fact of the matter is: jkr created hp. knowing that, the choice of buying hp products, regardless of her opinions is completely and entirely yours, but buying the same stuff unlicensed, from people who are infringing on her copyrights seems, to me, very problematic as this could potentially be scaled to all artists. either we overhaul the entire copyright system or we don't, but making special cases is dangerous, in my humble opinion.

option two: we choose to preserve copyright law as it is, for the reasons outlined above. this means that most people will not get paid for the content they put out and that the few that do will operate on a very tight, legal rope, and work for tips that are a 'nice bonus' but not a proper pay. this sort of perpetuates the idea that fanfiction is 'less than' other art forms, because in our capitalist society, things that don't generate money (things often made by women, may i add) are not seen as being as valuable as things that do.

for me, personally, while getting paid to write fanfiction sounds lovely (and makes my bank account purr) in theory, i think i side to preserve the current system. as an artist, i think that intellectual property protects us and our concepts from being ripped off by others, including by big companies who might find it handy to steal a design, a quote, anything, without proper remuneration. this is even more important for smaller artists who wouldn't necessarily have the means to defend their craft otherwise.

this being said, i do appreciate that it depends on why you're writing fanfiction. i think that topic probably deserves a whole different post in its own right but ultimately, most people write fanfic because it's fun. we know it's for fun, and not for profit. and if that's the case, then we're okay to receive compliments, reblogs and sometimes, for some people a little bit of an awkward tip for our work. for me, fanfic has been a space to make friends, to get feedback, to learn and to experiment without the pressure of money being involved. that's why i don't particularly mind doing it for free, and wouldn't even bother setting up a patreon or tip-me jar. i love being able to do it just for the enjoyment of myself and my five followers (lol), without worrying about scaling it, or making it profitable. not every part of our lives, not every passion has to be profitable. as we say in ireland, you do it 'for the craic' and nothing else.

this, though, as i already said, also depends on your means and level of privilege. to me, writing for free is fantastic and a bloody relief - it means being able to do exactly what i want. original fiction writing is full of rules, and editors, and publishers. in fanfic, i can write whatever i feel like, and i'm willing to forgo a salary in exchange of that freedom. again, i have a full time job that covers my bills. this does mean, though, that i don't have as much time to dedicate to writing as i would like to.

and also, the thing is: i'm a small author. i happily write in my own little niche. bar that one comment, it is highly unlikely that anyone would actually want to pay me (or even tip me) for my content. but when you look at very successful people, like the author of all the young dudes, i could see how they'd want to get paid for their art, and why they'd feel differently.

bottom line for me is: the flaws of the current systems of remuneration combined with my strong belief in copyright law as a means to protect small, original creators, means that i don't really think it would be right for me to get paid for fanfic, even if i was the kind of person who had the market for it. whilst it would be nice, this very long rant has, hopefully, explained why.

[queenangst]

This is a truly dumb question im so sorry but do u recommend making an ao3 account to someone who isnt a content creator?? Idk why im still on the fence abt making one haha

it’s not a dumb question!

there are plenty of reasons why you might want to create an ao3 account as a non-content creator, and there are plenty of non-content creators on ao3! 

keeping up with authors/stories: 

probably the main reason to have an ao3 account is it makes it a lot easier to keep up with stories or authors that you like. ao3 has fic subscriptions, which means you can get an email update every time a new chapter of a work is posted, and also author subscriptions, which notifies you when a new work is posted by the author you’re subbed to. 

saving fics: 

when you have an ao3 account, you can save fics in a variety of ways. bookmarks will let you have a digital, organized library of all the fics you want to mark. you can also mark for later a fic you want to read, but maybe don’t have time for yet. 

while i don’t do this often, you can also download fics. this is a good option for example, if you know you’re going to be without internet and you want to read fic; alternatively, maybe you prefer reading a fic as an epub like you might a book; or maybe, in some cases, a fic author is going to delete a fic, so you download it to be able to still read it. (there’s some general etiquette about the last one i won’t go into, be mindful.)

other: 

locked fics - ao3 allows authors to lock their fics to ao3-users only, so you might miss out on some really good stuff without an account! and what about ao3... but dark ao3? i love reading fics in dark mode lol. 

i did not cover all of ao3′s features in this response, but these are probably the main reasons why you’d get one. 

here’s another post about why to get ao3 as a reader. here’s another post.

ALSO: 

if anyone doesn’t want to wait in the ao3 queue and needs an ao3 invite, i have some! just ask me and i can send u a code <3 (ao3 accounts are created through invitations from either an automated queue, or through being invited by a pre-existing user.) (what does that mean? here’s the invitation faq.)

[acaciapines]

dunno if you've seen it yet but there's an app called Fanfic Pocket Library and it's ripping data and fics from Ao3 and then using ads and subscriptions to make cash off them. i found your fics on them, jsyk. when i found mine i went to Ao3 and locked all my fics and they don't show up on the app anymore. might be a temp solution, but it's something

yeah, i found that too, sent their support an email asking for them to remove my fics, but haven’t heard anything back yet. if i still don’t after a while i’ll probably lock my fics too, but i don’t really want to do that bc, yknow, i like letting anybody read them even if they’re not logged in. it’s just a big :/ mood. why do these apps exist. 

[eleanor-writes-stuff]

a language that i never knew existed before - Day 12

For @dawninthemtn, who asked for a modern AU in which “Ben Solo keeps trying to cancel his Book-A-Month subscription service, but just can't seem to say no to the friendly customer service agent”.

This was so much fun to write, especially since it allowed me to sneak some epistolary storytelling into this collection. Thanks for the prompt, and I hope you enjoy the ficlet!

Reylo fam! ‘Tis the season for giving, so come get your very own holiday ficlet right here!

25 Days of Reylo Also available on AO3

JUNE

To: custservice@resistancebooks.com From: ben_solo@gmail.com Subject: Cancellation/refund

My friend used my credit card to sign me up for a one-year YA subscription as a prank. I didn’t realize until the first box arrived today. I’d like to cancel the subscription and just pay for the box I’ve already received, if that’s okay.

To: ben_solo@gmail.com From: r_niima.custservice@resistancebooks.com Subject: Re: Cancellation/refund

Hi, Ben! I’m so sorry to hear about your experience with our service.

Our refund policy allows you to change your mind anytime and get a full refund for boxes not yet received. But might I suggest changing boxes instead? At $29.99 per month for a box of three books with a combined retail value of up to $59.99, we’re the most affordable book service in the country! If YA isn’t your thing, we offer eleven other standard boxes, along with an option for customization.

If you’d like to give us a second chance, please take this quick quiz to determine the best box for you. The results will automatically be emailed to me upon completion, and I’d be happy to guide you through the selection process.

Best regards, Rey Niima, Customer service representative, Resistance Books.

JULY

To: ben_solo@gmail.com From: r_niima.custservice@resistancebooks.com Subject: First box!

Hi, Ben!

Your first sci-fi/fantasy box just shipped out today, and should reach you within three working days. I hope you enjoy the selection, and thank you again for choosing to stick with us!

If you have any further questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me!

Best regards, Rey Niima, Customer service representative, Resistance Books.

To: r_niima.custservice@resistancebooks.com From: ben_solo@gmail.com Subject: Re: First box!

Hi, Rey.

Three working days, just like you said. Everything looks okay, thanks for your help.

Regards, Ben.

To: ben_solo@gmail.com From: r_niima.custservice@resistancebooks.com Subject: Re: Re: First box!

Hi, Ben!

I’m glad to hear the box arrived on time! If you don’t mind, please keep me informed on how you like the selection. I’ve got a few other suggestions for you based on your quiz results, and I’d be happy to switch your subscription if you’re not absolutely pleased with the sci-fi/fantasy box.

Best regards, Rey Niima, Customer service representative, Resistance Books.

To: r_niima.custservice@resistancebooks.com From: ben_solo@gmail.com Subject: Re: Re: Re: First box!

Hey, Rey.

I think that might be for the best. Sci-fi just isn’t what it used to be. Or maybe I’ve changed; it’s been a while since I last read anything in that genre.

Of course, if that’s too much trouble you can always just go ahead and process my refund. I’d hate to take up more of your time.

Regards, Ben.

To: ben_solo@gmail.com From: r_niima.custservice@resistancebooks.com Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: First box!

Hi, Ben!

It’s no trouble at all! I first joined Resistance back when it was an actual store, and I’ve always loved matching readers up with the right book. As long as you’re okay with it, I’d like to keep going until we find you the right match.

My next suggestion for you based on your quiz results is one of our non-fiction boxes, the history/anthropology combo. Please let me know by the 23rd of this month if you’re interested in that so that I can arrange for the switch and shipping.

Best regards, Rey Niima, Customer service representative, Resistance Books.

AUGUST

To: r_niima.custservice@resistancebooks.com From: ben_solo@gmail.com Subject: New box

Hi, Rey. The box just arrived today, and the selection is perfect.

So perfect that I already pre-ordered all three of them earlier this year.

I think it’s pretty obvious that this service and I just aren’t meant to be, as great as it is. I really do appreciate all of your help, especially you taking the time to discuss books with me off the clock, but it’s probably time to call it.

Unless you’ve got a third suggestion?

Sincerely, Ben.

To: ben_solo@gmail.com From: r_niima.custservice@resistancebooks.com Subject: Re: New box

What can I say? I’m good at my job – too good, in this case.

I’ve got at least three more suggestions for you, if you’d like to keep going. And your box should have come with a return ticket, if you’d like to send it back; I don’t see the point in you keeping the duplicates, unless you have a friend with the same unique taste in books? I’d be happy to process the return and credit it to your account. Same goes for your first two boxes; I’m sorry I forgot to mention it earlier.

I’ve actually really missed talking about books with someone, so really, thank you for humoring me. If you ever feel like debating the SWEU again, feel free to reach me at 555-3494. I like that things can get heated when we talk about those books, but it’s probably for the best if I don’t argue with a customer on my work email.

Best regards, Rey Niima, Customer service representative, Resistance Books.

SEPTEMBER

Rey: So technically we’re not supposed to tell anyone about this yet But Wait You still collect comics, right?

Ben: You make me sound like a teenage boy. I collect graphic novels, yes. Why?

Rey: You say potayto, I say potahto ANYWAY I know you’re not 100% happy with the customized box

Ben: They’re your picks for me, of course I’m happy with them.

Rey: Ben

Ben: I am! I’m just not happy with the fact that I barely get any time to read. And when I do get an hour to myself, my brain is too tired for anything intellectual.

Rey: You cutthroat lawyers and your ridiculous endless work Back to my point

Ben: You have one?

Rey: Very funny, Solo Okay so next month we’re announcing a special new box Limited time only And we’re only opening it up to 200 subscribers

Ben: Sounds like a big deal. What do we get, hand-bound manuscripts?

Rey: Even better Two trades and a hardcover, no extra charge

Ben: You’re kidding me.

Rey: Nope Completely serious You in?

Ben: Hey, Rey? No offence but that’s the stupidest question you’ve ever asked me.

Rey: Whatever, nerd I’ll sign you up

Ben: You’re my favorite person right now, thank you.

Rey: Careful, Solo Keep saying nice shit and I might actually start to like you

Ben: And we wouldn’t want that, of course.

Rey: Of course

OCTOBER

To: ben_solo@gmail.com From: custservice@resistancebooks.com Subject: Congratulations!

Hi there, Ben!

Your assigned customer service representative recently entered you for a chance to win one of our 200 limited-time-only comic box subscriptions.

We’re very pleased to let you know that you made the cut! As of next month, you’ll start receiving two trade paperbacks and a hardcover volume each month for the remaining duration of your subscription. We also noticed that you have seven months left with us, and as a sign of our appreciation we’d like to offer you the chance to add on another five months at the standard rate of $29.99 per month in order to receive a full year’s worth of comic boxes. If you’re interested, please contact your assigned customer service representative by the 31st of this month.

Congratulations again, and we hope you enjoy your boxes!

Best regards, Paige Tico, Head of customer service, Resistance Books.

.

Rey: Did you get the email???

Ben: Just read it. Can’t wait for the first box. Thanks, Rey. By the way, sign me up for the extension thing.

Rey: Can you believe how far we’ve come? It feels like just yesterday that you were trying to cancel your subscription at every turn

Ben: For what it’s worth, I’m glad I didn’t. So fucking glad. I wouldn’t have gotten to know you otherwise.

Rey: Stop, you’ll make me cry Ben? I’m happy we’re friends too

NOVEMBER

Rey: Is it there yet?

Ben: Rey. It’s been two hours. I haven’t even left the office yet.

Rey: Okay, NOW is it there yet?

Ben: Still at work. You’re the one who shipped it, can’t you track the package or something?

Rey: I could But I think I prefer it this way

Ben: Of course you do. You’re lucky I have no other friends.

Rey: As if you’d stop talking to me even if you had a hundred other friends I’m your favorite

Ben: Says who? Maybe Poe’s my favorite. I’ve known him since childhood, after all.

Rey: Poe is a prankster and you fucking hate him

Ben: I wouldn’t say hate.

Rey: Ben He stole your credit card and signed you up for a year’s worth of YA books

Ben: And if he hadn’t done that, you and I would never have met.

Rey: We haven’t Met, I mean Shit I don’t even know what you look like BRB, I’m gonna go stalk you on social

Ben: Honestly, I just assumed you already did.

Rey: Wow, I’m offended HOLY HELL, BEN

Ben: So you’ve found me. If this is about the ears no, I don’t know what the fuck’s going on there either. No one in my family does.

Rey: What ears? Your ears are FINE, silly I was talking about your hair Christ, do you shampoo with unicorn blood or something???

Ben: That would be very soulless lawyer of me, wouldn’t it?

Rey: Shut up, you’re not soulless Funless, maybe, but I’d like to think I’m helping with that

Ben: You are. In the interest of fairness, I’m going to stalk you too.

Rey: Not much to see, but go right ahead Ben? Wow did I scare you off already? And here I thought that was a decent picture

Ben: Shit, sorry. Got pulled into a meeting. It’s a great picture.

Rey: You don’t have to say that

Ben: Well, it is and I mean it. And… I hope this isn’t creepy but I love your smile.

Rey: Not creepy at all By the way I like your eyes

DECEMBER

To: ben_solo@gmail.com From: a_holdo@resistancebooks.com Subject: Come celebrate the holidays with us!

Hi, Ben!

Did you know that before Resistance Books went online and became the #1 book delivery service in the country, we were a tiny little indie store known as Gatalenta?

This holiday season, we’re returning to our roots – and we’d love for you to join us! Resistance Books will be participating in the annual Coruscant Christmas Market with our very own pop-up store from the 15th of December onwards!

This is a great time for you to come on by and check out the full range of our diverse offerings. And if something catches your eye, you’ll be able to bring it home with you for the same incredibly reasonable rate you know and love – pick any three books from our store for just $29.99!

We hope to see you there!

Warmest wishes, Amilyn Holdo, Founder and president, Resistance Books.

.

Rey: Hey, did you get the email about the pop-up store?

Ben: Yeah, I was just about to text you. I just realized your boss is a friend of my mom’s. Anyway, this is probably extremely unlikely but Will you be there?

Rey: Seriously?? That’s so weird And yes, actually I’ll be helping out 21st-25th, 11AM-8PM

Ben: You’re working on Christmas?

Rey: You know me Not like I’ve got anything else to do

Ben: Okay, feel free to say no but… What if I go on Christmas? We’d get to discuss books in person And maybe after your shift we could hang out? I haven’t been to the CCM in years, but Maz’s Cantina used to make the best hot chocolates.

Rey: Books, hot chocolate, and finally getting to meet my mysterious Internet stranger? Ben Solo, you’ve got yourself a date

Ben: Great! I mean Cool. I can’t wait. See you then.

Rey: See you!

Ben: Hey, so I just woke up and you’re not here Which is fine, it’s your choice to make And last night can be whatever you want it to be But… Rey, I know what I want it to be I know we moved fast, but yesterday meant a lot to me You mean a lot to me I just… I just want to make sure you know that before you make a decision And the decision’s yours to make, completely I’ll go along with whatever you want As long as we’re at least still friends Because I don’t think I could bear to lose you entirely, Rey Fuck, I don’t think I could bear to lose you at all Shit, sorry, that’s too much I’ll stop now Just… text me back, please?

Rey: Babe I’m in the kitchen Hurry up, breakfast is getting cold And Ben? You mean a lot to me too ❤

This is a little over two thousand words and stopped being about tsundoko about halfway through (if it even was in the first place), but it was such a fun idea to play with and I hope the format doesn’t get in the way of the story. I thought emails and texts would help me keep things short, but obviously that didn’t pan out.

Anyway, thanks for reading as always and I hope you liked it. Please don’t hesitate to like/reblog/comment!

[beatrice-otter]

I am sorry you’re struggling with this, and I’m sorry it feels like a burden to you. I hope you will do whatever you need to do to manage the stress and anxiety it is causing you. AO3commentoftheday and alexseanchai had some good suggestions.

But I do think you are so focused on what you think your subscribers expect of you that you are missing a few key things. As someone who has subscribed to a lot of people, here are my thoughts:

1) Some of the people who subscribe to you are probably polyfannish, that is, they read fic in a variety of fandoms. For all the ones who go “ugh, this isn’t what I followed them for!” there are others who will go “yay, they’re writing in this other fandom I love!” or “yay, a new fandom for me to explore!” (Seriously, I find new fandoms regularly because my favorite authors start writing in new fandoms, it is a joy.) The people who will be happy you’re writing in a new fandom are just as real as the ones who will be disappointed you are not writing exclusively for their fave any longer.

2) Subscribing is not a contract. This is not patreon, they’re not paying you in exchange for content. This is not social media, where people share content and interact in social and parasocial relationships. When someone follows you, you have no obligations to them whatsoever beyond the common obligations we have to each other on AO3 (don’t deliberately mistag your stuff, etc.). All subscription is, is them asking the archive to be notified when you have new content. There is no guarantee as to what sort of content it will be or how often it will come. If they like it, great! If it’s not their thing, that’s fine! The burden of managing subscriptions is completely, totally, and always on the suscriber’s shoulders. It is not on the creator’s shoulders. You have no obligations toward the people who have subscribed to you.

3) There is never a match of creator and subscriber so perfect that the subscriber will like every single fanwork the creator makes. There just isn’t! Even if you only ever posted in one fandom with one pairing, I guarantee you that every single person who subscribes to you would have some fics they love and others they are meh about and others they don’t like. That’s the nature of the beast. And even if, somehow, you could magically only produce works that all of your subscribers always like, they’re going to move on too! Most people get tired of a fandom eventually and move on. It happens! Your tastes and fandoms will change over time, and so will the tastes and fandoms of the people subscribed to you. And that is fine! That’s life! That is the way fandom works. Things change. You change, your audience changes. It’s natural and normal and good. The only possible result of worrying about “will my subscribers like this?” is making yourself crazy. There is no possible good that can come from that question.

4) If a subscriber doesn’t like a fanwork you create, the worst thing that happens is that they get an email notifying them of the existence of a story they don’t want to read. That’s it! That’s as bad as it gets! A single email, easily deleted. The absolute worst thing that can possibly happen is that someone looks at the email, takes a few seconds to decide “not my thing,” and hits the delete button. (Unless, of course, you’re deliberately mistagging things in an attempt to deceive people into reading your fic, but that is a problem on its own that has nothing to do with subscriptions.)

5) If a subscriber doesn’t like the sort of content you’re creating now, they can unsubscribe themselves. It’s very simple! There is a link at the bottom of every single update email to unsubscribe from the creator, fanwork, or series they subscribed to in order to get that notification. Or they can go to your profile page, and the unsubscribe button is right there at the top. And this is the subscriber’s choice to make. It is always within their power. If they don’t like being subscribed to you, they can stop at any time, and it is quick and easy to do so. The burden is on the subscriber’s shoulders, not the content creator’s shoulders.

6) If someone is mad that you’re creating in new fandoms, that’s their problem. They don’t own you or have any right to your creativity. And if someone contacts you to complain, they’re being an entitled jerk.

7) Remember number one. While some people may be disappointed that you’re going in a direction they don’t want to follow, other people will be delighted that you’re going somewhere else they like.

tl;dr: don’t worry, write what makes you happy, tag appropriately, and trust your audience to take care of themselves.

the ao3 subscriptions give me anxiety. every time i want to post something that isn't from fandoms i usually write for, i get scared because the people who subscribe to me will get the notification and i don't want them to 'perceive' me. i can post my works on a new account, but i really like my username. any tips on dealing with the fear of being perceived/judged or know how to 'purge' subscriptions (like you can on socmed to make sure no one follows you)? thanks!

There's no way I know of to purge subscriptions since each AO3 user controls for themselves which authors and stories they subscribe to.

I've struggled with this a little bit myself in the last year or two. I used to write pretty much entirely for one fandom and mostly for one ship in that fandom. When I stopped writing that, I didn't know what I'd write next.

It took some internal convincing to give myself permission to start bringing over my old fics from FFN because I knew anyone who was subscribed to me would get the emails with those old fics in them. But then I remembered that just because I get a subscription email doesn't mean I open it. I receive them almost daily but I only click in maybe once a month or so.

I think it's good to remember that you're allowed to take up space (as far as "space" is a concept that can be applied to the internet) and you're allowed to have more than one interest. If someone isn't interested in the fic you wrote, they won't read it. And that's not a knock against you, it's just that they aren't into that fandom or that topic.

The last several fics I wrote were silly stupid oneshots that made me cackle but only appeal to a very narrow subset of humanity, let alone fandom. And that's fine. It's an Archive of MY own too, and that means that I can post whatever fics I want to - whether people decide to read them or not.

I can offer you two practical solutions if you have trouble coming to the conclusion that I did.

1) Use a pseud. That allows you to keep all of your works on the same account, but separate them out with two different usernames. Your subscribers will still get the emails, but they can always filter out the second user name if they really don't want to see them.

2) Add your work to an Anonymous collection at the same time that you post. No subscription emails will be sent out so they won't even see them - but your username won't be attached to the fics. You can still reply to comments as "anonymous author" and you still control your fic, unlike when you orphan it. If you ever decide to remove it from the collection, the subscription emails will go out at that point. I explain in more detail in this ask over here.

[friedgreentomahtoes]

PFFFFF ALRIGHT SO.

While I get the wait, what? responses to the tumblr+ ‘announcement’ the vitriol being thrown at the platform is also very wait... what?

And by this I mean there are benefits to being able to post paywalled content on the platform you primarily post on. A platform where you might already have a few hundred or a few thousand followers, giving them the convenience of not needing another site login to subscribe to the content they’re not posting publicly.

I support a few people on patreon. Fanartists, mostly, but also a couple of podcasts. This absolute hysteria around fan creators monetizing their content is just ridiculous. Yes, there’s a risk. That’s for the individual to decide. I’m sure tumblr has their lawyers on it, Automattic isn’t an insignificant company, they have the resources to pay for legal counsel.

And before you bring up Ao3, they are notoriously conservative around their rules for good reason. It’s also a completely different kettle of fish than paid content because they do not allow any linking of any sort to donation drives or subscription services. Tumblr monetizing fan content is not going to suddenly make the OTW disappear, and I’d be surprised if tumblr hadn’t approached them to consult based on the sheer volume of discussion around Ao3 and the OTW on their site, particularly around donation drive time. Fuck I experienced the absolute garbage fire that are the OTW antis for the first time this year and I wanted to throw my computer out the fucking window.

There are so many people making money from fanart nowadays that it’s not economic for even big companies to go after them unless the examples are particularly egregious. It’s also extremely bad PR for Disney to be going after someone earning fifty bucks a month drawing porn of two random characters boning. And - this is my opinion but something to consider - they cannot argue in a court that fans writing or drawing content that they are not providing is taking money from their pockets, particularly when they’re producing mutli-billion dollar franchises that are if anything, HYPED by the exact content that encroaches on IP laws.

And for years, this has been a loss making website. yeah it sucks that they have to make money somewhere, but frankly I think it’s commendable that they’re trying out options. It might crash and burn, there are certainly more appealing options out there for creators, but shit. It’s not the evil horrifying nightmare everyone’s making it out to be.

tumblr is still the best option for fandom out there, if severely lacking in a lot of fronts, but they’ve actually bothered to make improvements over the past couple of years since the acquisition. Tons of features people have been screaming out for for years are now available rather than having to use a third party plug in (I may have only been back here for a short time but I’ve talked to enough people to know what xkit is and why people used it), they’ve started making ads make sense after their weird testing phase (and yeah I hate ads too but again they need to make money somehow to keep the fucking lights on for you to actually use this place that you haven’t left yet)

And I see all these posts saying ‘lololol if you get the tumblr blue tick you’re losing a follower’ and like... there are hugely popular people i see on here making money on ko-fi or patreon or wherever, are you unfollowing them. Like... where’s the logic there. You’re basically saying to people ‘I hate the fact you’re making a couple of bucks a month off creating something I’m consuming that I’m going to be petty about it’ and like that absolutely describes the tumblr mentality so well.

If you give money to fan creators, that’s their issue to deal with if it has negative consequences. But it also means they might be able to rely more on that money, and create more content. Perhaps partially escape the 45 hour a week misery wheel. You know, the stuff you love so much you’re consuming it regularly and struggling to reblog because apparently you’re worried the content might be cringe or problematic and you’ll lose a fucking follower. OH THE IRONY.

Fuck, I don’t even have a stake in this. I’ve never drawn or written anything beyond a stick figure and a fucking business report in my life. Even I can see how goddamn stupid all this rhetoric is.

And I know everyone’s going to call me a bootlicker blah blah what the fuck ever, but we exist under capitalism. tumblr exists under capitalism. Guess what? If it doesn’t start turning a goddamn profit it goes away. You’re going to end up on twitter or instagram that you hate so much because they’re so much worse than what we have here.

Get mad about the porn ban (because LBR this is the best use of this feature). Get mad about the shitty ‘you can’t block/forcefully unsub supporters without emailing support’. Get mad they aren’t fixing search or that posts with links don’t show up in tags half the time. Don’t get mad about the feature itself.

In a year’s time seeing paywalled posts is going to be routine. you’re going to block them from your dash and move on, or scroll past, or maybe go ‘fuck yeah actually I like that person and I’d love to throw them some cash’. Or maybe the feature will never make it past beta. Get over it.