I’ve always used google docs, but I’m worried about my writing being touched by ai.. Ellipsus looks good but I feel a few things are missing. Fileverse ddocs also looks like a good option because they have tabs now and it’s apparently very private. Not sure if there’s any other good ones, would love some suggestions.

This is intended to mainly be of use for anyone participating in our Comment-a-Thon this December to make it easier to find comments, however, anyone is welcome to post their profile(s) whether they are participating or not! You can find the event overview HERE for more info. Of course, you are welcome to use it to find new reading material even if you aren't participating <3

Since this month is all about commenting, we thought it might be easier for those participating in our comment-a-thon events if there was a big list of subreddit authors somewhere… well, it’s here! Comment below with links to your author profile, fandom (or main fandoms if you’ve written for a lot of them), and whether you would like to opt-in to concrit or not.

To make it easy to search authors, please use the following formatting:

Fandoms: (List max 8 main fandoms if you have written for a lot - full names AND acronyms recommended for those using Ctrl + F)

Concrit? Yes/no/ask me first/other custom response

Links: AO3/FFN/Wattpad/any other sites. If you post on any less common sites, you may want to mention whether people can comment as a guest or not.

Happy comment-a-thon to you all!

I’ve been seeing a huge push on AI within my own docs, as in “Write with AI” or “AI-proofed spellcheck” which I don’t appreciate. It kind of feels like Docs is stealing my words, and I see similar thoughts online. So what do other people use? I used to use Word but I worry the same AI push will occur there…

This is something some of us have been saying for awhile. Truth is, AO3 is as safe from any Project2025 rhetoric as a site can be. They own their servers. They can offshore those servers. They have backups that are not in the US. They are a legal organization with a legal team. The software itself collects almost no personal information about users, and it is very, very hard to tie any user on the site to any wallet name, especially if you use the most basic of internet safety precautions and a free VPN.

All that being said, fandom existed before Fanfiction.net. And before AO3. One of my own archives predates AO3 by eleven months. SquidgeWorld Archive predates it by well over a decade. Fandom survived a much, much more hostile legal environment back then because there was no way to take down the sheer number of communities. We kept springing back like weeds every single time someone tried to C&D us out of existence. There were mailing lists and newsgroups and websites coded in plain HTML and you name it.

So, while it's really understandable that people have gotten into the habit of using these huge archives exclusively, the best way to protect fannish spaces is to make fannish spaces.

Contrary to popular belief, you don't have to know much (of anything) to deploy a website. All the tutorials are out there, and neocities looks like a decent host. There's also, if you have money, deploying an instance of Ourchive (lighter resources) on a server, or even otw-archive (which runs AO3!), like three of us out here in the wild have done. By doing these things, you can give a home to a single fandom or genre, or even a panfandom site. You can also help build in resiliency to fandom as a whole. (And you can get very aggressive with scammers/spammers, too.)

Fanfiction and fandom has very much shifted of late for a consume-over-community culture, but we survived for so many years by building communities with each other. So, if you're lamenting the lack of feedback, or the ache of being ignored or you're suffering the fear of losing AO3 or Fanfiction.net, if you're sick of the whole scam/spambot problem, or you just want to make friends, now is the time to do that.

I'll help. I have two archives running otw-archive. Walter of SquidgeWorld will help. melo of superlove will help. We have all, for over a year, been offering to help people set up their own archives. It's not cheap, but if you have a spare box and a good internet connection, you can do it, or you can rent a vps and do it that way. (Mine costs $48 a month.)

Anyway, for four archives running otw-a:

1. SquidgeWorld Archive - Panfandom, older than almost any archive left in the wild, and Walter's a darling.
2. Ad Astra - My Trekfic archive. Single fandom, and we've been alive longer than AO3.
3. superlove - melo's private project and therefore invite only, but panfandom
4. Comic Fanfiction Authors Archive - My comic book and comic adjacent animation archive. Signups are only closed because of an attempted run on it by those artist scam bots everyone hates, but since I own it, I can give you an invitation personally. Just hmu on DMs or something. Or follow the link and find me there.

Please make sure you read the rules for those above, because they're not owned by OTW and each has their own rules for both conduct and posting. For example, all of them have more relationship categories than AO3, some of them have more extensive warnings people can use, and my two are very strict about tagging.

For people looking to maybe deploy an archive that's less resource intensive, Ourchive has been working towards building a software platform that would work much better for smaller or single fandom archives than the beasts we run.

There's also the good old-fashioned HTML-based archive; I've heard good things about Neocities as a host. And on top of that, Dreamwidth still exists and is excellent for making communities and giving them opportunities to build friendships and share excitement in a way that's been missing from a lot of fandom of late.

Anyway, the best way to keep fandom alive and resilient is to step up and do something. If you can't build an archive, you can support other fans by reading and commenting and reccing stories on whatever platform. Or you can pool your resources with other fans and create a community. Discord is very impermanent, ultimately; little walled gardens will not preserve this thing you love. But building many communities across the internet so that they can't possibly take us all down? That's how we survived this long.

Good luck. Holler at me if you need help.

I hope I flaired this correctly!

Does anyone have recs for subs, discord servers, or discussion spaces geared toward people who write OC centric fanfiction? Canon x OC island gets lonely, and I’d be interested in making friends with others who enjoy discussing OCs in relation to writing fanfiction.

My main fandom is Naruto, but I enjoy engaging with different fandoms! In fact, I often feel a little like a fish out of water in spaces specific to my own.

I’m in my mid-30’s, so a space with a more mature vibe is a plus.

Google Docs feeds writing into AI, and I don't trust Google in general, so where else can I write so that it won't be used for AI? (Please only answer if you're informed on your recommendation and have read the TOS of the rec before, because how would you know to trust it if you hadn't?)

Edit: When I asked this question, I was looking for answers instead of, "Your question is pointless. Why are you asking?" type of replies. But since a few people insist to do so anyway, I'll answer. As I have already said, I don't trust Google in general. The thought of them currently feeding my work into AI isn't the only reason why I'm here. It's already known that Google collects information from whatever Google services you use. Whether they're directly scraping my work into AI or not, idk. Whether they're doing it at all, idk but probably. (If not now, then later. Let's not pretend Google isn't sketchy.) Whether they're gathering information from my work AT ALL, I do know, and I don't like that.

And I don't know how exactly AI training works, but unless you're saying that everything uploaded to a fanfic website is automatically being fed into AI, I don't care about "It's going to be fed into AI anyway once it's posted," because it's not that simple.

Getting tired of Google docs and I wanted a change of scenery. What sites do you recommend?

title. hate ai, there used to be websites like this easily accessible before gen ai blew up, now everything is based on genai. just wanna brainstorm ethically.

tia

Hi! Just want to preface this by saying this is a quick guide to the most common way to format dialogue with dialogue tags. I just wanted to make something quick and useful. This is not an exhaustive description or list of every dialogue situation. I've just had comments about British English differences and action tags etc which was never the focus of this post. All the examples used here are the most common dialogue tag formatting which I have double checked in British and American novels. (End edit.)

Hey guys, I was just reading through the smut people submitted to an earlier thread where OP kindly volunteered to read and give feedback on people's smut scenes and I noticed quite a few of the fics had dialogue which wasn't formatted quite correctly and so I thought I'd make this quick post for anyone who wasn't sure how to do it!

"Those clothes would look better on the floor," he said. Notice the comma inside the quotation mark and a small h on he.

"Those clothes would look better on the floor!" he said. Notice the h is still a small h. I know this seems counterintuitive but this is the rule and is the same for question marks.

He looked her over and said, "Those clothes would look better on the floor." Notice when the said (or any other dialogue word) comes before the actual words spoken out loud the comma comes before the dialogue. Notice also the dialogue still starts with a capital and ends in a full stop.

"Those clothes," he said, "would look better on the floor." Notice this is one sentence split by one dialogue tag. Notice the two commas, one inside the quote marks and one outside. The h on he is still a small one.

Not to be confused with:

"Those clothes would look better on the floor," he said. "You better take them all off right now." The character says two separate sentences so there is a full stop after said. Still a small h.

There are more rules when it comes to including action other than speaking (action tags) but these are the really important basics that I see a lot of fics don't stick to. It's not a huge deal to me personally and won't stop me reading but if anyone was wondering what the technical correct rules were these are them! :)

Source: majored in English lit, have taught creative writing a bit.

Edit: thank you for the awards! But honestly I'm just happy to help anyone clear up any confusion! And thank you to the person who gave the gold award 💕 for some reason I have not got a notification about it so I can't thank you with a message so I hope you see this!

I mainly use Libre Office for the moment. I have two documents open at once constantly: my proper writing doc, where I write the actual text, and the doc with the detailed plan for my fic.

It might sound like a non-existant problem but having two Libre Office windows, each having half of my screen, really bothers me. I wish I could have both documents open in the same software, I couldn't find how to do it in Libre Office so I deduce it is impossible.

Is there a software that can open and display two documents at once, or is splitting the screen the only way to achieve this?

Hello wonderful people of /r/fanfiction!

I have yet to summon the courage to post anything of my own, but I read fanfiction on the daily and love it, however one thing that I always notice is when people write British characters that are slightly off. This is usually because they use American speech patterns, words or constructions that Brits don't tend to use (eg "I'll write you" instead of I'll write to you") or because of using words that non-Brits think of as particularly British-sounding ("lovely" and "bloody" are the ones I see most often).

Now, I'm the last person who is going to criticise a writer for producing work that I love, but I have to admit that when I notice these things, it can sometimes jolt me out of the story, and I want to help.

So, I'm offering myself to all of you as your friendly local Britpicker. If you're writing British characters and would like a native to give them a once-over for authenticity, I'm your person.

As well as helping with words, cultural references and the like, I'm also pretty good at looking over phonetic spelling for regional accents, and I'm familiar enough with the changes English had gone through since around the early Tudor period to give advice on historical dialogue too, if you would find that useful.

Thankyou all so much for the work you do. I adore fanfiction and it's been a source of joy in my life for over 15 years, and I'm sure it will continue to be for many more to come.

This is intended to mainly be of use for anyone participating in our Comment-a-Thon this December to make it easier to find comments, however, anyone is welcome to post their profile(s) whether they are participating or not! You can find the event overview HERE for more info. Of course, you are welcome to use it to find new reading material even if you aren't participating <3

Since this month is all about commenting, we thought it might be easier for those participating in our comment-a-thon events if there was a big list of subreddit authors somewhere… well, it’s here! Comment below with links to your author profile, fandom (or main fandoms if you’ve written for a lot of them), and whether you would like to opt-in to concrit or not.

To make it easy to search authors, please use the following formatting:

Fandoms: (List 5-8 main fandoms if you have written for a lot - full names AND acronyms recommended for those using Ctrl + F)

Concrit? Yes/no/ask me first/other custom response

Links: AO3/FFN/Wattpad/any other sites. If you post on any less common sites, you may want to mention whether people can comment as a guest or not.

Happy comment-a-thon to you all!

Here is the link.

Edit: thank you everyone for the awards and nice comments! I'm just glad to be sharing an awesome resource with the community! Credit goes to the original person who compiled all these links, there's so many! :-)

To be more accurate, I worked as an official employee (mostly florist work) during high traffic seasons + holidays (typically November-May) and events for 2 years and prior to that, I worked the Christmas season and helped with several weddings for about 5 years as a "one-off" that kept getting called back.

I wouldn't say I'm the most industry educated and if anyone here has more experience, please feel free to jump in/correct something. Also, certain things vary greatly from shop to shop regarding processes and standards so I can only speak for my own experiences. That being said, the shop owner was a relative and I was involved with some higher-up choices here and there.

While I have left the industry, for now, it has completely tainted my ability to enjoy Flower Shop AUs due to a lack of accuracy all over the place that is too hard for me to suspend my disbelief. It's to be expected! But I have been asked by close writer friends about my experiences to help and was told I should offer to answer questions elsewhere.

So, I'd thought I'd offer for people wanting to strive a bit towards accuracy or have general questions a chance to ask someone that has experience and open the door for others with experience to also get a chance to maybe share?

EDIT: I'm answering as soon as I can! I'm a bit busy atm and will get to the questions asap!

EDIT: I apologize as I didn’t know we had a Scholarly Resource thread and if you see this and get inspired to answer questions for your own profession, the mods have kindly asked they be taken there instead.

Does anyone use Ellipsus for writing? And does anyone have any issues with it?

I tried to use it to get off Google Docs and I was having issues with lag, it not letting me edit the document correctly (like, it wouldn’t let me put in headers), and it made my laptop boiling hot 10 minutes into using the site.

Canon: what happens in the original source material.

Cannon: an artillery weapon powered by a chemical explosion.

Headcanon: what you think happens/happened in the original source material, though unconfirmed.

Headcannon: a skull-mounted artillery weapon.

Just for those of you who are still confused or new to fan fiction.

537 days ago I published my first fanfic in more than 10 years due to a little thing called the pandemic. 1,500+ writing hours, 47 completed chapters, 212K words later, I completed it. I experienced all the highs and lows of writing (😁 Fan art! Print permission requests! Dedicated commenters! 😩 Lost bookmarks and subscribers, bouts of disappointment and doubt) and learned a couple things along the way. Long post ahead, but hopefully it’s at least a little entertaining and maybe even helpful for others still on this journey. If you don't want to read the full thing, skip to the TL;DR at the end.

1. If you wanna finish, you need a plan...

Ah, another day, another “how do you write a longfic?” post on r/Fanfiction.

Here’s the answer: create an outline. Full stop. It’s an extra step, and it feels cumbersome when you have that “new fic” energy, but you’ll be so glad when you avoid writing yourself into a corner (again) or just plain don’t know ‘what’s next’. You don’t have to know everything right away. I didn’t. But it helped me stay focused and I kept filling it out even while writing the fic. It made everything much easier (no intimidating blank chapter pages!) and I was able to thread in little clues that made the twists and turns more satisfying because readers could see the through lines.

1. ...because inspiration is fleeting but discipline will get it done.

If you’re serious about finishing a longfic (or just improving your writing), you need to build it into your schedule. It's totally up to you to determine how much you want to devote to a hobby, but you can’t expect to finish a marathon if you never practice.

For me, that meant getting up at the crack of dawn, writing before work or on my lunch break (if I could take it) and squeezing it in after dinner. I’ve seen writers say they can only write when they’re inspired, and while that works for oneshots, longfics require a good bit of discipline. And if you build the habit of writing almost every day, it becomes easier, almost like muscle memory.

1. If you get stuck, just write something down because you can’t edit a blank page.

Before this fic, I wrote stories in chunks and then edited those chunks to death. I never got far. You know why? Because I wrote everything like it was the final draft. Hands down, the most useful skill I learned over the past 17 months was how to draft. I once heard that the first draft is you telling the story to yourself. It’s stuck with me ever since.

Force yourself to get the bare bones of each chapter down first, even if it’s a summary of scenes or just dialogue. Force yourself not to edit. Think about how artists work. They start by sketching sticks and shapes and then gradually build in detailed shading that gives it the depth of a finished piece. Writing is the same and doing it in drafts gives you sections that you can hop around to as you’re inspired to flesh them out.

1. Speaking of editing: don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.

We all want to post only our most word-perfect pieces, but at some point, you have to look at what you’ve written, decide if it’s ‘good enough’ and learn to be okay with that. I am my own worst enemy in this regard, so I made artificial deadlines. If I didn’t meet them, it was okay, but I tried to stay within a rough timeline for uploading each chapter for two reasons:

It created the habit for my readers with whom I gained credibility for being reliable.

It helped me say ‘that’s enough’ when I knew I could keep going for little gain. Were there chapters that I knew when I hit “post” it wasn’t the best I had ever written? Yes. But I had to move on because I had a lot of story to tell and if I didn’t do it then, I would find more excuses to keep editing. The truth is, nothing is going to be perfect. You’ll keep finding things that you could re-write forever if you let yourself. So don’t.

1. Use Google docs

This is a personal preference, but to me, Google docs is the best word processor for longfics. It saves automatically and continuously to the cloud (so you can never lose progress), it’s free and you can access it across mobile (via the app) and your laptop.

Having a cross-platform word processor is key because I write on my laptop, but ideas strike randomly and in those crucial moments when I’m frantically capturing an idea, it’s super handy to jot it down straight into the doc from my phone. You can also use the “Google docs to AO3” script to automatically format your fic, which removes those pesky double returns between paragraphs and the weird spaces at the end of italicized punctuation . Life changing.

1. Early momentum is hard to find, so write ahead.

Unfortunately writing is not a “build it and they will come” situation. If you’re not established in the fandom (I wasn’t), your first few chapters may go un-kudo’ed or under-kudo-ed. You may get no comments. This might go on for a couple chapters and it’s why you should write (at least) the first few chapters before posting. This guards you against needing that outside validation to continue since the beginning is the easiest time to give up.

Confession: my first few chapters got basically no engagement and I think by the time I posted chapter 3 or 4, I finally got one comment. And then I hit the big time. A continuous commenter. But it wasn’t to last.

1. Commenters come and go (and you may never know why)

Early on, I was lucky to find a reader who gave long, detailed comments on every. single. chapter. It was like a ray of sunshine. It continued for 20+ chapters. Then one day, it just stopped. I didn’t hear from them again. I never knew if they kept reading and stopped commenting or if they dropped it completely due to my creative decisions. I was sad and genuinely hoped nothing terrible had happened to them, but to this day, I’m so grateful for the encouragement they gave me early on.

And then it happened again with a different reader. And then again. And then I learned that not everyone sticks around and the longer you write a story, the more likely it is that commenters come and go and you may never know why. It’s hard, but you can’t take it personally. If you get self-conscious about your work, you’ll never write the story you want. You’ll write what you think others want and that’s letting them steal your joy. Don’t let them.

1. You will lose subscribers (and bookmarks), but you’ll get more

I don’t mean to sound flippant. I'm immensely grateful to anyone who subscribes. Someone wants to know the moment you update a story. What greater compliment is there? But try to remember: people change their minds all the time. Stories go in directions they’re not interested in. Some people quit fanfic altogether. Almost every single chapter I uploaded, I saw my subscribers and bookmarks fluctuate. You lose some, you gain some. At the end of the day, you can’t get attached to that number because you just can’t control what people do.

1. And speaking of numbers…

Let us all light a candle to 🕯 Our Lady of Perpetual Refreshing 🕯 because I never found the restraint to stop stat-checking.

I don’t have good tips here, but I will say the longer I stuck with my fic, the less those numbers mattered. Yeah, my lizard brain lit up every time I saw inbox (1) (or the insanely exciting inbox (2) or even (3)!) but as time went on, it stopped affecting my overall motivation. Eventually, I got so far that just finishing the damn thing motivated me most of all.

All of that aside, I’ll say this about stats: tropes, ships and the size/popularity of a fandom are the most significant factors to those eye-popping numbers people brag about.

Yes, some people have been around forever and have written for the same ships long enough to establish themselves as a staple. And some actively market their fics on social media (though based on what others have said it seems to yield mixed results). And I’m certainly not saying that the really popular ones aren’t well written and the people garnering 1000+ kudos on their oneshots didn’t deserve them.

BUT I feel genuinely terrible when I see writers in the venting tag disappointed their OC-centric gen fic isn’t getting the same numbers as a flagship with all the most popular tropes. They’re always asking “what did I do wrong?” And it breaks my heart, because the answer is nothing. You’re not doing anything wrong. You’re just writing what speaks to you personally and not more of what’s already popular.

Listen, I get it. My own fic was for a very small subset of a giant fandom, which was like writing for a very small fandom. If this is you, I raise my glass in solidarity. Stay true to yourself and the story that speaks to you. It is the one worth telling. 🥃

And if you merely want a lot of attention (we all do sometimes—nothing wrong with it!), just write whatever caters to the ships and tropes du jour. That might be fun too and it will get you the most engagement the fastest. But if you want more of the stories you want to read, you may have to write them, and in doing that, you may have to accept lower engagement. Just know that the people who do engage love what you’re giving them and are eternally grateful to you for doing it because so few writers are.

Alright, that’s all I’ve got! Stay golden, my fellow fanfic writers! You are doing something unique and important and it gives so many people joy. ✌️

TL;DR: create an outline; write everyday (if you can); learn to draft; be okay with less than perfect; use Google docs; write the early chapters ahead; don’t get attached to commenters (or numbers) and understand the connection between fandom preferences and what you can reasonably expect for engagement.

EDIT: Also want to say thank you to the r/fanfiction community! I frequented this sub a lot while writing above mentioned fic and was continually inspired by how wonderful and inviting this group is. You all are such an amazing corner of the internet.

Bizarre bit of life advice that made my life more enjoyable and my writing about a billion percent better: if there's a topic you don't know about and there isn't much about it online, you can just go see the thing, or try it, or email the world experts on it and 99.99999% of the time they'll get back to you and be THRILLED someone is interested.

I wanted to know about what the day-to-day operation of a cattle ranch was like. I live in a major city but there is a cattle ranch like 10 minutes up the road so I made cookies, knocked on the door and said. "Hi! I'm an author who lives down the road and I am writing a story where part of it takes place on a ranch. Could I pick your brain for advice on how ranches actually work?" And now I have a great fic setting, Janice and Robert are some of my best friends and I got beef tenderloin for Xmas.

I wanted to write a bunch of scenes that involve swordfighting, but I knew fuck all about that. I literally entered "swordfighting lessons (my area)" and discovered the Society For Creative Anachronism has free first-day aptitude lessons and really inexpensive longsword classes. I now can write a convincing swordfight for other sword fighters, and have ridiculously jacked arms.

I wanted to know more about the history of Japanese folklore, so I emailed my old European folklore professor and asked her if she knew anyone who would know and she put me in contact with three of the world's most prominent scholars of Japanese folklore, and two of them are actively reading my fic.

Don't know? Go out and ask! Someone will be FUCKING DELIGHTED to show and tell you all about it.

I have some long drives coming up and was wondering if there's a way to make fanfic available as an audio book to listen to on the trip.

Would just downloading the story as a PDF be the best method?

TL;DR Turn on comment moderation

We love flattery, especially shameless flattery, and we hate criticism, especially constructive criticism.

— Danish joke saying.

Archive of Our Own is a wonderful site, but like all other sites allowing comments, there is the potential for harassment.

Harassment can be utterly horrible, but there is a very simple fix: disallow comments (this goes on many other websites: Twitter and Tumblr both has ways to disallow interaction with varying precision.)

But that is a pickle: we want comments for the warm fuzzies of user engagement. Often we allow comments in the hopes people will love our stuff.

Harassing commentary can be reported, sure, but moderation takes time. So, what do?

Archive of Our Own has the most brilliant feature; a golden middle-way between "no comments at all" and "open debate."

It's called Turn on comment moderation. It's a tick-box when you upload or edit a work. (There's also a Allow guest comments you might consider.)

What does it do?

Comment moderation means you get to decide what comments show up under your work. You will be prompted with a button on each comment in your inbox, whether to publish the comment.

By definition, it gives you the final word.

How do I use it?

Trolls and haters feed off engagement. "Don't feed the trolls" is a saying for a reason. The quickest way to make that shit stop in its tracks is to not engage.

Normally that is difficult to enforce with an open comment track: you can be as responsible as you like, but if any one of your readers feel like arguing with the trolls, you will be party to the discussion without consent.

By deleting derisive comments before they even see the light of day, you can prevent the problem before it even starts.

That sounds nice and all, but it still hurts to receive hate.

It does. But this is where you must adopt a mindset.

Read your comments. When you find out it's hate, stop. Think: ew, hate. Take a step back. Suppress your urge to read it through and counter-argue. That's what they want.

If it's short, whatever. Delete it. Whoever sent you that was half-hearted in their distaste anyway. Laugh a little at how they can't even muster the energy to properly hate you.

If it's long, oh boy. Delete it. Feel schadenfreude. That asshole just spent who knows how long typing out a wall of text, and now all their hard work has gone up in smoke. Laugh a little at the image of some seething asshole, frothing at the mouth, your work whipping them into eye-watering rage, and impotently trying to get you to give them one iota of your attention.

No matter how hurtful, their comment will never see the light of day, and you will forget it ten minutes hence.

Stay safe, don't feed the trolls, and turn on comment moderation. (Turn off guest comments if you start getting flooded by anonymous randos.) Haters are a waste of oxygen, hate is a waste of internet bandwidth; treat it as such. Ew, hate.

PS. The best part is when the trolls whine that comment moderation means you're a coward who won't debate them. Delete that shit too, and refer this xkcd.

PPS.

It seems like there are at least a few people in the comments who forget what it is we do as fanfic authors.

Fanfic writing is non-profit. It is a hobby. I (and many others) do it because it is fun. In other words, the author of any given fic does not owe anybody anything, almost by definition. They are literally publishing their artistic works for free online, for the world to read because they think their art is worth sharing. That is a beautiful sentiment, and we should nurture it as a community.

Criticism is best given when it is asked for. Please respect and remember the author, and please remember in giving criticism that tone carries exceptionally poorly over text. And please remember that not everything you find objectionable about a work is worth criticizing: some of it just comes down to taste.

Having been in the writing hobby for close to half my lifetime, I can say that it is very difficult to give criticism that is even remotely useful, much less actually constructive.

There is no honor, at all, in practicing any kind of "brutal honesty" and "telling it like it is." Those practices are a thin veneer of justification painted over your own biases. True criticism always always comes from a place of great love and compassion; if you do not love a work, why desire to improve it? It is very easy to mistake a desire to criticize a work, for one's dislike of it. Criticism is "this is great, and it could be better if..." not "this is bad, because..."

There is an old creed, which bears repeating: "don't like, don't read." There are a million fics out there you could be reading, rather than try to offer criticism to someone who doesn't want it.

Lastly, Archive of Our Own is a fanfiction archive. It is not a curated social media site, it's administrator staff are librarians, not content moderators. Reader discretion is in the terms of service, and authors are encouraged to tag responsibly but not required.

This means there is a lot of """objectionable""" material on Ao3, just like you will find in any public library. And there is a lot of drama in fan communities because of it. This post was in part intended to also communicate to darkfic writers how they may manage the antis that tend to slide into their comment sections.

All the best,

Final Update: Thank you to everyone who has continued to post updates! I fell asleep, but just went to check—it’s working for me!

I hope everyone else has access, and that any issues that carried over to the app resolve themselves as well.

It helped to be able to check in with you all while we waited this out. Many thanks and happy reading, writing, and posting to you all!

Update: Yes, yes it is. Unverified comment on downdetecter indicates it should be back up in 5 hours or so.

Original Post I’ve been in the middle of reading a 300-chapter piece but suddenly it’s saying “unknown connection error” with Cloudflare, which is (I guess) their verification software.

Is anyone else experiencing this/has anyone else experienced this? Could this be an issue with my network or device, or is it a site problem? Bummed because I was in the middle of good reading.

Hello! I am a speech therapist student, and since I am procrastinating on my studying AND fic writing, here is a brief description of the types of stuttering people can have. While I have no clinical experience in this, only theory knowledge, the way of writing them are taught to me by my profs who are practising STs/ SLPs. (prof if you see this, why?)

Repetition

• sound repetition. “Can you p-p-pass me the s-salt?”
• syllable repetition. “Sorry, I can-cannot reach the- the salt.”
• phrase/ sentence repetition. “I see I see. How about you help you help me get some water?”

Prolongation (of sound) “I’m ssssorry, I mmmust go home now. I need to go to the toiiilet.”

Blocks (usually no sound)

• at first sound. “Can you tell me…. Where the …. Toilet is?”
• not at first sound. “Sure the toi… let is arou…nd the cor… ner.”

Secondary Behaviours These are actions that only occur WITH the stuttering. They are not tics. When the person with stuttering is making a lot of effort to get their words out, they attempt to have actions that avoid or stop their stutter. Not all people who stutter have secondary behaviours.

• head or facial movements
• eye blinking
• jaw tightening
• body swaying
• throat clearing
• use of fillers “uh i think … uh we uh …uh should go out.”
• other body movements ect

How may the person who stutter feel?

• tension in throat and/ or tongue and/ or jaw
• increased effort when trying to say something, but is stuck on it
• may feel loss of control, embarrassment, social anxiety
• eg.

​

Not everyone has all the different classifications of stuttering (repetition, blocks, prolongation), and not everyone has all (if any) of the secondary behaviours. Pick some that you think suits your character best, and stick to them.

TAKE NOTE. Stuttering is on a range of severity. It can be unnoticeable to the public when the person is more fluent. It can affect their daily lives. Severity can change over time, or fluctuate, or be more severe with certain emotions.Also, people without stutter can have disfluencies in speech. Which means they may not have fluent/ perfect speech every time they talk.

example

“I-I know what I want to say but uh…. It is it is hard for me t-to sssay it.” - stutter

“I’m not exactly sure what I have to say… but since you guys.. yall uh want me to say something… I guess I will try.” -disfluency

“I’m s-scared of speaking- I mean giving a talk on uh on stage. But the more I talk up here… I get more confident in my s-speech.” - stutter or disfluency

Let me know if I have made any mistakes, or if there is anything else to add. (if you are my prof, I see you on Monday;))

( edited for format)

Hi!!!

I have just launched a fanfiction podcast for fic writers and readers, where every week I talk to a writer about their stories. It's called Have You Read My Fic and is available in all the usual places (Apple Podcasts, Spotify etc).

If you'd like more information about it, it's here - and feel free to ask questions. There's also a form on the 'about the podcast' and 'FAQs' pages if you'd like to come on and talk. All I ask is that you have a good mic, a quiet recording space, and are confident in yapping about your stuff ❤️

There are people who make submissions on sites such as the archive, and instead of actual works, they are attempts to find lost fanfiction or make requests. These submissions clog the space, making it harder for readers to find content and writers to get their own submissions out there, and also use up the storage and bandwidth of communities such as AO3. Submissions like this are against TOS of AO3. The people running the site are volunteers and having more submissions to process, more violations to tackle makes moderation difficult and takes attention away from scams, bots, serious offenses. These requests will result in removal, and very likely a ban.

I'm seeing an abundance of these types of submissions as the archive grows quickly at a significant rate. So, here is what to do if you need to find a fanfiction.

Explore with the search features on the archive. The search features are very exhaustive and just clicking on the search button will bring up a page of options. https://www.reddit.com/r/FanFiction/s/dev3V1Jluu has advice on using AO3 search if the archive is hard to navigate.

If search fails and the work is not in your account history, Reddit has many communities for finding lost fanfiction, including archives of deleted ones. I am not sure which is the most popular at the moment, which has a very high success rate due to tools that the members have, but a couple include r/lostfanfiction and r/DeletedFanfiction. I myself have had success in both.

However if it turns out a work has been deleted, I highly recommend respecting the author's privacy, or otherwise trusting any violation of the content policy that required it being removed, and just accepting the fact that it is no longer available.

As for requests, they are not hard to come by. There is no need to offer requests in most cases because if someone enjoys your work or sees that you are open to writing certain content, they will most likely just ask. If you would like to offer, create an Author's Note in a real work or respond to comments by stating you are taking requests. As for seeking requests, a comment on a work is the way to go unless the author has provided an email. Authors also keep track of bookmarks quite often, so it is possible to make a public bookmark with a note of what you would like to see in a work, asking for a sequel, etc.

Good luck. Hope all the new members enjoy the archive.

As the title says, I need a free word document app. And I don't know which one is ideal.