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think probably someone has already done this or at least should have

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THIS IS NOT REAL. If you get this comment, they’re just trying to get you to delete your fic.

1) I would have gotten some kind of email from Ao3 if this was true

2) this comment is formatted to be perfect to tack onto any fic they choose

3) ALSO why on earth would Ao3 get rid of entire fandoms off the site? Even if they WERE inactive? Who knows if others will be ‘late’ to the fandom and want some fic to read. Who knows if someone wants to come back to their 6 year old account only to find most of their fics deleted.

I’m lucky to be a reasonable adult who has seen tricks like these who also had a very kind person comment their own doubts.

Please let your Ao3 friends know <3

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An Incomplete Yet Somewhat Sufficient Guide to Writing Fiction Based in the UK

As many of you know, I am an American who lives and studies in London. I thought I’d make a little general rules list about aspects of UK culture which I feel are misrepresented quite often when I read fiction written by someone who’s never experienced life here. So here it goes, every American fiction writers’ incomplete yet somewhat sufficient guide to writing fiction based in the UK.

KNOW YOUR SUPERMARKETS. Tesco isn’t the only one. Tesco and Sainsbury’s are the two most popular, like Safeway, Albertson’s, or Kroger. M&S and Waitrose are where the posh white people shop. Everything is over-priced; the American equivalent would be Whole Foods (which the UK has but is not nearly as common). Then there’s Morrison’s and Co-Op which are both good but not as popular as Tesco or Sainsbury’s. And then you have the discount supermarkets like Lidl and Aldi, where everything is off-branded so the prices are lower. And of course there’s ASDA which is Wal-Mart only smaller and not as terrifying.

In the UK, pants = underwear. I thought this would be quite known but I still see the mistake all the time? Jeans and trousers, folks!

Accents are hugely different from one another. First you have to learn the distinction between Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Northern Irish, and English. Then from there you have all the regional accents. And accents are classed and racialised as well. A middle class white person raised in West London is going to have a completely different accent from a working class PoC raised in East London, even though they may live within 15 miles of each other. If you want to really impress readers, study different types of accents and incorporate them into your dialogue, it makes things much more interesting (think Hagrid from Harry Potter).

Pubs are also classed. There are old white working class pubs that don’t do food (besides maybe crisp packets), are always showing greyhound or horse racing, and still smell of cigarette smoke. Only locals go here, and they usually go pretty much every night. Like the Winchester from Shaun of the Dead. And then you have the hipster pubs, which are expensive and do fancy food. The people working at these pubs usually look pretty cool—dyed hair, piercings, that stuff—but there probably aren’t any��‘regulars’ who come there every day. 

Wetherspoon’s is the backbone of society. Wetherspoon’s (or Spoons) is a chain pub that’s pretty much in every damn post code. It’s cheap as shit and beloved by many. You can get a huge cocktail pitcher for under £10, and you can guarantee you’ll get wasted pretty quickly cause they’re full of sugar and have a high alcohol content.

Drinking culture in general is quite different from the US. People start drinking at about age 15/16, and it’s legal to drink at 18. Kids drink WKD (which is like Mike’s Hard Lemonade I think??? I’ve never actually had it but it seems like it’s on the same tier), Smirnoff Ice, Malibu, and cheap fruity wine (Echo Falls, Hardy’s, Blossom Hill, Kumala, and Gallo Family are the usual brands).

Drunk food consists of: fried chicken, chips (+cheese, salt and vinegar, gravy, or curry, depending on the region), kebabs, pizza from a shop with bad graphic design, microwaveable burgers. You can also get delivery from a lot of restaurants, and they bring it right to your house. Indian, pizza, and Chinese are the most common.

Speaking of food, it’s hard to find good Mexican food in the UK. There’s Wahaca but it’s spendy as it’s a sit-down restaurant and it kind of only exists in touristy and gentrified areas. You won’t have any luck finding cheap, authentic street tacos the way you would in Southern California. There also isn’t really any fast food Mexican (although there are a handful of Taco Bells splattered around the country). I’m sure there are some trendy areas which are bringing in Mexican street food in London, but let’s be real, it’s probably not authentic and is also probably stupidly over-priced. I’m getting off topic, sorry.

Nando’s is also the backbone of society. They do grilled chicken there, ranging from mild (but still seasoned) to burn your tonsils off spicy. There’s stuff for vegetarians too, like portobello mushroom and halloumi (a type of cheese you grill—it’s amazing and difficult to find in the US without spending an obscene amount of money) wraps which are incredible. Nando’s is usually packed and they play really fun Spanish/Portuguese/South African music which is really fun when you’re drunk and in the toilets. 10/10, perfect for a cheeky night out with the lads. The kind of place Gryffindors probably love (I’m sorry I keep using Harry Potter references)

You don’t ‘sign for the check’ in the UK. Almost every credit/debit card in the UK has a chip, and you put it in the chip and pin machine, type in your pin, and voila! You’ve paid! It’s actually much more secure than signing, honestly, the amount of times I’ve just scribbled my signature in a US shop and they’ve accepted it without even checking is appalling. 

Public transport is actually good in most cities. Buses are common everywhere, and bigger cities like Manchester, London, Birmingham, Glasgow, etc all have some sort of mass rail system, whether that’s a subway, tram, lightrail, whatever. Also nearly everywhere (even the tiny villages!) at least has a train station. It may be tiny as shit and trains may not go through very often, but they do exist.

All schools have uniforms.

Infant school = preschool, primary school = elementary school, secondary school = middle school/half of high school, further education (6th Form) = second half of high school, uni = college. The first two and last one are pretty self explanatory. At 16, you take your GCSEs, and after that, you’re not required to continue school, but many go to further education and take A Levels, which are like the pre-requisite for uni (although you can get into uni without A Levels, this is quite rare). Most take 2-3 subjects for A-Levels, but I think you can take more if you have a death wish (kind of like AP classes for us Americans). Here’s a good link for people who want to know more about the UK education system: https://www.internationalstudent.com/study_uk/education_system/

No one says “What’s up?” Instead, it’s “Alright?” which is confusing at first, but you get used to it. An example greeting between two friends: ‘Hey mate, alright?’ ‘Yeah, you alright?’ And that’s it. 

Religion is different. I actually know very little about religion so I can’t offer a whole lot of insight on this, but I’ve had a lot of people tell me it’s very different. If anyone wants to have their input here, that would be lovely!

Houses don’t have yards, they have gardens. This is mostly just a terminology thing to be honest. 

Speaking of terminology, use ‘pavement’ instead of ‘sidewalk’. Obviously people aren’t stupid, they’ll know what you mean if you say sidewalk, but still, gotta stay authentic for the plot.

House layouts in general are very different. Houses are either terraced (town houses in the US), semi-detached (duplex in the US), or detached (typical US house). Terraced are most common in big cities, and most houses are made of brick. Take some time to research different architecture styles (Victorian, Edwardian, Georgian, 60s), the differences between them become quite apparent when you do a bit of looking. 

 There are also a variety of apartment/flat styles. Old period properties are often divided up into flats, and there are also purpose-built blocks of flats, which is like a US apartment complex. There are also luxury flats, which I think we call condominiums in the US. They’re all really modern and have lots of glass.

Since the entire country is so damn tiny, long roadtrips aren’t really a thing. It’s more like, you drive somewhere to go camping, like Cornwall or Devon (basically Florida for British people).

Holidays to warm places are quite common. South of France, Greece, Portugal, and Spain and some of the usual destinations. You usually fly to these places on budget flights like Easy Jet or Ryan Air, unless you’re rich, then you probably take British Airways.

Stop signs don’t exist. No, I’m serious. If the intersection (or crossroads) is big enough, there’ll be traffic lights or a roundabout. But other than that, you just have to be careful. Which is generally okay, because people in the UK can actually drive.

No one refers to a section of street as a block. Cities in the UK aren’t really set up in a grid the way US cities are. Streets are kind of weird and curvy and don’t make sense, so saying ‘it’s two blocks that way!’ doesn’t really work. Instead, write about distance in terms of vague relation: ‘It’s just up that road a bit, past the M&S, then left at the The King’s Head pub’.

London, in general, is a fucking huge city. You can’t walk across the whole thing in a day. Hell, you can barely drive across the whole thing in a day. Big Ben and Tower Bridge are 2.5 miles apart from each other. I know, it was a shocker for me too when I first got here! Take a look at a map of London and you’ll see what I mean. It is possible to do most of Westminster in a day, but that would be a very full day and you wouldn’t get to really see anything in-depth. And most people live very far away from these landmarks. So keep that in mind next time you have a character who lives in London saying they can hear Big Ben chime from their flat. That character must have a lot of money.

This is a really short list and I’ve probably barely even made a DENT so if anyone else has something to add, please do so! And please reblog this to boost it to your followers! Thank you my pals, have a good day, and KEEP WRITING! 

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Happy storyteller saturday! What are you most looking forward to writing in your current WIP?

Hiya! Thank you for sending these asks still, even though i can be a little inactive >.<

For my original work, The Quest for the Book of Balance, I’ve been very slow at editing the first draft, but I’m still excited to rewrite everything to be stronger and more impactful and immersive for the reader. I know that’s a little vague but i don’t have a specific scene in mind.

I’m also working on an Ace Attorney NaruMitsu fanfiction called Of Vampires and Turnabouts (aka OVAT), and I talk about it more on my main, but I always look forward to writing the love confession/reveal in my fanfictions.

Thank you again! Happy writing!

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basically I think that if your protagonist doesn’t want to fuck someone so bad it makes them look stupid, then there probably isn’t enough energy in your story. “Fuck someone” isn’t literal btw—they can want to uncover the secrets of their parent’s death, they can want to prove their worth, they can want a donut from one particular bakery—it can be anything so long as they want it so bad that they’ll make decisions that make any sane person go “are you a moron??”, with little to no forethought, or even tons of forethought and this is still the option they chose. Because they want to fuck that thing so bad.

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Wanna' come back to my place? I was thinking you might pierce my heart and spill its blood in a frenzy of barbarous delight.

Father Ardelian has been summoned to a distant, secluded island to perform an exorcism. What will happen when he begins to suspect his host — the mysterious, nocturnal lord of the manor — of wanting him for another reason entirely? Will the piously celibate priest be able to resist the monster’s diabolically seductive charms?

What Manner of Man is a queer gothic romance novel about a priest and a vampire, inspired by Dracula Daily.

Get the novel here or DRM-free on Itch.io

Or read it for free!

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Two more days before Errant Wings is out in the world! If you need some more reasons to pre-order it, why not snippets from kind Goodread reviews? Early readers agree it's pretty cool and heartfelt! And it's also a quick read! ERRANT WINGS, my coming of age novel about a punk with angel wings trying to find his place in the world after his life gets turned upside down, release April 22nd!

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Where to find me:

I will ride this ship to its watery grave. But I do also exist elsewhere, so, here's those spots:

📚My art and writing website. This is the best spot to keep up with all my projects, including new books and Kickstarters. You can join my newsletter there as well, which will get news about my projects directly in your inbox whenever I remember my newsletter exists.

🔥My disaster work website. This is where I stick all of my disaster specific work from disaster blogging, disaster posters, etc. etc. etc..

🌪️ My disaster blogging Patreon. I have a free Patreon for my disaster work as well! You can sign up and get all my disaster stuff directly in your inbox for free. And if you do subscribe, you'll get early access and behind the scenes stuff too!

🔵My Bluesky. I use it off and on, but if Tumblr does ever go down entirely, I'll probably start using it more.

I've got TikTok too, but that is 100% gonna be dead here in a couple months, so I'm not going to bother to link it.

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im not interested in glory through combat anymore. i do not want to be a part of this shit.

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Every night a beautiful spectre named You've Got Kudos appears and haunts me with the knowledge I should be writing fanfic

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IDK who needs to hear this but (I certainly did) : A chapter is not required to be 2000-4000 words in length (or whatever 'reasonable' amount it is in your head.) A chapter ends where you feel comfortable ending it. You make your own rules!

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Folks, backup your Tumblrs, for real this time

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people who write fics. how do you feel about comments on super old ones you wrote like 2+ years ago

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but what if i read one of your fanfics and then went to your ao3 accounts and read all of your fanfics and left a comment on every single chapter of every single one and you got spam emails from all of my kudos and comments and it made you smile, what then? what if i brighten your day with my words like you did mine, what then???