#..... 13k update

[stevie-petey]

new chapter tonight ‼️‼️

[wasabi-gumdrop]

Sabi i come to you humbled and humiliated to ask for one thing..PLEASE GIVE US ONE CHAPTER OF NEON GLORY FOR CHRISTMAS

neon glory chapter 12 in the works 🥹🫶🏼

[thegoldencontracts]

Hahaha tonight I'm finally gonna post a chapter of this long fic I've had on hiatus for like. A fucking year??? And everyone in the fandom's so talented rn I'm thinking please don't throw rocks at meeeee

[aria0fgold]

FLOWER GARDEN!!!

I didn't realize there was a flower garden here?! My fave house now. The flowers <3

[cancerravenclaw]

the long awaited (by me) trivia fic update should be up by saturday and it’s got me giggling and kicking my feet

[snarkythewoecrow]

okay, so writing update, i have been doing it! headway is being made on the hob/dream fic, you know, the one with all the tropes and hurt/comfort and shit

words are definitely flowing and shit is tightening up, coming together, the mess i puked into these various docs is now congealing into something pretty fucking great if i say so myself

working through older sections atm and trimming and shaping things to tell the story, now that the word vomit phase is mostly over

(i tend to make the absolutely most disgusting mess in my docs, all the ideas, before coming back later and trimming the overgrown shit into something pretty)

And speaking of pretty things, take a look at the a bit of the second draft of the Dream meeting with Calliope again scene, seeking her advice regarding how to help Hob.

@thefangirloutof-time @kydrogendragon @buckybeardreams @psychiccatpanda

No warnings for this snippet

Her presence in the Dreaming once again ached—their love had left a bruise that would likely linger until the last dreamer stepped into the sunless lands.

Fiddler’s Green seemed uniquely suited for this reunion, as a place they’d forgotten themselves, and occasionally, neglected to remember, sentient and prone to modest notions—his creation had once even lengthened the soft grass just to better conceal their bodies.

Calliope stood beneath a lone tree, an oddly placed bald cypress standing tall on a knoll amongst the wildflowers, entirely out of place in the scenery. The enormous base more a cluster of roots than simple trunk, each tendril pressing against the next before diving into the earth. Above, Spanish moss swayed from its branches in great heaping clumps, while its feathery, frond-like foliage stretched to the sun on irregular limbs.

His eyes followed her delicate fingers as they skimmed over the hills and valleys of the base that nearly dwarfed her.

And no, the symbolism hadn’t been lost on him—that of all things that could have appeared beside her here, it would be an ancient cypress that had taken root--a species that carried many meanings—most markedly, a symbol of death and the grief that followed it.

It was no secret why she stood within its graces now, as it reached for the skies of the Dreaming, weeping for them both.

The sight had an old--yet never forgotten--not even for a moment--pain lodging in his lungs, making his breath hitch, forcing his jaw to clamp tight before he cleared his throat, choosing not to face those particular memories right then.

Seeming to have heard him, Calliope turned. Some of the tension easing in his chest at seeing the light had returned to her eyes.

Then with a soft, indulgent shake of the head, she smiled. Just as stunning as always.

[liliansun]

so in order to break my writers block, I started a fic impromptu and it’s almost done..😀 so should I post a teaser? LMK BC IM STRUGGLING TO DECIDE IF I SHOULD OR NOT??

[twistingnightmare-s]

Chapter 9: Wandering with Broken Feet

Summary:

He never wanted to come back. He never wanted to set food on an island again--so why was he here?

In the place of deception, of lies and fondness that was stripped away by the mere thought of awakening and the dream of a world not real but only to your mind as a deity trapped you in it; He hadn’t wanted to come back. (That was a lie.)

Legend hadn’t wanted to come back to this cursed island, but now he was bringing his brothers too and he just wanted to make sure they all made it back home--but someone else had different plans.

Rating: Teen and up

Relationship: Four & Hyrule & Legend & Sky & Time & Twilight & Warriors & Wild & Wind (Linked Universe)

Characters: Legend, Warriors, Hyrule, Four, Twilight, Time, Wild, Sky, Wind, Wind Fish, Marlin, Linebeck

Additional Tags: Angst Blood and Violence Horror Survival Horror Psychological Horror Koholint AU Linked Universe Links As Family (Legend of Zelda) Linked Universe (Legend of Zelda) Legend-centric The Author Regrets Nothing Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Wind-centric, Moral ambiguity, Unreliable narrator

(TW:Blood, violence, gore, vomit, arguments, mentions of past abuse, personification(you have been warned), starvation.)

Chapter summary: Looking for clues for those fallen.

READ HERE!

Read first chapter here!

[stevie-petey]

chapter 2 comin tonight ;)

[milkolya]

playing sims 4 for real and summer holidays cooking privileges have been REVOKED. bitch started three (3) fires and almost died

[scribeofmorpheus]

I hate how LLMs have made it very untrustworthy to regard what one comes across as genuine craft anymore. i know artists are struggling big time with scrapping. I even wrote a paper on how openai was scrapping ao3 based on their early story prompt structures reading like a lot of popular fanfics i'd read before.

i was actually so paranoid that i locked most of my fics on ao3. sometimes i roll back the lock when i work on a fic again, but i usually lock em back up again after a while. scrapping is abhorent and i hate how much ai has shifted digital art paradigms and is now seeping into fandom culture.

I will say that i do find the "nonsense description" portion of this post a bit hard to align with. I'll get into it below the cut. but this is purely discursive, I'm not condemning or abstaining (I'm on op's side here), I'm just pointing out some factoids of my own for perspective!

here it is:

""her nimble fingers worked with quiet precision" (ct. 1), "his grip firm but tender" (ct. 33), "her gown pooling around her like embers" (ct. 1)."

See, I write like this, becuase i was trained in poetry first and then moved on to prose later. i use imagery, i use atmospherics, i use sensation in place of actual telegraphed motion or action that one expects of an action alone--it flows better, sounds sweeter and sometimes, yes, nimble fingers can move with quiet precision (not quiet as in "sound" but as in "understated", as in "draws little attention to the movement"). Firm but tender is another of my favourites--juxtaposition, contrast between the outward seen and felt execution of the action and the internalised, more personal mode of emotion conveyed so as to angle how we broach the situation. "firm but tender" is assuring, it's safe. "firm and rough" is more edged, and since we're left with little assumption of the setting and intent of such action, we cannot tell if the action and the emotions align--if its sexual, is it also consensual? if it's violent, is it because of haste to act, fear, annoyance, etc, etc. now "pooling like embers" is odd. embers spark and bristle and fly and catch things on fire, they disperse and scatter, never hold a body of matter congealed enough to pool. pooling like unfurled flame from dragon's breath? yeah, now that works! especially if it's a magic setting.

all this to say, ai is making it exceeding harder to prove craft is genuine if you work outside structural modes one can fact check. if you try to be more experimental, there's high chance you'll end up like me, and chip away at rigid writing structure in order to form your own voice. repetition and favoured descriptions is also a known trait of writers. one of my fav fanfic writers back in the day used to love "hard" after a pause. like: "he slammed the door, hard." or "his kiss pressed deep into me, hard." and it was noticeable and i loved seeing they had a tell.

though, i do agree that one of the things that need the least repetition in fiction is hair colour. but even published books like to remind readers of physical traits id it's something the author is so beguiled by. poor writing, but writing none the less.

i did suspect something was off with TSATS because of how fast the updates rolled. because damn! 23k word update after a 13k word update with less than 48 hrs between? crazy if true. but alas, i don't think i have it in me to be disappointed if i go seeking and do indeed find a pattern that proves LLM usage.

but to all my fic writers that take like half a day to write 3 pages and the other half procrastinating, if you (like me) got notified of all the updates and wondered if you weren't "productive" enough, you are not making a product, these are labours of love, keep at it, at your own pace, with your own skill, the process is the process!

we need to talk about The Silence and The Song

as per my last post, i have received a lot of encouragement to go public with this, and the more disappointed people i have in my dms, the angrier i get. so i will.

the silence and the song is an ancient arlathan au DA fic on ao3 by luxannaslut, and it is partly, if not entirely, written by an ai. i have no wish to be involved in any kind of fandom drama or witch hunting or bullying, but as a writer myself there are few things that piss me off more than watching people steal the work of others because they can't be fucked to write. it's disrespectful to your fellow writers, it's disrespectful to your readers, and it's disrespectful to the authors of the works the ai is stealing from.

ai is a plague that has no business being in creative spaces and you must do better.

the writing pattern

there was something very odd and monotone about the sentence structure of tsats that i couldn't quite place, so i fed chatgpt a prompt along the lines of "two people in a fantasy novel hate each other, but they secretly desire one another, and they kiss", and the screenshots above are the results. the third one is an excerpt from chapter 40 of tsats. the writing pattern is identical and it doesn't seem like the "writer" has even bothered to pretend they wrote it. if you're going to use ai, at least be sneaky about it. you know, paraphrase a little.

nonsense descriptions

"her nimble fingers worked with quiet precision" (ct. 1), "his grip firm but tender" (ct. 33), "her gown pooling around her like embers" (ct. 1).

fingers don't make sound, so what does quiet precision mean? as opposed to what? her joints cracking with every movement? how is a grip firm but tender? what does that mean? since when do embers pool?

the entire fic is littered with these adjectives that contradict each other or just straight up do not make sense, because all an ai does is generate descriptive language with no understanding of what the words it's spitting out actually mean. i could spend hours picking out examples from the seven billion pages worth of text, but i quite frankly have better things to do and would simply challenge you to try getting through a chapter or two without noticing the pattern.

repetition at structure-level

all the scenes in this fic are described in pretty much the same way. they open with purple prose vomit of the surroundings; solas is standing somewhere looking "unreadable as ever"; ellana's fiery golden molten fire copper ember ginger red hair is flowing this and that way; there's some dialogue with whoever is present and it leaves ellana feeling different variations of "something she couldn't name". this is, once again, a blatantly obvious sign of ai. below is the result of me feeding chatgpt the line "write me a scene from a fantasy novel where a woman with red hair is sitting on the ground in a magical garden at night", and side by side with that is the opening scene of the fic. make your own judgement.

repetition at word-level

this one speaks for itself. we fucking get it. her dress is orange, her hair is red, mythal's presence is heavy in the room, solas looks unreadable, compassion is sitting on her head like a crown, solas' ears are betraying him and ellana's move with every thought she thinks. we get it. the issue here is that an ai remembers the info you feed it, but not necessarily the info it shits out. if it's being told to write scene after scene of an elven woman with a gown that looks like fire doing xyz, it's going to do so with no regard for how many times the reader has already been informed of these details.

lastly: the breakneck speed

359,6k words in four weeks by a person who allegedly is employed and married and hasn't pre-written anything? no. any writer will tell you that this simply isn't possible. it absolutely infuriates me to see how much praise this "writer" gets for posting up to three full chapters in a day without anyone calling bullshit. i am pulling out my hair, you guys.

why i'm not going to live and let live this one

perhaps i would be less angry if the fic was some silly bullshit court intrigue Y/A stuff, but this is a text that handles very heavy and triggering topics such as SA, coercion, domestic abuse, and other things of the same vein. to sit back and put your feet up while having a robot write these extremely sensitive and very real human experiences with words it has stolen from texts written by actual persons is fucking heinous. the "writer" should be deeply ashamed of themselves and i'm sick and tired of watching people eat up their bs.

and on that note: the amount of people in my dm's telling me that they feel stupid and naive for not clocking this has infuriated me more than anything else. you're not foolish for this. being fed ai-generated bullshit is not what is supposed to happen on any creative platform and much less a fandom-centred one, so of course no one approaches a fic through that lens. fandom and fic writing is supposed to be about passion and the only person in this situation who needs to do better and change their behaviour is luxannaslut. polluting our creative spaces, wasting the time of your readers, and minimising the effort of actual writers who are working hard to provide content for us all to share and enjoy is vile and so, so lazy. i beg of you: do better.

[artistic-m3nace]

vacation announcement!! :)

I will be on vacation April 11th through 22nd, and will therefore be taking a break from all my art related social media posting (except from maybe posting doodles here on tumblr). I will have some posts scheduled on Patreon for the days I'm gone, including a Fractal Alliances comic upload, but I will not be available online for most of that time.

Thank you for your understanding :)

[wheremermaidsdwell]

I've been writing really slowly this week due to recovering from surgery but NOT writing is so intolerable i'm committing this weekend to hit wordcount I know it will get worse if I don't break it now

[sheliesshattered]

I miiiiight have just finished the next chapter in my long-neglected multi-part fic

[forest-hashira]

ok party people. the next chapter of noble blood was getting too long so i split it. again... BUT that means you guys get an update sooner! so that's a win in my book

[a-chuffed-floating-panda]

“Have you heard of the ancients?” Gawa asked. “Or is that something strictly known to air nomads and or other spiritual groups?”

Professor Song swallowed hard on his tea. “The who?”

—

Where I run with something mentioned in one Korra episode that will be explored more in an upcoming Wan fic and a trip to the sanctuary :)