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*emerges from the other room covered in blood* you should see the word document

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Neil Gaiman’s Advice to Aspiring Artists

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new laptop arrived yesterday, which means no more working from my tablet and phone!!! 🥰

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Shadows of Asphodel [10/?]

Summary: Asphodel; (noun); a flower said to bloom in the shadows of the greek underworld. or, Secrets are like shadows, and Izuka is surrounded by them. Secrets about her turbulent childhood, about her mother, and about her quirk.

Warnings: Darker themes are being explored in this fic. These themes include suicidal thoughts and ideation, trauma, intrusive thoughts, and other such topics. I will give provide warnings before each chapter.

Chapter ten: Me and Mine

Izuka is exhausted.

Not just tired, but a deep, echoing exhaustion that radiates from the marrow of her rib bones and spreads through her system like the oxygen in her bloodstream. More than that, she’s afraid. She’s no stranger to fear – fear has become a constant companion, taking up residence in the furthest corners of her mind, where the voice of her mother resides – and has learnt to live with it, but this time it’s different.

This fear feels cold against her lungs like winter mornings, presses against her chest with the pressure of a weighted anchor. No, this is not the same fear she’s grown accustomed to when at school, when staring into the faces of her bullies and the activation of their Quirks. That fear is hot, a flash and blinding but ultimately over quickly.

This is a constant pressure. It tugs at her naval – although that could also be the bandages wrapped tightly around her abdomen. The police station’s on-site nurses had said that they’d healed the worst of the damage, but they’d wrapped up the remaining cuts just to ensure infection can’t seep in – and wraps around her in a constant chill.

Read more on AO3

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heavy is the folder that holds the wips

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not pictured are the dozens of other unfinished fics

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“why don’t you just finish one story instead of building up more and more WIPs??”

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Why do people stop commenting on fics if they’re more than a week or two old? Please comment on old fics. Tell me you like my one shot from 2014. Tell me you like my old multi-chap I finished in 2016 that I spent a year writing. I will be fucking thrilled.

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just written another thing if anyones interested

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reblog and add your favorite comment a fic or fanart or edit of yours has ever gotten

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hey uh

this is probably somewhat awkward for a fiction written years ago, but today i read both of the mirror mirror-verse fictions and found them quite enjoyable. thank you for writing them.

Okay, so, I think the reason that explanations about this aren’t gaining traction is that we as ficauthors instinctively respond by focusing on our experience to reassure you–“No, it’s great! I love getting comments on older fic! No fanfic author is going to object to that!”–and the reason that doesn’t have much of an effect is that it’s inherently subjective. Just because one person has a positive reaction doesn’t mean everyone does, and besides, we might just be polite, right?

Here’s the actual explanation: Your anxieties are misplaced because you are mistaking a fanfiction site for social media.

Ao3 isn’t Facebook! It’s an archive. Works there are intended to be easily found and enjoyed years after their creation, exactly the same as books in a library!

It’s not “awkward” to say you just read Fahrenheit 451 for the first time even though it was written years ago, and in the same way, new readers are SUPPOSED to be constantly finding fic and enjoying it regardless of publishing date. That’s the entire point of publishing it.

Fanfiction sites are not social media. There’s no such thing as “creeping” in someone’s old posts. In a very real way, there’s no such thing as “old posts” at all. Again–by that logic, you’re being creepy whenever you pick up a book at the library that’s more than a few months old! That’s insane.

If this is your first time reading Macbeth, then it’s a totally new experience to you and you can and SHOULD talk about your impressions and reactions to that story in the context that you’re reading it. There’s entire courses and academic careers dedicated to doing exactly that. If today was the first time you went looking in the right section of the site to find our mirrorverse fic, then that fic is a new story to you and you should join the conversation.

These fics are there to be preserved so that people can always find and read and interact with them for the first time. That’s actually the entire point.

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To any fic writers who worry they are wasting their time... I read a fic for a relatively small and inactive fandom about three years ago. And there was one specific scene where a character watched another dancing like an idiot to a beyonce song and it was so sweet and loving that even now years later I have that song on one of my spotify playlist so every once in a while it will play and remind me of that fic, and every time it does I smile and feel a little happier.

The stats on a fic will never really tell you if your writing touched someone. There's no numerical way to show you what impact you made. Maybe you are wasting time, or maybe you are writing something that someone will remember for a long time, something that will never fail to make them smile.

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What about prehistoric amphibians? I think a diplocaulus holding a little cup of tea would be neat

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day 742

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What to do when you don’t like a fic: a step by step guide

Step 1:

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i don't know if anyone's interested but i like to write about greek mythology when inspiration strikes. this time it was about aphrodite

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Shadows of Asphodel [9/?]

Summary: Asphodel; (noun); a flower said to bloom in the shadows of the greek underworld. or, Secrets are like shadows, and Izuka is surrounded by them. Secrets about her turbulent childhood, about her mother, and about her quirk.

Warnings: Darker themes are being explored in this fic. These themes include suicidal thoughts and ideation, trauma, intrusive thoughts, and other such topics. I will give provide warnings before each chapter.

Chapter nine: Rounds

Shouta Aizawa considers himself quite a rational man.

He’s, quite infamously, very fond of using logic to defeat his opponents. Sometimes the battle in question is something literal – there are a good number of back alley fights with common criminals that he’s won without a scratch simply because he’s talked himself out of them, usually by saying something to the effect of, “Best give up now, otherwise we’ll both end up with several days’ worth of headaches and neither of us want that”. When the criminals in question see that Shouta is, in fact, one hundred percent serious, some of them actually do give up on the spot. A few of them have even given up control of their bodily functions along with the budding fight.

Other times, the battle is something petty, usually involving his husband.

These battles usually involve Hizashi begging Shouta to please, don’t bring home that stray cat, to which Shouta will give his Trademarked Grin and take a deep breath. The last time he’d pulled out that particular expression, he had simply remarked, “what good are we as heroes if we can’t even look out for the most defenceless of our society?” and, well, Hizashi had caved pretty quickly.

Read more on AO3

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my ao3 extension/plugin/downloady thing recs:

as i use ao3 primarily on my laptop, i have a number of super helpful things installed to make life easier. some of them are about accessibility, but most of them are just for making my reading and writing experience smoother

1. ao3 enhancements:

this one is an absolute must have for me. it combines a lot of the userscripts you can find on greasyfork and the like. unlike those scripts, though, this is a chrome extension, so it's easier to install (and can also be installed in opera gx!!). it allows you to set a reading speed (which is very handy when you're trying to find a quick fic to read before sleeping at 2am), hide works with too many fandoms, input tags so that works containing those tags are automatically hidden, and decrease the width of the work (which is great on larger screens). there's other things, as well, that it does!!

2. coloured tags

i have a lot of Issues with my eyes and chronic migraines so ao3's normal tags are a nightmare for me. the coloured tags are an absolute godsend though. the script also changes the fonts so everything's a bit nicer and easier to look at. there are two scripts to install: the original one, and the one that allows it to work on dark themes. they both need to be installed together for the dark mode one to work

note: these scripts are a few years old now so they can be a bit finicky. however, just install the two into tampermonkey, and then install the one for lightmode into stylus. that fixed any problems for me

light mode | dark mode

me, using my own fic as an example? it's more likely than you think

3. other userscripts:

note: these all require tampermonkey or something similar to work

tracking: lets you track specific tags and collections and whatever else

clone subscribe button: just adds an extra subscribe button at the end of a work. it doesn't work on fics that you're looking at in a collection, but you can easily just alter the url

download buttons: adds download buttons to works on index pages

links to first and last chapter: adds an extra button on works that takes to straight to the aforementioned chapters. very handy for quick navigation

hide images: hides images in a work. i don't always have this one active, but if a fic is already long and taking 1000 years to load, hiding any images can speed things up

4. extension of our own:

this one is more of an honourable mention, because using it too often breaks the website. it basically sorts out your subscriptions and orders them by update date. unfortunately, using it and clicking on more than one work upsets the site and locks you out for a few mins, so it's usually not worth it. if anyone knows of any other extensions or scripts that deal with subscriptions, pls tell me!!

5. offline reading:

i like to download fics to read offline, either for convenience or for travel purposes. for this, i have a couple of apps:

freda: this is the best ebook reader i've come across. it has a lot of customisation options and you can sync your library with onedrive so you can have it on multiple devices. there's technically a free version and a paid version, but there's absolutely no difference between them other than a banner ad on the free one on the library screen. when reading, the screen is clear of ads, and the only extra thing you get by paying is removing the ads. everything else is available in the free version

calibre: this is technically another ebook reader, but i like to use it for its library management and plugins, particularly fanficfare (which lets you download fics straight into calibre) and epubmerge (which lets you merge multiple works into a single ebook - handy for an ao3 series that you want to compile or smth). at first it wants to automatically open all ebooks in its own reader, but you can change that setting in the preferences. you can also save the calibre library to onedrive, so it syncs across multiple devices