sarahundomiel - Tumblr blog

[sarahundomiel]

The next chapter of Fallout is finally up!

Slight delay today due to the need to create ART to accompany this one.

Meet Mina's pet white skunk!

[sarahundomiel]

Second chapter!

This one was fun to write. (Though seriously those poor kids. It's okay. We're going to fix it.)

[sarahundomiel]

One missing pro hero

One badly injured pro-hero

Fifteen students injured by gas

Eleven students with other injuries - two of them severe

One student missing...

...and the rest left trying to understand what had just happened.

Following Class 1-A and their teacher through the tumultuous three days between the disastrous end of the Forest Training Camp and All Might's fight against All for One in Kamino Ward.

...

Our newest work in the We Are More Than Heroes series. We've been looking forward to posting this one for quite a while!

[sarahundomiel]

Oh my goodness! I think this particular story is one of the best ones we've written for this series! It was SO much fun putting this together and we laughed SO hard!

Tsukauchi just doesn't know what to do with this teenager he's fostering 😆

[sarahundomiel]

This story was fun to play with the pacing as it was very much inspired by those flashback stories that all long running crime dramas do where they have one character telling another character about a case they worked in the past.

It's just that this time it's Tsukauchi and Aizawa 😁

[sarahundomiel]

Hey all,

Sorry I sorta disappeared for a bit. For those of you who look here for updates on what stories have been updated - oops 😬 I'm really sorry. I'm going to go ahead and get the links to the things that have been posted in the past couple of months linked over here also.

[sarahundomiel]

That's your opinion. I don't tag every interaction. As determined by people who actually read my work - no those tags were not unnecessary. I get regular comments from readers who appreciate the level of depth minor characters and friendships received in that story. That particular story is complete. I won't be adding more, but neither will I be deleting any. If the tags I've added bother you then you're most likely not my intended audience, and that's okay with me.

Tags are intended to be searchable and excludable. That's LITERALLY their entire purpose. There are bigger problems with AO3 functionality than this. Like not having the ability to block tags/works/authors without having to bookmark a filtered search off site or coding a whole new site skin.

AO3 already has a checkbox under preferences to not show additional tags. Coding in additional preference boxes to instead of hiding all tags, hide "all tags after [number]" which could be a box filled in by the account holder would make far more sense. Heck they could even do it for each field - relationships, characters, and additional tags.

Both of those things might ACTUALLY improve site functionality.

In the coming days, we’ll be rolling out a code change that limits the total number of fandom, character, relationship, and additional tags that can be added to a work. This limit of 75 tags will apply to both new and existing works, but no tags will be automatically removed from existing works.

Afrikaans • العربية • Bahasa Indonesia • Български • বাংলা • català • Cymraeg • dansk • Deutsch • Ελληνικά • English • español • français • 한국어 • हिंदी • hrvatski • italiano • עברית • lietuvių kalba • magyar • Malay • मराठी • Nederlands • 日本語 • norsk • polski • português brasileiro • português europeu • Română • Русский • slovenčina • slovenščina • српски • suomi • svenska • ไทย • Tiếng Việt • Türkçe • Українська • 中文

[sarahundomiel]

Anyone who needs more than 75 tags on a story (I have one that's 300,000 words with less than 30 tags) is no longer tagging for trigger warnings, they're tagging to get the most views they can by wanting it to show up in the most searches possible. Which is fine, but we need to be honest about why they're being used and not pretend it's for the good of other people. Use "additional warnings in author's note". It's not the end of the world, nor is it even a real problem.

.5% of 8mil fics is 40,000 fics, not 400,000.

That's just it though - tags AREN'T just for warnings! Their purpose is specifically TO BE searchable! People don't post things they don't want people to read. Yes I've seen long fics that don't hit 30 tags, but those are either A) written for fandoms with a small cast, B) insufficiently tagged, C) focused on a small subset of characters because people find adequately writing ensemble cast stories difficult.

Also as someone with very niche interests for what I want to read it's already hard enough to find works that contain them. Forcing authors to narrow their tags just makes it harder to find fics I want to read.

It ISN'T a non-issue just because it doesn't effect you.

(And yes I see I moved the decimal point over one place too far. That actually doesn't help your case though. Something that effects such a small number of fics won't actually be beneficial in the long run. The suggestions I made for other things that would fix ACTUAL issues are far better than messing with the number of tags a fic can have.)

[sarahundomiel]

Further Notes which I commented on the main post on AO3:

For anyone still defending that this won't horribly impact authors of long fic who very often need more tags to adequately cover the topics/potential triggers in their stories, especially in fandoms with very large ensemble casts and/or multiple media sources - I've run some numbers for you.

AO3 says that they chose this number because it only effects about 0.5% of fics on the site. AO3 currently has just over 8,000,000 fics in the archive. 0.5% of that number is 400,000. When I run a search of all works in the archive across all fandoms based upon nothing except word count, I find that there are only 207,847 works on the ENTIRE SITE that are over 50,000 words. That's approx. 0.25%! Same search including all works over 30,000 words? 391,214 works. Okay that's ALMOST 0.5%. Same search including all works over 25,000 words this time. That gotta jump quite a bit right? 478,064! On the entire freaking site and I still haven't even hit 1%!

This means that OVER 99% of fics on the ENTIRE SITE are UNDER 25,000 words!

Anyone who still thinks that this move doesn't disproportionately favor short fic in fandoms with smaller casts and harm authors of long fic and fandoms with larger casts is a moron! (And don't even get me started on what it will do to authors of erotic fic - but that's what the antis wanted all along anyway wasn't it?)

Does there need to be a solution to make the site more accessible? Yes. I'm not arguing that. But this is NOT it. Maybe try fixing the system so that we can set certain tags/works/authors we don't want to see to be blocked on the site in preferences WITHOUT having to bookmark them on our personal devices or write them into the code of a site skin? Write a new preference code to allow readers to hide all additional tags over a certain number instead of just hiding all of them? If you have to have a limit, set it proportional to the word count/chapter count of a work? (And before anyone says this will hurt podfics and and fanart - obviously they would get the same base limit as everyone - which COULD BE 75 tags. But fics over 25,000 words should not have to be held to that limit.)

Just because a few idiots abuse the system is no reason to implement collective punishment which is EXACTLY what this is!

In the coming days, we’ll be rolling out a code change that limits the total number of fandom, character, relationship, and additional tags that can be added to a work. This limit of 75 tags will apply to both new and existing works, but no tags will be automatically removed from existing works.

Afrikaans • العربية • Bahasa Indonesia • Български • বাংলা • català • Cymraeg • dansk • Deutsch • Ελληνικά • English • español • français • 한국어 • हिंदी • hrvatski • italiano • עברית • lietuvių kalba • magyar • Malay • मराठी • Nederlands • 日本語 • norsk • polski • português brasileiro • português europeu • Română • Русский • slovenčina • slovenščina • српски • suomi • svenska • ไทย • Tiếng Việt • Türkçe • Українська • 中文

[sarahundomiel]

I'm sorry but I don't know who thought this number was a good idea but 75 is WAY too low!!!!!!!!! It was obviously decided on with statistics based on short fics and doesn't adequately allow long fic to be tagged.

I currently have a nearly 60,000 word fic with about 90 tags on it. It's very much an ensemble cast story for My Hero Academia. I have ONLY tagged for characters who have a portion of the story written in their point of view, relationships which are the focus of a chapter or significant scene, a few warnings, and a few applicable additional tags which are specifically major tags in the fandom and not redundant. I could MAYBE at most trim FIVE of those tags and still have it adequately covered.

No this is NOT a story that could be broken up into shorter pieces. It's not a series of stories that should be separate one-shots. It's a single fandom piece.

If they were says 75 character tags, 75 relationship tags, AND 75 additional tags for a total of 225 tags I could work with that. If they were saying 150 tags, I could work with that. Limiting it to 75 tags for long fics of the rotating POV style I write makes the site practically non-functional.

In the coming days, we’ll be rolling out a code change that limits the total number of fandom, character, relationship, and additional tags that can be added to a work. This limit of 75 tags will apply to both new and existing works, but no tags will be automatically removed from existing works.

Afrikaans • العربية • Bahasa Indonesia • Български • বাংলা • català • Cymraeg • dansk • Deutsch • Ελληνικά • English • español • français • 한국어 • हिंदी • hrvatski • italiano • עברית • lietuvių kalba • magyar • Malay • मराठी • Nederlands • 日本語 • norsk • polski • português brasileiro • português europeu • Română • Русский • slovenčina • slovenščina • српски • suomi • svenska • ไทย • Tiếng Việt • Türkçe • Українська • 中文

[sarahundomiel]

Next work in the series is up! This one features Miyake Ohta, our darling OC who we introduced in chapter 12 of 'Beasts Close In', as Tsukauchi takes him home after the events of that story.

When we introduced him in 'Beasts', a few people asked us for art of him, so I played around with the alcohol markers again to create a portrait of him. He's between 5'7" and 5'8" (171 cm) with a build somewhere between Bakugou and Todoroki. If anyone else wants to take a crack at drawing him or any other illustrations for the series, we'd love 💕 to see them. People are not my strongest art skill, so I can draw an initial image, but it's difficult for me to recreate multiple images of the same person.

[sarahundomiel]

Oh my goodness!!!! It feels like the end of an era! The final chapter of "Beasts Close In" is UP!!!

Never fear however that it still has lots of unanswered questions. We're kicking off a MASSIVE series here and have so many exciting things planned for the future!

[sarahundomiel]

With the style of writing I work in where I deep dive in a particular character's POV and switch characters regularly, 8 times out of 10 when I'm stuck it's because I'm trying to write the wrong character and switching to a different POV fixes everything. The other two times it's "this scene doesn't actually need to be here" or "real life is kicking my butt and I need to just take a break".

When I do need to change after I've already written something I never completely delete what was already there straight away. I just move it out of the way until whatever new bit I'm writing makes them obviously unneeded. So that the pain of deleting words isn't really there. Sometimes I delete them at that point and sometimes I hang onto them as homeless plot bunnies because I might find a way to use them somewhere else.

This isnt a joke my favorite piece of writing advice that I’ve ever seen is someone that said if you were stuck with a fic and couldn’t figure out why or what was wrong, your problem is actually usually about ten sentences back. Maybe there was something wonky about the tone or the dialogue or you added something that didn’t fit but it’s usually ten sentences back. And every single time I get stuck in a fic I count back ten sentences and it’s always fucking there

[sarahundomiel]

Of all the redemption arcs in popular fantasy media, I feel like Theoden's in The Lord of the Rings is the most overlooked.

The movies emphasize the magical control that the evil powers exercise over Theoden, but in the books, it's more obviously a depiction of bad kingship, in the British medieval sense. Theoden takes bad advice; he neglects his family; he fails to reward his knights; and he leaves his people vulnerable to attack. He also does not honor his kingdom's promises to help nearby kingdoms, as we can tell from Boromir's account of what Gondor has been going through.

Gandalf doesn't just cast out the curse and magically fix everything. He encourages Theoden to free himself from his bad advisor, but Theoden has to take all the subsequent steps. And those choices are not easy; after so much neglect, his knights are scattered, and his only option for defending his people is to gather them at Helm's Deep. The siege does not go well. His people are afraid and despairing. But nevertheless, he holds firm and charges out to meet the enemy -- and Gandalf literally meets him halfway, bringing with him the lost knights, whom Theoden welcomes and rewards after the battle.

Theoden could have just gone home after that. But when Gondor calls for aid, Theoden proves his worth by honoring his promises. He keeps his oaths not only to his people but to his allies.

And the climax of his redemption in the book is not his death, but his leadership. The ride of the Rohirrim against Sauron's armies is described in lavish detail, with an uncharacteristically heated pace: Theoden leads the entire line of Rohan, his banner streaming behind him in the wind as they race toward their foe. And that's the end of the chapter.

I love Theoden's arc so much, and especially that moment so much, because the message is not that he has to win battles or seek power. He just has to keep fighting. Theoden's greatest enemy isn't really Sauron: it's despair. And over the course of the book, he keeps choosing hope and action over despair and hesitation, until finally he can lead his people with courage.

As someone who struggles a lot with despair, I really needed to hear that story.

[sarahundomiel]

Second to last chapter on this story!

Super excited for this one! It sets up the rest of this massive series SO well I think!

[sarahundomiel]

Or take the easy route and just italicize the punctuation next to the italicized word which avoids this without bothering with any code at all and under most circumstances makes no visual difference. Copy it into the rich text box on AO3 and be done. I don't have the time or care for complicated.

I write my fics out in Google Docs and then paste the text into Ao3 when I'm ready to post it. Does anyone else have the problem of pasting with italics? If there's a word in italics next to punctuation, Ao3 will add in a space for some reason and it's kind of infuriating.

One of the AO3 translation volunteers (Min) created a Google Docs script to handle issues when copying from a doc into AO3. It’s really easy to use

create a copy of this google doc. It contains the script that will do all of the HTML formatting for you.

Delete all of the text from the document.

Write or paste your fic/chapter into the document.

Go up to the top menu and click the new menu option Post to AO3, then choose Prepare for posting into the HTML editor

Note: because this is an apps script, you’ll need to give it permission to run the first time. 

The script will automatically mark up your document with the required HTML that you can then paste into the AO3 composition window. \o/

To revert your text back to normal, just go back up to that menu and choose Remove HTML. It will look like regular text again. 

Once you have the doc, you can make a new copy of it for each new fic you write and that way you’ll always have that script available when you need it :)

For other cool stuff, read this post from @ao3org - which is where I found this script in the first place ❤

[sarahundomiel]

"Show, don't tell" applies to all writing because it gives a deeper more immersive experience. Showing in a written narrative means that instead of saying "this character is helpful" you demonstrate that through having a scene where your character volunteers to clean the garage or gives directions to a stranger. Instead of saying "it was a sunny day" you have a character notice the way the light sparkles on the pool in the back yard or mention the cat sunning himself by the window. You describe the light as warm or golden or oppressively bright. For plot points this is more of a scene vs a transition paragraph sort of deal and it's comes down to pacing. There's a lot more nuance to pacing a story than just how long or short it is.

I have a preference for writing long fic and read fast enough that for me anything less than 1000 words is rarely clicked on, but transition paragraphs and exposition to get the characters from point A to point B are expected techniques in all prose regardless of length, not the enemy that they're often made out to be. That said a good story strikes a balance and doesn't overdo the exposition but uses it judiciously to move the story along at a satisfying rate.

My preferred method for all writing whether long or short is to simply drop my readers directly into the middle of the action and then reveal the context as I go in order to build tension.

in support of “tell, don’t show”

A lot of writing advice out there encourages writers to show rather than tell information to their readers. This is really useful in things like characterization where it can be a much more satisfying reading experience to understand a character’s personality over time rather than just being given a list of adjectives right up front.

But that doesn’t mean that stating things directly is bad. It just means that you should reflect on your story and decide which parts are important enough to be worth showing and which parts are just background and can be handled with a quick sentence or two that tells the reader the relevant information.

If you try to show every piece of information that a reader needs to be aware of, you’ll find yourself going off on long tangents away from the point of the story. Or you’ll find yourself writing two pages of context that could have just as easily been handled by a character (or the narrator) revealing that information much more succinctly.

What is the point of your story? What are you trying to get across? What is the main idea that you want to spend the most time with? Those are the parts of the story where showing will have a satisfying payoff.

The parts where telling is useful are where you want to give your reader information but you don’t want to lose the thread of what you’re talking about. In that situation, telling keeps your story more on target. It also respects your reader’s time.

The next time you find yourself faced with a section of a story that you really don’t want to write but you feel like you have to because context, try just dropping that information in - even just as a placeholder - and see how you feel.

Give writing priority (and reading priority) to the parts of your story that are your story and let the rest settle into the background. It’s worth a shot, don’t you think?