#also yes please publish original stuff because i will eat it UPPP

[ofmermaidstories]

Tbh you bring up some rlly great points in ur response to that asker abt chonky chapters! but first, I will always jump into askboxes to remind people that their writing is for them first and foremost. if a reader finds longer work more intimidating, then it's on them to either brace themselves and read it anyway or look somewhere else. the benefit of the BNHA reader insert community in particular is that there are MANY other places to look! nobody's limited if they prefer longer fics or little drabbles, there's so many out there that it's impossible to read them all even if u absolutely refuse to read one type or another. And it goes the other way too! dont pressure urself to write more bc its what you think your fanbase wants—youre providing absolutely incredible work for free, write it how u wanna. anyway! all that out of the way, bc I also have some original fiction/manuscripts that I'm working on, and also bc comparing fanfic & fanfic writing to "real"/"traditional" fiction/publishing is a rlly cool topic that I enjoy discussing, i have some Opinions abt what you talked abt with bad writing habits. bc the BIGGEST thing that sets fanfic and "real" fiction apart is editing. simply put fanfic is never edited with the same vigorousness as a YA manuscript might be, even if you have many beta readers and you feel like your edits are massive. editing in traditional publishing is primarily the work of other people—an editor who is being paid to do so, sometimes even a team of them; beta readers and sensitivity readers who are also being paid to do so (the paid part is important, bc even tho we care about hobbies we arent doing them professionally!)—and v importantly, theres something you hear a lot from writers that from rough draft to print their work practically became multiple different books along the line. it's rigorous, it's practically half the total work & time put into working on a book these days. fanfic doesnt have that! i guess my point is that you're thinking that, like fanfic, the pressure of what to cut on the chopping block will come to you if/when you do make the jump to "real" writing, but it likely won't. you'd have editors to say "these parts dont matter as much, chop them" or "this is lengthy, cut it down" so your job is to do the work they tell u n trust them lmfao. ofc if you become a diva writer who bitches n moans n refuses to edit that's a different story (and frankly one that's becoming more common as fanfic authors start to break into the traditional publishing world, and writing esp in ya is v much suffering as a result imo) but. well. i dont believe thatll be a problem for u merm JKBAAKJHFS esp considering ur already thinking abt it as for accessibility...... first off one of the benefits of posting on ao3 as opposed to tumblr is that ao3 has a ton of scripts for users that can help with that. but you can always leave a little note in a chapter saying "hey, this is a good time for a break!" or something. or break it up differently! s'all up to you

either way ik ill eagerly read anything u put out 😌 whether its 10k or 30k or 100k, fanfic or original <333

Omg, Pluvi, i love you LMAO sdkjsdklfjh okay okay hang on, lemme squint at this for a bit.

I’ve always wondered if like, this unedited freedom is what’s given rise to the whole, worship-culture of long fics?? Okay, worship-culture isn’t the right term for what I want, but we’re gonna keep it for now — idk, because unless you’ve got a guaranteed audience to sell to or an editor who REALLY goes to bat for you, most publishers are gonna be leery of like, things over 100k???? The chonky-ass book trend has only been a relatively recent thing!!! I remember Tamora Pierce (one of my favourite childhood authors!!) saying that Harry Potter/Stinker (derogatory) really opened up the door to publishers being more willing to print big books, because it was proving that there was enough kids out there who would read them.

And on one hand, I feel like fandom sort of proves that that can be true for a general audience, too. Because you’ll come into a fandom and there’ll be someone going, “omg read this super popular Dramonie fic!! it’s 300k and will take a solid week off your life but it’s sooooo good!!!” (i am not a dramonie fan personally but that has also not stopped me from reading some of the single most popular fics in that ship — mostly because i was listening to a podcast one day that was like, two hours long and was an interview with a really popular Dramonie author who’s fics I kept seeing on tiktok being book-bound???? idk, it was interesting! She talked about how she would finish a chapter in a week (jealous) and then send it off to her army of betas and then post it via her phone while in service at Church LMAO dslksdkljdfk anyways). But then I wonder, like — is it less about length, and more about what you can explore when given the freedom to write whatever you want? And people just confuse length with that freedom? Because I have read some long, long, long fics that I can tell you right now were better off stopping like, 50k in LMAO. And I think being a storyteller (which we all are, really) means knowing when enough’s enough (i say, like my dumb ass isn’t planning an interconnected trilogy sdlkfjsdlkjf).

The fanfic-author-to-pubbed-author pipeline is FASCINATING lmao, because I always think of 50 Shades of Gray :’) Our Twilight-loving friend really said, “replace Edward and Bella’s names and hit print money” and it WORKED LDSKFJLDKSFJ. I guess… more so because it was just blatant erotica? I feel like fanfic is a really good example of the power of hornee LOL. But also that people… want it???? I dunno, the overlap is fascinating. I think a really interesting like, case study in the power of an editor/beta is the Caroline Calloway story, who is like, very, very, micro-ly infamous for like, being an early instagram “influencer” — she likes to say that she pioneered the “long caption” trend, because she (as an American citizen) went off to Oxford University and started using her instagram to like, chronicle the magic of those days — rowboating with Titled peers, spending a weekend in Italian with aristocrats and eating squid-ink pasta at midnight. She would have these long, long captions that were poetic and charming and she gathered a bit of a modest following because of it — and ended up scoring like, a 200k book deal from it? A book deal that she then reneged on because she couldn’t deliver the finished product — because her friend, Natalie, was ghostwriting said book, after editing the instagram captions for her. They’d had a falling out during the process of writing the book and it’s proposal though — so obviously, Natalie wasn’t ghostwriting anymore, and Caroline, under the influence of an addiction, couldn’t deliver. To this DAY, Caroline is STILL promising a book that she’s trying to self-publish, but she’s been promising (and has opened pre-orders) for it since like, 2019 LMAO. Okay, you know what, that actually has literally nothing to do with what we’re discussing here right now LMAO but idk.. it’s fun so I’ll leave it in sdlkfjsdlkfj. A neat little detour!!!

writing’s hard. :’) and i think i personally find it harder than it might actually be because — I worry about it like it’s my job, instead of something i do for fun LMAO. and, ultimately, i am a people pleaser at heart!!! i will only ever write the things i like, but i want the people who read them and like them too to like… idk, have fun doing it, LOL. it’s fine, this is fine. It’s interesting, because I didn’t have this pressure working on my manuscript — I just wrote the story I wanted to, and then the strictness came when I sat down to edit it the first time. I was on my second round of edits when i fell head-first into BNHA and haven’t looked back since :’) but it does need an overhaul; especially at the beginning. I just dread…. going back and doing it, lmao, because idk where to start with it. but i do need to do something with it, since i did love this idea, once, and believed in it pretty whole-heartedly!!! but also: My Hero Academia 😩 Bakugou. 😔 Bakugou, my beloved.