#and i want to get a variation of it published which will also be work since i need to change a mountain of details

[pastafossa]

hey pasta! I don’t know if someone has asked this already but is TRT gonna go into Born Again or end at season 3?

So that's where I'm not sure! The current outline is as such:

All Major Arcs (including Cyrus James/Project Beagle fallout arc and psychic abilities arcs): scheduled to wrap up a bit after the end of S3 so that Matt and Jane's arcs/development neatly dovetail together. This will mark the official end of TRT's main fic.

Special Additional Arcs (chaptered fics not attached to main fic but still TRT canon, taking place after end of main fic) in no particular order: Endgame/The Snap arc, Spider-Man: NWH arc, Spoiler Removed arc, tentative She Hulk Shenanigans arc.

Oneshot Arcs: various domestic fluff arcs, interactions with major MCU events, a 'What Their Life Is Like When Old Cause GD It They're Going To Live To Old Age And Will Have Rocking Chairs' arc, a SINGLE take it or leave it 'What If?' fic of something funny with a possible daughter cause damn I had this idea for a hilarious scene and it won't leave me alone

Now, those are what are planned in the outline, and the main event with Project Beagle tie-ins and plotlines and all of that is something I'm still planning to end just after S3 because I really do want to have a finish line for that, and I feel like dragging that all out for Born Again wouldn't work for the... events that are going to happen, without saying too much. Once that's wrapped up, that's when you're going to see TRT finally marked as 'complete' on AO3, though there'll be more fics set in that universe (see special additional arcs and oneshot arcs) that I'll mark as in the Devil and Hound series along with drabbles on tumblr.

Once we're past that official endpoint and those special arcs, though, things get fluid and murky since when I was outlining all the major plotlines, there was no Daredevil: Born Again, nor was Matt even in the MCU officially (which is why Spider-Man pops in way sooner in TRT than he meets Matt in the MCU) and I specifically set up Jane's plotline to bookend with Matt's so their growth twined together and they both finally found peace around the same time. Outside that, I'd planned some shorter chaptered stories in the series post-mainline TRT like the Snap arc that I may now adjust (since it sure is looking like Matt was left behind for the snap) but nothing on the level of TRT's main plotline which is absolutely massive and took me years to fully outline and construct before coming back from hiatus in 2021 and pumping out chapters (Happy six year anniversary to TRT on Sept 15!).

ALL THAT BEING SAID.

I do have plans to write stuff for TRT's take on Born Again because I'm 100% married to writing for Matt at this point and there's no possible way I won't want to do something once I'm being fed Charlie!Matt scenes again. I'm not sure what those plans are just yet - I kinda wanna wait and see what happens in Born Again in case it sparks something. But I also want to make sure that no matter what I do, there's some sort of strong original plotline so that, much like mainline TRT, we'll be able to weave in and out of canonical events (especially since things like the Snap or a wedding or Jane and Matt's friendship with Peter will alter canon). I don't think I'm going to do something quite as huge as TRT's main plotline again, mostly because it takes a TON of time and work, and I'm planning to take the original TRT elements and morph them into an original series fit for publishing (different enough that I can leave TRT up for everyone to read, cause at this point the fic's part of DD fandom culture and I have no plans to take that away) which will also take a ton of time. But I'm definitely rattling my brain around, looking at different plotlines I could do knowing what I know about the ending, hunting for loose ends or canonical threads that I can weave in with TRT's world and create something new!

Then again, I never would have said I'd make something as massive as TRT before I started, either, so who knows.

So in short: YES, there will be TRT events for Born Again even if it's not as elaborate as TRT! I just have no idea what those will be yet. Fortunately, TRT mainline's only a little over halfway done so I've got time to plan!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Pluralistic: Leaving Twitter had no effect on NPR's traffic

I'm coming to Minneapolis! This Sunday (Oct 15): Presenting The Internet Con at Moon Palace Books. Monday (Oct 16): Keynoting the 26th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing.

Enshittification is the process by which a platform lures in and then captures end users (stage one), who serve as bait for business customers, who are also captured (stage two), whereupon the platform rug-pulls both groups and allocates all the value they generate and exchange to itself (stage three):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

Enshittification isn't merely a form of rent-seeking – it is a uniquely digital phenomenon, because it relies on the inherent flexibility of digital systems. There are lots of intermediaries that want to extract surpluses from customers and suppliers – everyone from grocers to oil companies – but these can't be reconfigured in an eyeblink the that that purely digital services can.

A sleazy boss can hide their wage-theft with a bunch of confusing deductions to your paycheck. But when your boss is an app, it can engage in algorithmic wage discrimination, where your pay declines minutely every time you accept a job, but if you start to decline jobs, the app can raise the offer:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

I call this process "twiddling": tech platforms are equipped with a million knobs on their back-ends, and platform operators can endlessly twiddle those knobs, altering the business logic from moment to moment, turning the system into an endlessly shifting quagmire where neither users nor business customers can ever be sure whether they're getting a fair deal:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

Social media platforms are compulsive twiddlers. They use endless variation to lure in – and then lock in – publishers, with the goal of converting these standalone businesses into commodity suppliers who are dependent on the platform, who can then be charged rent to reach the users who asked to hear from them.

Facebook designed this playbook. First, it lured in end-users by promising them a good deal: "Unlike Myspace, which spies on you from asshole to appetite, Facebook is a privacy-respecting site that will never, ever spy on you. Simply sign up, tell us everyone who matters to you, and we'll populate a feed with everything they post for public consumption":

https://lawcat.berkeley.edu/record/1128876

The users came, and locked themselves in: when people gather in social spaces, they inadvertently take one another hostage. You joined Facebook because you liked the people who were there, then others joined because they liked you. Facebook can now make life worse for all of you without losing your business. You might hate Facebook, but you like each other, and the collective action problem of deciding when and whether to go, and where you should go next, is so difficult to overcome, that you all stay in a place that's getting progressively worse.

Once its users were locked in, Facebook turned to advertisers and said, "Remember when we told these rubes we'd never spy on them? It was a lie. We spy on them with every hour that God sends, and we'll sell you access to that data in the form of dirt-cheap targeted ads."

Then Facebook went to the publishers and said, "Remember when we told these suckers that we'd only show them the things they asked to see? Total lie. Post short excerpts from your content and links back to your websites and we'll nonconsensually cram them into the eyeballs of people who never asked to see them. It's a free, high-value traffic funnel for your own site, bringing monetizable users right to your door."

Now, Facebook had to find a way to lock in those publishers. To do this, it had to twiddle. By tiny increments, Facebook deprioritized publishers' content, forcing them to make their excerpts grew progressively longer. As with gig workers, the digital flexibility of Facebook gave it lots of leeway here. Some publishers sensed the excerpts they were being asked to post were a substitute for visiting their sites – and not an enticement – and drew down their posting to Facebook.

When that happened, Facebook could twiddle in the publisher's favor, giving them broader distribution for shorter excerpts, then, once the publisher returned to the platform, Facebook drew down their traffic unless they started posting longer pieces. Twiddling lets platforms play users and business-customers like a fish on a line, giving them slack when they fight, then reeling them in when they tire.

Once Facebook converted a publisher to a commodity supplier to the platform, it reeled the publishers in. First, it deprioritized publishers' posts when they had links back to the publisher's site (under the pretext of policing "clickbait" and "malicious links"). Then, it stopped showing publishers' content to their own subscribers, extorting them to pay to "boost" their posts in order to reach people who had explicitly asked to hear from them.

For users, this meant that their feeds were increasingly populated with payola-boosted content from advertisers and pay-to-play publishers who paid Facebook's Danegeld to reach them. A user will only spend so much time on Facebook, and every post that Facebook feeds that user from someone they want to hear from is a missed opportunity to show them a post from someone who'll pay to reach them.

Here, too, twiddling lets Facebook fine-tune its approach. If a user starts to wean themself off Facebook, the algorithm (TM) can put more content the user has asked to see in the feed. When the user's participation returns to higher levels, Facebook can draw down the share of desirable content again, replacing it with monetizable content. This is done minutely, behind the scenes, automatically, and quickly. In any shell game, the quickness of the hand deceives the eye.

This is the final stage of enshittification: withdrawing surpluses from end-users and business customers, leaving behind the minimum homeopathic quantum of value for each needed to keep them locked to the platform, generating value that can be extracted and diverted to platform shareholders.

But this is a brittle equilibrium to maintain. The difference between "God, I hate this place but I just can't leave it" and "Holy shit, this sucks, I'm outta here" is razor-thin. All it takes is one privacy scandal, one livestreamed mass-shooting, one whistleblower dump, and people bolt for the exits. This kicks off a death-spiral: as users and business customers leave, the platform's shareholders demand that they squeeze the remaining population harder to make up for the loss.

One reason this gambit worked so well is that it was a long con. Platform operators and their investors have been willing to throw away billions convincing end-users and business customers to lock themselves in until it was time for the pig-butchering to begin. They financed expensive forays into additional features and complementary products meant to increase user lock-in, raising the switching costs for users who were tempted to leave.

For example, Facebook's product manager for its "photos" product wrote to Mark Zuckerberg to lay out a strategy of enticing users into uploading valuable family photos to the platform in order to "make switching costs very high for users," who would have to throw away their precious memories as the price for leaving Facebook:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

The platforms' patience paid off. Their slow ratchets operated so subtly that we barely noticed the squeeze, and when we did, they relaxed the pressure until we were lulled back into complacency. Long cons require a lot of prefrontal cortex, the executive function to exercise patience and restraint.

Which brings me to Elon Musk, a man who seems to have been born without a prefrontal cortex, who has repeatedly and publicly demonstrated that he lacks any restraint, patience or planning. Elon Musk's prefrontal cortical deficit resulted in his being forced to buy Twitter, and his every action since has betrayed an even graver inability to stop tripping over his own dick.

Where Zuckerberg played enshittification as a long game, Musk is bent on speedrunning it. He doesn't slice his users up with a subtle scalpel, he hacks away at them with a hatchet.

Musk inaugurated his reign by nonconsensually flipping every user to an algorithmic feed which was crammed with ads and posts from "verified" users whose blue ticks verified solely that they had $8 ($11 for iOS users). Where Facebook deployed substantial effort to enticing users who tired of eyeball-cramming feed decay by temporarily improving their feeds, Musk's Twitter actually overrode users' choice to switch back to a chronological feed by repeatedly flipping them back to more monetizable, algorithmic feeds.

Then came the squeeze on publishers. Musk's Twitter rolled out a bewildering array of "verification" ticks, each priced higher than the last, and publishers who refused to pay found their subscribers taken hostage, with Twitter downranking or shadowbanning their content unless they paid.

(Musk also squeezed advertisers, keeping the same high prices but reducing the quality of the offer by killing programs that kept advertisers' content from being published along Holocaust denial and open calls for genocide.)

Today, Musk continues to squeeze advertisers, publishers and users, and his hamfisted enticements to make up for these depredations are spectacularly bad, and even illegal, like offering advertisers a new kind of ad that isn't associated with any Twitter account, can't be blocked, and is not labeled as an ad:

https://www.wired.com/story/xs-sneaky-new-ads-might-be-illegal/

Of course, Musk has a compulsive bullshitter's contempt for the press, so he has far fewer enticements for them to stay. Quite the reverse: first, Musk removed headlines from link previews, rendering posts by publishers that went to their own sites into stock-art enigmas that generated no traffic:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/oct/05/x-twitter-strips-headlines-new-links-why-elon-musk

Then he jumped straight to the end-stage of enshittification by announcing that he would shadowban any newsmedia posts with links to sites other than Twitter, "because there is less time spent if people click away." Publishers were advised to "post content in long form on this platform":

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/111183068362793821

Where a canny enshittifier would have gestured at a gaslighting explanation ("we're shadowbanning posts with links because they might be malicious"), Musk busts out the motto of the Darth Vader MBA: "I am altering the deal, pray I don't alter it any further."

All this has the effect of highlighting just how little residual value there is on the platform for publishers, and tempts them to bolt for the exits. Six months ago, NPR lost all patience with Musk's shenanigans, and quit the service. Half a year later, they've revealed how low the switching cost for a major news outlet that leaves Twitter really are: NPR's traffic, post-Twitter, has declined by less than a single percentage point:

https://niemanreports.org/articles/npr-twitter-musk/

NPR's Twitter accounts had 8.7 million followers, but even six months ago, Musk's enshittification speedrun had drawn down NPR's ability to reach those users to a negligible level. The 8.7 million number was an illusion, a shell game Musk played on publishers like NPR in a bid to get them to buy a five-figure iridium checkmark or even a six-figure titanium one.

On Twitter, the true number of followers you have is effectively zero – not because Twitter users haven't explicitly instructed the service to show them your posts, but because every post in their feeds that they want to see is a post that no one can be charged to show them.

I've experienced this myself. Three and a half years ago, I left Boing Boing and started pluralistic.net, my cross-platform, open access, surveillance-free, daily newsletter and blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/drei-drei-drei/#now-we-are-three

Boing Boing had the good fortune to have attracted a sizable audience before the advent of siloed platforms, and a large portion of that audience came to the site directly, rather than following us on social media. I knew that, starting a new platform from scratch, I wouldn't have that luxury. My audience would come from social media, and it would be up to me to convert readers into people who followed me on platforms I controlled – where neither they nor I could be held to ransom.

I embraced a strategy called POSSE: Post Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere. With POSSE, the permalink and native habitat for your material is a site you control (in my case, a WordPress blog with all the telemetry, logging and surveillance disabled). Then you repost that content to other platforms – mostly social media – with links back to your own site:

https://indieweb.org/POSSE

There are a lot of automated tools to help you with this, but the platforms have gone to great lengths to break or neuter them. Musk's attack on Twitter's legendarily flexible and powerful API killed every automation tool that might help with this. I was lucky enough to have a reader – Loren Kohnfelder – who coded me some python scripts that automate much of the process, but POSSE remains a very labor-intensive and error-prone methodology:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/13/two-decades/#hfbd

And of all the feeds I produce – email, RSS, Discourse, Medium, Tumblr, Mastodon – none is as labor-intensive as Twitter's. It is an unforgiving medium to begin with, and Musk's drawdown of engineering support has made it wildly unreliable. Many's the time I've set up 20+ posts in a thread, only to have the browser tab reload itself and wipe out all my work.

But I stuck with Twitter, because I have a half-million followers, and to the extent that I reach them there, I can hope that they will follow the permalinks to Pluralistic proper and switch over to RSS, or email, or a daily visit to the blog.

But with each day, the case for using Twitter grows weaker. I get ten times as many replies and reposts on Mastodon, though my Mastodon follower count is a tenth the size of my (increasingly hypothetical) Twitter audience.

All this raises the question of what can or should be done about Twitter. One possible regulatory response would be to impose an "End-To-End" rule on the service, requiring that Twitter deliver posts from willing senders to willing receivers without interfering in them. End-To-end is the bedrock of the internet (one of its incarnations is Net Neutrality) and it's a proven counterenshittificatory force:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/06/save-news-we-need-end-end-web

Despite what you may have heard, "freedom of reach" is freedom of speech: when a platform interposes itself between willing speakers and their willing audiences, it arrogates to itself the power to control what we're allowed to say and who is allowed to hear us:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

We have a wide variety of tools to make a rule like this stick. For one thing, Musk's Twitter has violated innumerable laws and consent decrees in the US, Canada and the EU, which creates a space for regulators to impose "conduct remedies" on the company.

But there's also existing regulatory authorities, like the FTC's Section Five powers, which enable the agency to act against companies that engage in "unfair and deceptive" acts. When Twitter asks you who you want to hear from, then refuses to deliver their posts to you unless they pay a bribe, that's both "unfair and deceptive":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

But that's only a stopgap. The problem with Twitter isn't that this important service is run by the wrong mercurial, mediocre billionaire: it's that hundreds of millions of people are at the mercy of any foolish corporate leader. While there's a short-term case for improving the platforms, our long-term strategy should be evacuating them:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/18/urban-wildlife-interface/#combustible-walled-gardens

To make that a reality, we could also impose a "Right To Exit" on the platforms. This would be an interoperability rule that would require Twitter to adopt Mastodon's approach to server-hopping: click a link to export the list of everyone who follows you on one server, click another link to upload that file to another server, and all your followers and followees are relocated to your new digs:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/23/semipermeable-membranes/#free-as-in-puppies

A Twitter with the Right To Exit would exert a powerful discipline even on the stunted self-regulatory centers of Elon Musk's brain. If he banned a reporter for publishing truthful coverage that cast him in a bad light, that reporter would have the legal right to move to another platform, and continue to reach the people who follow them on Twitter. Publishers aghast at having the headlines removed from their Twitter posts could go somewhere less slipshod and still reach the people who want to hear from them on Twitter.

And both Right To Exit and End-To-End satisfy the two prime tests for sound internet regulation: first, they are easy to administer. If you want to know whether Musk is permitting harassment on his platform, you have to agree on a definition of harassment, determine whether a given act meets that definition, and then investigate whether Twitter took reasonable steps to prevent it.

By contrast, administering End-To-End merely requires that you post something and see if your followers receive it. Administering Right To Exit is as simple as saying, "OK, Twitter, I know you say you gave Cory his follower and followee file, but he says he never got it. Just send him another copy, and this time, CC the regulator so we can verify that it arrived."

Beyond administration, there's the cost of compliance. Requiring Twitter to police its users' conduct also requires it to hire an army of moderators – something that Elon Musk might be able to afford, but community-supported, small federated servers couldn't. A tech regulation can easily become a barrier to entry, blocking better competitors who might replace the company whose conduct spurred the regulation in the first place.

End-to-End does not present this kind of barrier. The default state for a social media platform is to deliver posts from accounts to their followers. Interfering with End-To-End costs more than delivering the messages users want to have. Likewise, a Right To Exit is a solved problem, built into the open Mastodon protocol, itself built atop the open ActivityPub standard.

It's not just Twitter. Every platform is consuming itself in an orgy of enshittification. This is the Great Enshittening, a moment of universal, end-stage platform decay. As the platforms burn, calls to address the fires grow louder and harder for policymakers to resist. But not all solutions to platform decay are created equal. Some solutions will perversely enshrine the dominance of platforms, help make them both too big to fail and too big to jail.

Musk has flagrantly violated so many rules, laws and consent decrees that he has accidentally turned Twitter into the perfect starting point for a program of platform reform and platform evacuation.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/14/freedom-of-reach/#ex

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

Image: JD Lasica (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Elon_Musk_%283018710552%29.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[tiny-pun]

Unpopular opinion but I am fine with an author not finishing a fic!

Even if you won’t ever get back to this fic, I as a reader would still enjoy to know what the goal was, what the idea of the ending was. It’s not about seeing the ending written in the most eloquent way, even if that’s nice. It’s about the ending itself, the closure. To me at least.

Also I know that a bunch of people filter out the unfinished works and it’s a shame for them not to see such a beautiful piece !!!

So personally I am hereby proposing for authors following:

If you KNOW you most likely won’t ever finish this already published fic with over 10k words and multiple chapters …

You could write a last update in which you (as brief as you want) explain what the ending would’ve looked like (and maybe variations if you have them) and if you have already snippets of that ending but cannot connect them nor have the energy to ever try to … include that as well.

Of course warn it in the summary/tag it with unfinished but closed or sth.

[shai-manahan]

Hollowed Minds Progress Update 1/02/24

Hi! I hope you're all having a good year so far! I planned to post this last night but I was too anxious over having to return to work lmfao (with the holidays being over and all). Anyway, I know it's been a year since my last update; believe me, I'm upset about it, too, and I'm trying to make up for that.

To be completely honest, aside from my health, one thing that's been stopping me from progressing steadily was my attempts at improving the way I write. I was struggling to find my own style the entire year, experimenting over and over (sometimes without rest, like an idiot), and I know that probably sounds stupid, but writing as a craft is so special to me that I want to be better at it.

It did backfire, though. A lot. Mostly because I couldn't maintain a balance between this and irl stuff.

The thing is, I plan to write trad novels and short stories in the future. I plan to go back to writing screenplays, too. I don't think I'll ever stop making IFs, but there are things I want to write about that I can never do through this medium (and the same is true vice versa). This is also why I tend to keep editing HM while trying to push through with newer updates; this is the only way I can learn more about what I wish to do in the future. This is my chance to practice and experiment, before I get anything published and make the kind of impression I aim to make.

And I think I finally found the style I love to use the most this time.

I feel ready now to post progress updates regularly at least every two weeks (this one doesn't count). I was ashamed of my slow progress for quite a while, but I know I can start moving forward again. I'm also just eager to show you the story I've always wanted to share, and that'd never happen unless I push myself so :').

You're free to ask for progress in case I miss doing this btw, just. don't be an ass about it lmao. And feel free to send asks as well!

So far, this is what I'm trying to improve for the posted demo:

conciseness

strengthening the settings and the descriptions involving them

revising a few dialogues that do not fit the characters at all

readability and making some details clearer

overall pacing of ch2's first part

the nightmare scenes

reassessment of which variations would be most important to the plot and MC's characterization.

everything else I cannot think of right now

I think I'll dedicate a week or two into finishing whatever needs to be cleaned up so there'll be less game-breaking bugs that might happen for the new content. But after that 👀

That's all for tonight!

P.S. recently bought a lampshade and damn. this is definitely much better for my eyes when I write.

[bethanydelleman]

Thanks for the tag @firawren & @glassslippers-n-cowboyboots

1. How many works do you have on AO3? 45

2. What's your total AO3 word count? 208,023. And that's a bit surprising because a bunch of my longer fics are only on AHA or my website.

3. What fandoms do you write for? Mostly Jane Austen, all novels, Elizabeth Gaskell (Wives & Daughters), and Anne Bronte (The Tenant of Wildfell Hall). I have also technically written Oscar Wilde and My Happy Marriage, but those were very transformative.

I also have written some fics based on Kdramas, mostly for Alchemy of Souls.

4. What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

A Ride to Netherfield - Jane breaks her leg on the way to Netherfield and must stay for a month. Short one-shot (6k) and the first Pride & Prejudice variation I wrote.

Of Every Elizabeth - short and sweet Pride & Prejudice fluff, Darcy has nicknames for the plethora of Elizabeth's he's met over the course of his life (it was a super common name at the time)

Carry Me! - three vignettes of Jang Uk and Cho Yeong from Alchemy of Souls after they are married

The Fourth Bennet Sister - long fic (30k words), Pride & Prejudice variation where Kitty Bennet becomes aware that she is in a novel. She desperately tries to protect her sisters from harm.

All's Fair in Love and War - short Pride & Prejudice variation. Mrs. Bennet has weaponized compromise, men live in constant fear of being forced to marry.

5. Do you respond to comments? Yep. Every time.

6. What is the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending? Umm.... I'm not good at writing angst. I don't like characters to suffer for too long.

7. What’s the fic you wrote with the happiest ending? All of them?

8. Do you get hate on fics? Yes, because I dared to write Mr. Darcy marrying Anne Elliot. People get more angry about that for some reason than Elizabeth Bennet marrying Captain Wentworth in the same fic. Someone even told me Darcy would rather "throw himself off of Pemberley" rather than marry anyone other than Elizabeth. (Fic is called One Week Late)

9. Do you write smut? If so, what kind? I have written smut a few times, it's pretty vanilla because I am pretty vanilla. I was reading Victorian erotica when I wrote my longest one, A Little Before Their Marriage (Jane & Bingley fic).

10. Do you write crossovers? What’s the craziest one you’ve written? I constantly write crossovers, my first published novel is a massive crossover, Prideful & Persuaded. One of my fun shorts is Fall on the Sword, where every canonically single woman in Austen's novels decides if they want to try for the recently divorced Mr. Rushworth.

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen? Not as far as I know.

12. Have you ever had a fic translated? No, though someone did translate one of my meta posts from Tumblr. That was cool.

13. Have you ever co-written a fic before? Yes, The Marriage Contest with Branch Cloudsky and two with Amelia Marie Logan, Poor Caroline and Inferior Connections. All Pride & Prejudice fics, all funny. (You need an AO3 account for that one, the other two are on my personal website)

14. What’s your all time favourite ship? Catherine Morland & Henry Tilney. They are the only Austen couple I cannot bear to break up.

15. What’s a WIP you want to finish but doubt you ever will? I am writing a queer retelling of Emma called "Different Ways of Being in Love", where Jane Fairfax and Emma were lovers as teenagers, Jane is bi, Emma is a lesbian, and Mr. Knightley is ace, but I got stuck on the middle part. Someday hopefully!

16. What are your writing strengths? I'm told I write some pretty hilarious farces. I am told I do characterization well, which is my main goal when writing fan fiction. I try to stick as close to canon as possible.

17. What are your writing weaknesses? I don't write enough filler or develop things well enough. I like writing action.

18. Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language in fic? I would possibly try my hand at French, but probably never. I also have a lot of trouble reading accented speech (looking at you Wuthering Heights), so I'd probably never write it.

19. First fandom you wrote for? I am fairly certain I started writing a fix-it fic for Nineteen Eighty-Four after I read it in high school. Not sure I would be able to locate it but it did exist. The first since I started writing again was a sequel to Pride & Prejudice.

20. Favourite fic you’ve written? Probably Unfairly Caught (my other published work) or The Fourth Bennet Sister. I NEEDED to write a Mansfield Park fic because I hate the ending, so it fixed my dissatisfied feelings. My goal is to edit The Fourth Bennet Sister and get it published sometime this year.

@wurzelbertzwerg, @kehlana-wolhamonao3 and @bad-at-names-and-faces

[avelera]

Archetypes are fine and originality isn't as important as you think

I think one of the most shocking things I learned in my writing class when we brought in a professional agent to lecture was that they really, really don't want your original story idea.

Agents and publishers want to know where to put your book on the shelf. They want to know which recent books it resembles, not super-hits like Game of Thrones. When they ask "What two books is this book like?" they want recent, practical examples of which non-Bestselling authors' work your work most resembles. Nothing turns them off faster than "This is totally original" / "This is like nothing you've ever seen."

Similarly, most audiences don't want totally original. I don't mean that pejoratively. We joke in the fanfic world that everyone just wants to read their favorite ship falling in love over and over but... that is actually true. That is an engaged audience. That said, fatigue does set in when all the fics or books begin to sound exactly the same, so what's the deal there, huh?

The deal is: agents, publishers, and audiences want the familiar thing they know they love with your unique spin on it that only you as a writer can create.

Now, my theory on how to achieve this, as a pre-pro who thinks about this a lot but doesn't claim to have a solution, is that this is what, "Write what you know," really refers to. Not that garbage your high school English teacher told you that you shouldn't set a story in a fantasy world because you've never lived there.

No, what "write what you know" means in fanfic is: take these characters and filter them through your personal experience and/or your interests. Which are also things you know. That can mean "I put them in a Coffeeshop AU because I've actually worked in a coffee shop and I want to show y'all what it's really like there" to "I'm personally interested in explorations of grief so I want to do hurt/comfort for these two around grief," or any other number of variations. It's why a weird concept written passionately is 10x more interesting than trying to chase what's "popular" in fandom, people want to see the uniqueness brought by the simple fact that you are writing it. You can give 10 authors the same prompt and they'll end up with 10 wildly different fics, I guarantee you, that's why no one gets tired of the same tropes being played over and over.

Now, for original fiction, at which I have less practice but which I think about a lot because I want to change that, I think again people get too hung up on being totally original and in this case I want to talk about a tendency to design an "original character" by focusing all the little details of their character before they start writing. The thing is, a lot of those little details don't matter. (It's better to start with an archetype and layer on those details, but we'll get to that.) There's danger in that, in part because your character needs to have an arc where they change between the beginning and the end, more than we need to know details like their favorite foods. Their favorite food should be whatever is most thematically relevant in the moment.

IE, when writing a story about losing a parent, whatever the parent made for them is their favorite food. When writing about someone who needs to reconnect with their inner child, greasy Pizza Hut pizza might be their favorite food because it's about something that gives the character pleasure that doesn't play to adult expectations on them. See? Knowing they like Pop Tarts jus because they like Pop Tarts is utterly meaningless, unless for example, you the author loves Pop Tarts and you know you can write a stirring monologue about how amazing Pop Tarts are that will make the audience feel your characters adoration of Pop Tarts. But you can substitute literally any food and write the same monologue, it has to either have emotional resonance or plot relevance, otherwise it doesn't matter what the food is.

But going back to characters, I think just starting with an archetype, adding a few details from your own life that you know you can write authentically, and then kicking this character through the mousetrap maze of your plot, really goes a lot further in making them unique than any amount of pre-planning of details that get you bogged down. And most popular characters reduce down to Archetype + Story-Relevant Details pretty damn quickly when you look at them.

Here's an example:

Last of Us = is a Lone Wolf and Cub archetype, ie, grizzled man takes a dependent child on a dangerous journey. That it's a post-apocalyptic landscape riddled by zombies tweaks the necessities of what skills the characters like Joel and Ellie need to survive. Add some author relevant details - he's from Texas but he lives in Boston now, he had a daughter who died (relevant to the plot, which is him adopting a "new" daughter), and he is former military and a blue-collar worker who therefore has the skills to survive in this setting, and you've got a pretty solid character that people grasp and people love right away, especially the more humanizing moments you throw in there, like the moment we see him break down when his daughter dies.

It should also be remembered: passion is what is needed here. You don't pick a trope you hate unless you're setting out to subvert it. You pick details that you care about and that you want to write about. Everything needs to be things you authentically care about writing and innovating on because you're gonna spend a lot of time with this story, more than anyone else. But the idea that one needs to start whole cloth, rather than focusing on the tropes, stories, archetypes, and personal experience that you care about, is utter nonsense and in fact does not actually sell.

[carnivalcarriondiscarded]

Phullo there, I’d like to ask you a question! I hope I won’t be such a bothersome.

So, I’m planning to write a story about Laughingstock and since I find your storytelling very pleasing I figured it’d be a great idea to ask for your advice about the writing!

My Idea in general for this story is just Howdy taking a day off from working in his bodega. And basically, he’ll be just wearing normal clothes.. shocking truly.

And thennn, Barnaby and Howdy accidentally stumbled into each other’s path. They later then of course had a very long conversation that lasted until evening maybe.

Of course there’ll be some fishy moments like them looking at each other with goggly eyes and other cheesy romantic nonsense- but it’s just mainly them having their usual conversation with a ‘couple’ of jokes here and there. It’s supposed to be a sweet memory for them to remember basically.

So, what I’m really trying to ask you for is- how the heck do you start a story exactly and not make it into just the dialogues? Like, I want my story to be kind of long but I’m afraid it’ll be just them, y’know, talking and I really don’t want it to be boring.. therefore, I really need your help.

I am so sorry if it’s such a bad timing considering the fact that you just had an interview which I am very proud for you for that! Even if it didn’t go as expected at least you did good half of it.

Soo, yeah! I’d very much appreciate your advice and I am sooo sorry that this was soo long!!! And again, a bad timing too.. but hey if you got any time, please consider answering. Thank you..

Also any response yet? On the interview of course.

hmmm... in my experience and Knowledge Accumulated Over The Years via reading And writing... the best place to start is to just drop in. no story introduction, no "it was a dark and stormy night", just Start. it sounds like your story begins with Howdy taking the day off, so maybe kick off with him getting ready / choosing an outfit, or w/ him reflexively almost opening the store before he stops and chides himself for almost forgetting that he's taking the day off

to combat the dialogue, maybe detail him leaving the bodega to go into the neighborhood. what does he see? hear? feel both physically and mentally? is there anyone else out and about? set the scene! ive been struggling with this too lately since i haven't seriously written in a while and i haven't been reading actual books

WHICH! IMPORTANT TANGENTS!! read well-written books, Not fanfic! im not saying dont read fanfic ever or i'd be the world's biggest hypocrite, but also read actual books. it's important to study how published authors write, how stories are structured, dialogue and action. because these books have more often then not gone through a Rigorous screening process. multiple drafts, beta readers, publishers reading it with great scrutiny before agreeing to publish - of course there are exceptions, but a lot of books are the highest quality they can be, and will outshine most fics. because, and i say all of this as good things, fics are unregulated. most dont have beta readers. a lot are from amateur authors new to the scene. there will be spelling mistakes, weird grammar & sentence structure, etc - most fics have Entirely different writing styles from each other. so if you only read fanfic, That is what your brain will learn, and it's gonna be harder for you to write. published books have less variation in styles, and the styles are subtler. there's less spelling mistakes if any, so your spelling will improve. your internal vocabulary will expand. even if you don't consciously study what you read, your brain will pick up on & internalize patterns, how action works, how dialogue works, how to structure a story, all that good stuff. if you want, i can recommend well-written books! i've been an avid reader since... like, ever. i've got recs galore! you can tell me your preferred genre & literary interest and i'll probably have something for you! and if you're not big on books, well... get out of your comfort zone lmao, books are fucking awesome and i guarantee there are plenty out there that you would love.

and when you're writing dialogue, intersperse it with little actions or the main povs' internal dialogue. if there's a natural lull in the conversation, explore that lull! what do the characters do in this moment? what's going on around them? sprinkle bits of setting in so that your reader knows where they are and what's going on.

plus, exploring the non-dialogue sections of your story can, and often will, spark inspiration in your brain for scenes and actions to fill out the story if you want it to be long (but also! if you just want to write the scene of their conversation, that's the beauty of fanfic - there's no requirements. do whatever you want lmao). when Howdy is going into town, maybe Wally calls him over for a quick pose - does Howdy say yes or no, and how does that decision change the story? maybe Julie invites him to join her in a game, or Eddie stops to talk to Howdy about him being out and about. maybe there are some complaints over the bodega not being open. what's the lead-up to Howdy and Barnaby running into each other? do they literally run into each other? what happens when they do? those are just a few possibilities of many!

remember, when you're writing, you're that story's god. you can do literally fucking anything. you decide what the characters do, where they go, what happens in their world. that mindset should help you bolster the plot instead of just "these two characters have a conversation", yk?

i hope this helps!

[simplysnowbarry]

MARK YOUR CALENDARS ❄️⚡

Big thanks to everyone who voted in our poll recently. We can now announce that Snowbarry Week 2023 - our final full-length Snowbarry Week - will run from Monday December 4th to Sunday December 10th this year!

We’ve chosen the prompts from those submitted to us so as to speed the process along and give everyone plenty of time to create. And we’ve also got extras for artists, as well as a few song prompts.

prompts:

day 1, Mon Dec 4th - First + Last Time

day 2, Tues Dec 5th - Innovation

day 3, Weds Dec 6th - Reconnecting

day 4, Thurs Dec 7th - FREE DAY + any past prompts

day 5, Fri Dec 8th - Fantasy / Fairytale

day 6, Sat Dec 9th - "Just a normal day"

day 7, Sun Dec 10th - Post-canon / Future AUs

extras for artists:

silver and gold

hues of red and/or blue

song prompts:

The Script - No Good In Goodbye

Picture This - Take My Hand

The Heydaze - New Religion

Posting guidelines will be posted closer to the date. We hope to see you all in December, and in the mean time, HAPPY CREATING!

(!) F.A.Q

Who can participate in Snowbarry Week?

ANYONE! Writers, giffers, manip-ers (?), fan artists smol and toll. We welcome fan fiction, gifsets, manips, fanart, fanmixes, …

Can days be combined?

YES! Reconnecting with future AU? Or innovation and fairytale? All joking aside, you can combine whichever prompts you’d like.

Can I create work for both the artists prompts and the writer prompts?

ABSOLUTELY YES!

Can I use the artists prompts for a fic, or the writer prompts for art work?

GO CRAZY!

If I want to contribute something do I have to do something for every day?

Not at all. You’re free to commit to a single day, and we will be so flipping excited to see it. The point is just to have fun with the prompts, even if it’s just the one.

Can I post a WIP that I started working on before that fits a Snowbarry Week theme?

Yes, of course! We’re not a Big Bang, or even a Mini Bang, we don’t require art or fic to have been created from scratch for exactly this week.

I’m going to be busy/out of town during Snowbarry Week. Can I post early/late?

We’d really like to avoid early posting. If you’re out of town or too busy the week itself you can always schedule posts for the correct dates.

Posting late shouldn’t be a problem. Posting Day 1 on Day 3 is also perfectly fine, just make sure we can tell which day you’re posting for, so our heads don’t start spinning.

What does free day mean?

Basically, free day is where you decide what prompt you want to do something with. As long as it’s Snowbarry (or one of its variations like Savifrost, Flashfrost, etc), you’re okay to do whatever you want. A free day in the middle of the week might also provide some much needed breathing space for all the contributors.

Also, the same as last year, our free day now doubles as an opportunity to create for any of our past prompts! If there was a prompt you didn’t manage to finish something for, or just always liked the sound of doing but missed the opportunity, we’d love to see that for this day to have a fun revival of some of the great prompts from past events.

What does [insert theme] mean?

Oh man, this is a hard one to answer. Reconnecting could be about Barry and Caitlin getting to know each other after falling out, or after drifting apart, but it could also be about reconnecting with other things in their life or even as literal as reconnecting cables on some tech as part of an action plot! We can’t tell you which roles to cast your characters in, because everyone has different interpretations. If you can justify the connection, we’re pretty sure you’re good.

Does my idea fit the theme?

Like we said above, if you can justify it, we’re pretty sure you’re good. If you’re really not sure, hit us up!

If there are more questions, please don’t hesitate to drop us an ask. Any questions you don’t want published, feel free to come off anon and ask us as well - we promise we won’t publish what you’re not comfortable with, just let us know if you want it answered privately.

[granulesofsand]

A Guide to -conscious Terms with Examples

🗝️🏷️ paragraphs in orange refer to programming (and therefore RAMCOA)

We’re going back to -conscious terms. They’re easier to understand because they’re defined on pluralpedia and don’t have the aging that grows the meaning of phrases like possession form switching.

Possession Form: either experiencing alters as a) outside the body or b) taking over the body without shifting into the new alter. Uncommon variation of DID at the time of publish.

I’m going to define the words as I go, for anymany who identify with them, bringing them up in relation to our experiences.

We usually selves-describe as polyconscious, because it’s the highest degree of separation present in our system — most alter-to-alter switching works this way for us, though we also have a lot of subsystem switching that looks more monoconscious

Polyconscious: switching that feels like leaving or ‘coming to’ as you exit and enter front. Alters without innerworld access might ‘sleep’ when not fronting

Monoconscious: switching that feels like becoming the newly fronting alter. Could have memory barriers or not, could be median or multiple

Because we have both, we are more accurately a misaconscious or biconscious system. The structures of our system, however, rarely combine the two between subgroups, so we generally notice the polyconsciousness more in our front realm.

Misaconscious: a mix of polyconscious and monoconscious functioning

Biconscious: a system with two or more consciousness types

Our polyconscious switching feels like sitting next to someone at a piano bench; sometimes I can hear them play or fight them for the keys I want. They can get up and leave whenever, and someone could be next to me without me noticing if they’re sneaky or I’m not paying attention. Switching with other subgroup members is usually polyconscious for us.

Within my subsystem, we have a misaconscious switching that corresponds with our internal appearance. We are all Greys, and we can act as clones with set changes for each.

We can blend together and be hydraconscious with any other Grey by stepping into them (dropping our amnesia barriers), which makes us consciousflux.

Consciousflux: changing consciousness type

Hydraconscious: members have both individual (poly)consciousness and collective (mono)consciousness, like hydra heads. There might be a combined memory or a method of memory sharing

When we’re one alter, we have access to all the information each of us gathered. We’re still capable of talking amongst ourselves as separate entities, but we can let it blur if we ‘let go’.

We split to cover more ground; it used to be to spy on the others and report back to our perps, but now we do it for therapy — we can talk to different alters simultaneously, have one front and the others run around completing a task, become a general nuisance with higher numbers.

Depending on how we blend, we can lean into apiconsciousness or multiplexconsciousness, and we are always dynaconscious.

Apiconscious: individual (poly)consciousness with the ability to act as a hive-mind. The hive-mind bit can be more or less commonly used, noted as especially prominent for important decisions

Multiplexconscious: hydraconscious front and polyconscious headspace or innerworld; alters might have access to memories of others while fronting, but don’t continuously share them

Dynaconscious: alters can come and go from front as they please

Our subgroups shift around in proximity to front. Some groups were designed to stay far from front unless cued. They were generally polyconscious, but were taught to ‘slip in’ to front in an effort to make them less conspicuous.

These alters had to travel to get to front, and would ‘fade in’ as they grew nearer. They could keep information away from other fronters, so could be a subset of consciousflux called conciousslide. If they didn’t have secrets to keep, they could specify down to combiconscious.

Consciousslide: a change or shift in consciousness type depending on proximity to front

Combiconscious: polyconsciousness in headspace/innerworld, hydraconsciousness in co-consciousness, and monoconscious in front

Before one orbital subsystem cracked (split along submember lines to make each independent), they were cephaconscious. They were able to coexist simultaneously in our otherworld, but their switching was more of a shifting. They had nested subsystems that were mutoconscious, whose members existed within the same form always.

Cephaconscious: alters who are monoconscious at front, but polyconscious in the headspace/innerworld

Mutoconscious: alters who are monoconscious at front, and hydraconscious in the headspace/innerworld

Some polyconscious alters are seraconscious, the opposite of dynaconscious. They don’t blend well, or at all, with others.

Seraconscious: a alter or front whose consciousness can’t be entered or left

The one I’m thinking of has admin access to several hierarchy subsystems (ranked subgroups), and can’t turn off that function without an entire fleet of automatons going offline. Plus the general chaos of unmonitored children and active persecutors. Anyone who successfully joined up would have to deal with that too, but it’s not a problem cause we can’t do it.

Our system also has a gatekeeper to our front realm (headspace) that used to make us fixumconscious. They can roam around the Dome (front realm) now and are less bound to the external reality, but they can only get into otherworld if the body is unconscious.

Fixumconscious: an alter, group, or system that has to integrate/blend with another consciousness to front

We might still count? But the gatekeeper we used to blend through as our shell no longer serves that purpose; they rearranged the floating fragments in the Dome to hold the information we need, and they’re so tiny that it’s not the same sensation even in bulk.

If we aren’t, we would be raconscious. A good amount of our subsystems are raconscious — they don’t have any ‘lens’ alter or part that the front through, though they may still have a ‘blanket self’ they all identify with.

Raconscious: an alter, group, or system that doesn’t require stepping into another consciousness to front

Because our Dome is large (probably), we can have a lot of fronters occupying the same space and thinking concurrently. I imagine we were ‘trained’ to allow at least the programmed alters to coexist this way.

It does work to our advantage to have the resources to be conscious simultaneously; having that ability defines paraconsciousness. If we did have to learn the skill, we would have been unuconscious beforehand.

Paraconscious: a high capacity for hosting consciousnesses, like more bandwidth for headmates

Unuconscious: a low capacity for hosting consciousness, which can lead to dissociation and identity confusion between alters. It can be brought up with practice

One of our healing goals is control over dissociative barriers; in a system with total control, or who has focused on integration, they could lower the barriers completely and have a systemwide blend. Some systems can do this, or at least achieve a similar effect (as if before syscovery), spontaneously. Either would be dualconscious.

Dualconscious: systems who can maintain both a singlet and a system consciousness at different times, with or without their intent

Alters, groups, or systems can have murkier relationships with consciousness. They could be outside any description, unaware of which labels fit, or not care to use any labels.

Overlap exists between eniconscious and quoiconscious systems; one is outside the labels, the other is uncertainty around them.

Eniconscious: feeling no label fits (especially when headmate is unconventional) or not knowing enough about the system to decide on another label

Quoiconscious: not knowing enough about the labels or the system to decide on a consciousness type

[llamagirl28]

Hi, I kinda miss SINY, is the project still going on or is it put in the "fridge" until BOC gets done?

So I'm going to level with you all interested in siny: it's basically shelved for the moment. I've actually given it some attention lately - went and redid the whole outline. I've established some new plot points/character backstories. Grey's reworked backstory is giving me a bit of a headache (can't figure out some details). I even wrote down some brief scenes in my notes. But I haven't really worked on the demo, just very little. If you're curious, I've ported to Twine and rewritten chapter 1 and started on chapter 2, up until dealing with the faerie con man - one or two of the choices for it are written.

I've been reluctant to call it "shelved" because I love this project, and I want to work on it. Sometimes I do get this powerful urge to do it (but usually I'll have something BoC related that needs to be done first). I think about it and write notes for Siny and sometimes I even open the twine demo and do some tweaks. The changes and rewrites I've come up with really have revitalized my love for the story.

Boc is an ambitious project, and although Siny is intended to be a standalone, it's still quite complex. I mean, it's a relationship centric game and it's got 9 romance options (and to that the love triangle and poly route) 😅 This already means that for one romantic scene I will have a bunch of variations for each character. Not counting the fact that I want to offer different ways to go about the cases depending on your skills (which I've actually changed around a bit and combined some into one, but I've also added a variable that keeps count of how you may approach things - straightforward, by being charming or intimidating.) So yes, a bunch of things and scenes to vary.

Whenever I need a break from BoC (I work best switching between projects) Siny feels a bit intimidating to approach. So on the side of BoC and Patreon content, I've been focusing on writing non-interactive short fiction (ok, I'm working on the same short story for months because I'm not satisfied with the resolution lol). But I'm currently awaiting response from a magazine for a longer short story (which I actually wrote while still in uni since working on BoC felt too demanding - I already had to write code for uni and I was so tired by projects so writing a short, non-interactive story felt easier). I don't have high hopes of it being accepted since it's my first attempt, so I'm thinking of alternatives, such as self-publishing or just posting it free to read on my tumblr. I don't know if anyone here would have an interest for it though? 😅

So, this was lot of words for me to say: yes, Siny is shelved at the moment and Boc is my main project right now. If inspiration strikes me, I do give my attention to Siny though.

[finnlongman]

All right, time to talk about the Maines. I apologise that this is so delayed -- I've had terrible pain-related brain fog lately, but today I can at least think, even if I'm typing this from bed because sitting up at a desk is Bad.

A couple of weeks back, a friend sent me this AskHistorians question:

This is very much my area of expertise, but I don't use Reddit, so I said I'd answer it here, for the benefit of @llwhn (and anyone else who is interested).

First of all, context: I published an article about the seven Maines in Cambrian Medieval Celtic Studies 83 last year, which is one of the only pieces of research published on the topic in recent years. Unfortunately, I can't share this article online due to the copyright restrictions of the journal, but it's my research there that I'm drawing on. The Maines are a complicated bunch -- although we're told there are seven of them, they actually number between six and eight in any given list, and their names vary noticeably.

To show how much they vary, let me show you the table I produced for my CMCS article:

As we can see here, there’s considerable variation in a) how many of them there are, b) what their names are, and c) what order the names are in. This last point might not seem important, but it’s going to come up later.

Now that we’ve had a chance to appreciate that the ‘seven’ Maines are a far more complicated bunch than they appear, let’s get down to the specifics of your question. You wanted to know whether Maine Cotagaib-Uile’s epithet is implying that he’s nonbinary (or perhaps intersex?), especially as it talks about inheriting traits from both parents. This is a really interesting question, and not one I’d thought about before – surprising, since I also work on queer readings of medieval Irish texts. Having thought about it for a while, I don’t think that’s what’s being suggested here, but let’s look at it in more depth.

‘Cotagaib-Uile’ is probably the epithet to have received the most attention of those in this list, although given how little has been published about the seven Maines, that isn’t saying too much. This is interesting, because as you can see, it’s not in all of the lists, and some of the omissions are significant.

Quick Maine backstory: in some traditions, we’re told that the Maines originally had different names, and were renamed because of a prophecy Medb was given that her son Maine would kill Conchobar. She had no sons called Maine, so she renamed all of them (and one of them ends up killing a Conchobar, but not the one she wanted dead). This story is found in Cath Boinde / Ferchuitred Medba, as well as in a couple of manuscript fragments by itself; the first four columns of the table above show the lists of names given there.

In fact, let’s have another table, this time showing the ‘original’ names of the Maines and the epithets they were given when renamed, according to these four manuscripts:

Yep. As we can see, these manuscripts can’t agree on anything, which is funny, since they’re all versions of the same text. It just goes to show what a complicated question the Maines’ epithets offer. The fact that Cotagaib-Uile isn’t in this list is interesting, though, because some scholars have attributed quite a lot of importance to this name.

Introducing: Sir John Rhys. John Rhys was the Jesus Professor of Celtic at Oxford in the 19th century, and yet despite this distinguished academic background, managed to write a lot of absolute nonsense. That’s the 19th century for you! Rhys has the dubious honour of at least being creative in his wildly unsupported arguments; I love the confidence with which he’ll assert “this undoubtedly means X” when there is definitely a great deal of doubt and in fact it almost definitely doesn’t mean X.

Rhys is, however, one of the only people apart from me to have spent much time looking at the names of the Maines, so I was forced to consider his arguments for a while when I was writing this article. As we’ve seen above, there are often more than seven Maines, and Rhys, who had a theory that the “secht Maine” represented the days of the week (“sechtmain”), was keen to understand why there might be eight of them. He said that the epithet ‘Condagaib-Uile’ should be read as suggesting that this Maine ‘contained or comprehended all the others’. In this way, he’s functioning as a ‘superlative eighth’ to the seven – all the others are contained within him, just as sometimes triads give three examples of something and then a fourth that’s better than all of them.

But that’s not what the explanation given in Táin Bó Cúailnge suggests it means, is it? Now, I’ll note that Faraday’s translation is pretty old, and I wouldn’t generally use it. However, I pulled out Cecile O’Rahilly’s translation of the same line, and it’s pretty similar:

‘Their names are Maine Máthramail, Maine Aithremail, Maine Mórgor, Maine Mingor, Maine Mo Epirt, who is also called Maine Milscothach, Maine Andóe and Maine Cotageib Uile—he it is who has inherited the appearance of his mother and his father and the dignity of them both’

Cóir Anmann, a treatise on names, gives an explanation that seems to encompass Rhys's interpretation while saying the same thing as TBC:

‘who includes them all’, ‘i.e. had the appearance of his mother and father. For he was like them both’ (trans. Sharon Arbuthnot)

It's clear that even when Cotagaib-Uile is referring to "them all", it's not quite in the manner that Rhys argued, so his interpretation isn't particularly convincing. (He also attributed a lot of important to Cotagaib-Uile being the last in the list, which we can see very clearly from the table above is not always or even mostly the case.)

Instead, it definitely seems to be the “appearance” of both mother and father that the text claims Maine has inherited. Let’s look closer at that, because we don’t want to be misled by translations. Faraday uses ‘form’ instead; the difference there is negligible, but it might be significant, if we’re trying to read into this regarding gender and bodies.

The Irish word in TBC is ‘cruth’ meaning form, shape, appearance; beauty of form, shapeliness. It does refer to physical appearance, but it doesn’t seem to be a particularly gendered term referring to physical traits. There is no evidence, for example, that this is implying an intersex body containing both male and female traits. The simplest way to read this is just “he looks like both his parents”, which is a normal thing to say about somebody.

Moreover, it’s worth considering this name in the context of two of the other Maines in the list:

Aithremail, ‘like his father’, ‘i.e. he was like his father, i.e. like Ailill son of Máta’ Máithremail, ‘like his mother’, ‘i.e. he was like his mother, i.e. like Medb daughter of Eochaid’ (again from Cóir Anmann, translated by Sharon Arbuthnot)

If one brother takes after their father, one takes after their mother, then suggesting that a third brother might take after both of them doesn’t seem like a particularly loaded statement.

Indeed, if it was a loaded statement, we would expect these Significantly Gendered Traits to show up somewhere else. After all, Maine Mingar and Maine Mórgar get a whole story in which the “duty” (gar) of their names is positioned as central – that’s Táin Bó Regamain. So we might think there was a story in which taking after Medb or Ailill was significant, but there’s certainly no surviving story in which that happens.

That doesn’t mean there never was a story in which that aspect of their epithets was emphasised, but although Maine Mathremail and Maine Athremail are present in every list (a rarity among the Maines), I’m not aware that they ever get to take a starring role in any text that survives today. Likewise, there isn't a story in which Cotagaib-Uile’s superlative or combinatory nature is foregrounded.

All of that is a very long winded way of saying that I don’t think they are implying anything about this Maine’s gender: I think they’re simply saying that he has inherited traits from both Medb and Ailill. Since Medb is notorious for behaving in an “unwomanly” manner by trying to lead armies into war and so on (something some medieval authors were not impressed by), this also probably isn’t suggesting any of those traits were especially feminine.

But. That doesn’t mean this epithet, and the textual explanation given for it, doesn’t create space for a nonbinary reading of Maine. I’m all in favour of exploring queer possibilities regardless of the authors’ intentions. I think it would be challenging to argue for a trans reading overall simply because Maine Cotagaib-Uile does nothing else in the text except be included in this list, and therefore has no personality or behaviours to draw on, but that doesn’t mean you couldn’t choose, in your own creative or exploratory works, to explore nonbinary possibilities.

Moreover, although I don’t think this Maine is being portrayed as ambiguously gendered on purpose, Táin Bó Cúailnge is not a text where gender binaries are neatly demarcated and always maintained. Crucially, Cú Chulainn himself is a deeply ambiguous figure whose masculinity is constantly questioned, undermined, and problematised by those around him, and his own behaviour challenges their assumptions and their definitions of 'man'.

As people who follow me here know, I have an article which will be available in the next month or two about the ambiguities of Cú Chulainn’s gender and what this says about TBC as a text. I tend towards a transmasculine reading, and suggest one in this article, but that’s certainly not the only possibility. The value of queer and gender theory is that once you start dismantling assumptions about gender in this story, you can have a lot of fun looking at how it’s actually being constructed, rather than just how we assume it’s being constructed.

So I definitely think there’s potential for exploring more facets of gender in TBC than the ones that have already been discussed (by me or by others). And perhaps looking at epithets like this and what they tell us about personalities, appearances, and gender would be a good place to start – because clearly, medieval authors didn’t think it remarkable that a son could inherit the appearance or nature of his mother, or neither Maine Mathremail nor Maine Cotagaib-Uile would have the epithets that they do.

tl;dr: This passage in Táin Bó Cúailnge is probably not implying that the character in question is nonbinary, but there is lots of space for queer readings of this text.

For further reading on the seven Maines and the meaning of their epithets, you might enjoy my CMCS article; there’s a link on my website, which is also where I will also upload the article about Cú Chulainn and gender as soon as it’s available.

I hope this has been useful/informative, and I’m sorry it took me so long to get to it!

[z3phyr23]

Writing Tips!

1. Write anything and everything

Just write, it doesn’t matter what you write, it doesn’t have to be super creative. Write about your day, write about a commercial you thought was weird, write about a dream you had. Write an idea for a book, describe a random character. Just write. It doesn’t feel like it helps, but ever since I’ve started journaling the amount of writing I’ve done on my WIPs has doubled, at least. I find it easier to write a WIP when I’ve already been writing something else for a bit. It gets the gears turning. It’s like stretching before a workout. So just write, anything and everything you can.

2. If you get stuck, try, try again

Sometimes I write myself into a corner, and I don’t really know where to go. When I do that, I take a few steps back, I go back a few paragraphs and start writing again, trying out something new. If I get stuck while planning something, I’ll plan out multiple variations of the story, and see which one I like best. If you find yourself stuck, don’t be scared to go back and try again.

3. Skip things, if you need to

If you get stuck on a certain part, skip over it and go to the next part you want to write. Write the parts that you know, and then go back and fill in the gaps. The gaps seem a lot less intimidating when you know where you’re trying to get to.

4. Write what you want to read

“But then I’ll just be writing this same trope 10 times over!” So what? What’s the issue with that? You want to write 10 variations of the same trope, so I’m sure there’s someone out there who wants to read 10 variations of the same trope. Have you seen how many Enemies to Lovers fics there are?? Also, it’s your writing. Do what you want.

5. Don’t feel pressured to publish

If you don’t want to put your work out there, don’t. There’s no publishing requirement to being a writer.

6. WIPs can stay WIPs

You don’t need to finish everything. I don’t know why people look down on WIPs. I have at least 30 WIPs, and more every week. You don’t need to finish it. If you have a cool idea, write it down! But that doesn’t mean that you need to go through with it.

7. Have fun!

Writing is amazing, have fun with it! Write something weird! Go wild with it, and have a good time!

[wordsandrobots]

So the problem with my brain's capacity to plan stories is that it doesn't know when to stop.

Because here I am, 6000 words into writing the final part of Wishing on Space Hardware, which is essentially a superfluous coda to make up the numbers and tie off a few loose emotional strands from the main plot, and of course I'm already thinking about the other Iron-Blooded Orphans stories I'd like to write. Indeed, some of them I have already started, because of course I have.

Now, to be fair, most of those ideas are slash. Smutty slash too. Did you know writing sex scenes triggers the same 'choreography goes brr' synapses as writing fight scenes? I didn't until a couple of years ago and now here we are, with at least two collections of explicit short stories in the offing.

First up is Sympathy and Other Mistakes, which I would already call done if not for the inexplicable urge to add more chapters to it. This is the one that I previously mentioned goes well to Great Night by NEEDTOBREATHE and is for the . . . let's call it 'crack-ship taken seriously' that I'm still not sure I want to publish anything for. I'm fairly nonplussed by moral-purity hand-wringing over age gaps and so forth, and firmly of the belief that getting laid is the least problematic thing anyone in Tekkadan has ever done, but it's a pairing that essentially requires the entirety of Wishing on Space Hardware to have happened to work. So, about a decade of character development beyond the show, which probably narrows the audience past the initial 'wait, what' filter. Thing is, it's an interesting pairing that I think actually works incredibly well with established canon. A thoroughly unromantic thing that swerves from dubcon to somewhere that's honestly kind of sweet, rooted in a search for redemption both characters know is ultimately hopeless. So . . . yeah. We'll see.

Second is the one I suspect would be most popular, You, Me and Everyone Else, which is the logical extension of deciding Shino and Yamagi are poly i.e., how much of the rest of the cast can I ship them with?

Technically, I suppose the bit I've written most of already isn't actually that premise at all but rather them unlocking the most blindingly obvious kinks imaginable. Still, it's fun and should be interesting when placed alongside the other ideas I've got planned. To whit:

Yamagi/Shino/Eugene/Sri (OC) -- The poly relationship I've been building throughout WoSH, in a situation I can't discuss yet

Yamagi/Chad/Shino -- Because I'm curious if I can make that work. If you've been following along so far, you'll have noted the emotional heft in the Yamagi/Shino/Eugene relationship is skewed such that Shino/Eugene is more intense than Yamagi/Eugene. I kind of want to play with that in the other direction, by giving Yamagi a partner he's more strongly attracted to than Shino is. Also I want Chad to have nice things.

598/Yamagi/Shino -- Look. My perfect gremlin child managed to squeak out of that game in one piece and so I get to imagine him grown up and happy, OK? And by grown up I mean roughly barrel-shaped and capable of out-wrestling Shino, and by happy I mean slightly drunk and blurting out “You're really pretty" at Yamagi in the middle of swapping 'holy shit, you're not dead' stories. It'll be fine.

(Chapter titles are already themed: Fantasia for Chains, [REDACTED], Variation on a Theme, and Guest Soloist. Because yes.)

Beyond that, I suppose technically that idea of cadet!Cyclase trying to come on to young officer!McGillis is also slash but I don't believe it would actually go anywhere per se. More that McGillis would take one look at Cyclase and go 'not today, thank you', and Cyclase would get to a point in the conversation and come to the realisation that killing McGillis wouldn't achieve much. I don't know. I'm intrigued by the idea of McGillis accidentally prompting Cyclase off the path of vengeance and on to the path of whatever-the-fuck he was trying to achieve in Urdr Hunt, and there is the challenge of actually writing the bastard's POV (I scrupulously avoided writing either McGillis or Orga's perspective in WoSH).

Oh, speaking of POVs, I was considering doing something with the Venus gang as the other side to Eugene Sevenstark and the Hesperus Treasure, but the idea's not really stuck past how the Urdr Hunt plot wound up going. Maybe if the theatrical presentation version gives me more food for thought? (I am crossing everything that they don't pull a diablous ex machina on us and kill anyone else; I already wrote 598 a cameo in the fic I'm posting at the moment, damnit.)

And then, well. Then there's the actual . . . calling it a sequel to WoSH would be a stretch. It's set another ten years on in the same version of events, but it's very much detached from WoSH's plot and would be my attempt to do a 'what if Akatsuki grew up and starred in a Gundam show' story. The short answer is that he's the most throw-himself-on-the-wire pacifist you could hope to meet and he's gone and got himself caught up in a big mess involving interplanetary medical testing, pirates, and the IBO equivalent of the Gundam Fight because mobile suit battles for sport and the Jupiter equivalent of Las Vegas feels like a fun setting to explore. He'd be a dutagonist alongside a female Gundam pilot who I know lots about but don't have a name for yet. And the story would also feature me performing an act of character necromancy so devilish, you'll probably curse me for it. Because I worked out how I could pull it off and now I think I've got to. Overall this would very much be a one-and-done thing. I'm thinking like Narrative is to Unicorn: a story technically following on and handling some of the same themes but with much punchier pacing and an entirely new cast. No idea when I'd get to it and I don't expect it'll have as much traction as WoSH on account of largely being OC-focused, but I think it could be fun.

OK. There we go. Those are the currently-percolating ideas. I will answer questions on them if you have any but this is mainly just me jotting them down in the hopes that if I just focus on these, I won't spontaneously generate more.

*laughs hysterically*

Yeah, we all know it doesn't work like that. But I tried, damnit!

[nanowrimo]

What Do You Do After You've Written Your Novel? 6 Tips from Joanna Penn

Every year, we’re lucky to have great sponsors for our nonprofit events. Scrivener, a 2022 NaNoWriMo sponsor, is an award-winning writing app that has been enthusiastically adopted by best-selling novelists and novices alike. Today, they’ve partnered with author Joanna Penn to share some tips on what to do after you finish your first draft:

If you've completed this year's NaNoWriMo, congratulations! But finishing a novel is only the first step on a publishing journey. We spoke with Joanna Penn, author of non-fiction books for authors, as well as best-selling thriller author as J. F. Penn. 

Joanna did NaNoWriMo in 2009, and, while she didn't write 50,000 words, or finish her novel, the experience helped her decide where she wanted to go with her fiction, and how she wanted to develop her career as a writer. Joanna offers six tips for writers who have completed their first novel: 

1. Review your work.

"After NaNoWriMo, I spent the next 14 months in the editing process," Joanna said. At the end of NaNoWriMo, "you've got first-draft material, which you need to then shape into the book you want it to be. About 5,000 of the words that I wrote in NaNoWriMo ended up in the book. But this gave me the seed and the confidence for that first novel; I knew I could sit down and write, and have words that then I could edit later."

2. Formulate your goals.

Writers first looking for publication have choices to make. You can go the traditional publishing route, or you can self publish, and there are many variations of each approach. "If you are set on a traditional publishing deal, then you have to start researching agents. If you are interested in being an independent author, then you can look at self publishing options." 

3. Don't quit your day job.

Joanna is a full-time writer, but it took her several years, and several novels, to reach that point. She started writing in 2006, published her first book in 2008, then took a big initial pay cut when she went full time in 2011. "It's very unlikely that the book you write during NaNoWriMo is going to make you a million and get you a movie deal, so keep your day job while you keep writing." 

4. Do you enjoy writing?

Not everyone is cut out for a full-time career as a writer. Completing NaNoWriMo is a big achievement, but you need to really enjoy writing if you want to make it your career. "I think the question to ask yourself is, 'Did I enjoy writing?'" If the answer is "yes," you need to realize that a writing career won't be built around a single novel. "However you want to publish, it's not about one book, it's about more than one book."

5. If you self publish, you'll be running a business.

Successful self-publishing is a lot more than just writing; you also become a business. "To be successful at self publishing, you have to run a business. And many people don't want to run a business. They would rather have a publisher do the work for them."

6. Model your career on authors you like.

A good way to plan your future is to look how authors you like work and promote their books. "Find authors to model who have a career that you're interested in following. And then start looking at how they do marketing. What are you willing to do for the future that you want? Your decisions around publishing and marketing will come from that."

Joanna Penn is author of How to Write a Novel, and writes thrillers as J. F. Penn. 

Kirk McElhearn is the author of Take Control of Scrivener, and host of the podcast Write Now with Scrivener.

Scrivener provides a full range of writing and editing features at your fingertips, and combines all the tools you need to craft your first draft. All NaNoWriMo participants receive a 20% discount on Scrivener’s regular license by entering NANOWRIMO22 into the coupon code text field in the web store through December 7th, 2022. If you want to try out Scrivener first, you can download a free trial that will run through December 7th, 2022.

[julie-su]

One thing which has been irking me lately, is "this novel isn't allegorical, the author intended this" - with an emphasis on other interpretations being silly, or wrong. Now; you are fully entitled to feel how you want on the concept of interpreting works - if you want to interpret it as intended, that is absolutely fine. It's when people are sneering at other interpretations, as to where it gets iffy.

"The Death of the Author" is a massively popular theory in literary analysis circles on the net, and it's the one which explains how I feel best - in this essay, Barthes argues that there is no 'one true way' to interpret a piece of writing. The essay, by one Roland Barthes, can be summed up to - "Once a piece of work is published, it is open to interpretation"; that the intentions of the author do not determine the meaning of the body of work. Whether this dissent comes from subconscious bias from the author, or whether the text gleams new meaning in light of current events that the author never could have anticipated, or a multitude of variations in which you may interpret the text outside of its' original intent - I think that it is interesting to deny alternate interpretations as 'lesser', in the face of the 'intended' text.

Let's take a look at this advert, for Asbestos. I'm sure you've seen it.

"When the fire alarm went off, it took two hours to evacuate New York's World Trade Centre. The bigger the building, the more important fire-proofing becomes. That's why today's buildings have asbestos-cement walls and even floors containing asbestos. Asbestos contains fire, cannot burn and holds up after metal and glass have melted down, giving vital time for people to escape. You'll also find asbestos sealing plumbing joints, insulating heating pipes, electric motors and emergency generators. Asbestos. We couldn't live the way we do without it."

What was the original intent and context of this advert?

How was this advert intended to make you feel?

How did this advert make you feel, was it different to how you felt it was intended?

Now, apply this thought process to your favourite (or least favourite!) novel. The idea is that text can hold multiple meanings, and that these meanings and how they make us feel, are just as important as the author's original intent. Alternate readings add dimensions to the work, and can add such richness - I absolutely recommend gleaming your own interpretation, and comparing it to others. It is fascinating how different pieces of writing may mean different things to different people, and you can really get to learn a lot, both about the person reading, and of the writing itself.

Happy reading! ^^

[between-thepages]

20 Questions for Fic Writers

I was tagged by @gabetheunknown, thank you <3

how many works do you have on ao3?

Currently 88, I am determined to make it to 100 before the end of the year.

2. what's your total ao3 word count?

29,604

3. what fandoms do you write for?

The Witcher Books/Games, Silmarillion, Lord of the Rings and sometimes Endeavour/Inspector Morse when the fancy strikes.

4. what are your top 5 fics by kudos?

In the Morning (Glorestor)

Dance to the Firelight (Rorveth)

Eating Love (Rorveth)

Mirror Image (Rorveth)

Body and Soul (Yenralt)

5. do you respond to comments? why or why not?

I respond to them, I love comments, but I'm slow. Also, there are only so many variations of "Thank you" one can type in a day before it starts feeling ridiculous. I promise I'll get to your comments before Christmas!

6. what is the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?

my Iorveth/Cedric drabble from last spring. I had to cope with the Ending of Lady of the Lake.

7. what is the fic you wrote with the happiest ending?

Probably Beautiful like Starlight, but even that isn't really all that happy... I am writing a followup to it at the moment though.

8. do you get hate on any fics?

So far, only from a certain someone for shipping the wrong characters, but i usually have my comments restricted to logged-in users, so leaving Anon hate isn't really possible.

9. do you write smut? if so, what kind?

I will write everything once and then decide if I'll do it again xD Expect it to be at least somewhat kinky.

Also, it has to fit into a drabble or two, I can't really write long-form smut.

10.do you write crossovers? what's the craziest one you've written?

I haven't yet, I will write a Witcher/Silm crossover one day, just so I can get some of the ladies to meet

11. have you ever had a fic stolen?

I don't know, but I doubt my drabbles are interesting enough to steal.

12.have you ever had a fic translated?

Not officially, but I am trying to translate some of my fics myself. No idea when I'll be done there, though.

13. have you ever co-written a fic before?

No

14.what's your all time favorite ship?

As a multi-shipper, all time favourites are hard, because all i need are three compelling arguments and I start shipping another pairing xD

I guess Fingon/Maedhros is one of the pairings where I am least likely to read a fic if they are partnered with someone else.

15.what's a wip you want to finish but doubt you ever will?

I'll burn with a light of my own, because I started it for a flashfic challenge right before my silm hyperfixation hit full force, so Witcher is a bit on the back burner at the moment. It also needs some serious plot outline to develop further, so the continuation really depends on my interest the next few months.

16.what are your writing strengths?

I have been told I am good at writing short stories, which is great because I love writing drabbles.

17.what are your writing weaknesses?

long plots, probably. I always struggle with reaching wordcounts and making my stories interesting.

18.thoughts on writing dialogue in another language in fic?

Depends on the language and usage. I love things like terms of endearment in another language (I made up a nickname for Isengrim to use for Iorevth, after all), but I do sometimes get annoyed with the random elvish words in Tolkien fics.

The best use of other languages is if it is used to confuse the POV character, but then it has to be somewhat consistent.

19.first fandom you wrote for?

Sunrise Avenue xD But I never published any of it. The first fanfic I published was for Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.

20. favorite fic you've written?

She came in through the window because it got me into a new kind of rarepair hell <3

Tagging @she-who-drank-vodka-with-cats, @aretuzagradschooldropout and @gleamingsilence, I'm late to this so I really hope I haven't accidentally tagged someone who already did this <3