#i'd make an example but i'm not feeling like making a draft of a valentine thing rn

[merge-conflict]

8 & 17 for the fic writer asks 🌟

sorry it took me so long to answer yours T-T something happened and now it's 4 days some time later. you know how it is. anyway thank you!! I did want to take some time to answer the second one properly.

questions here

8. if you had to write a sequel to a fic, you’d write one for…

tough question to answer because when do I ever leave anything I've written for more than a few months before feeling compelled to continue writing. I'm going to cheat slightly and say there are two things I'd love to continue:

One is the RP I did with @corpocyborg which I'm having trouble finding right now (why am I such a terrible tagger) where Valentine and Valerie did a gig together. It was just such a blast playing them off each other and they made a surprisingly great team. Hard to find a canon where they can both really shine but gosh. That was so much fun.

The second is also OC-related, the stuff I've written with Valentine and @another-corpo-rat 's Victoria Crane. Those two's dynamic is so funny I don't know what they are but it's toxic af. I wrote some smut about the two of them and now I've been thinking about what that meeting over coffee is like afterwards. (I've been watching a lot of killing eve)

Collabs are fun! I love getting the chance to reverse engineer what makes other people's OCs tick and then try to faithfully recreate them in a story.

17. talk about your writing and editing process

I think I answered this one once but I forget and I'm just going to wing it!

I'll be honest I haven't really figured out "plotting" in an advanced way, and am sticking within shouting distance of canon on the longfic, and have fleeting fits of reason which I don't plot longterm at all because it's kind of a cool-down mess-around kind of fic I add stuff to when it sounds fun.

I guess I'll start with considering the shape of what I'm writing –> what the boundaries are, if that makes sense? rough length, and I do mean *rough* like: <1k, 2-10k, nope we're going to have multiple chapters.

Then I take consider the chapter I want to write, as in: what do I want to accomplish? where do I need to go? taking for example indicators of compromise, my objectives are:

textually establish that Alex has a trained eye for detail and analysis

show the rapport (even if it's uneasy) that she has with Reed and how well she knows him

introduce their opinions on Valentine

Then from there the process is basically:

Think of ways to accomplish objectives in the chapter that sound like fun.

Write them down in *some* way, if it's a wip snippet of a scene, [describing what's going on in brackets] or just a barebones script dialog with no description.

Repeat steps 1-2 as many times as needed to get the raw material for the scene that feels fun and satisfying. This may take a fair amount of time.

Finish Draft 0 - where all the scenes are interconnected, and the text written (even if badly), with no remaining [placeholders] or highlights.

Edit. Edit. Edit. Read pieces aloud. Find a rhythm. Edit. Despair. Edit. Despair. Rest.

Optional Beta Step

Publish.

D'oh.

Republish.

[deadlysoupy]

Would you do a basic tutorial on how to create your fanfic on AO3? without a user from Latin America getting exhausted from being without a guide trying to make a fanfic @_@

ye sure! ao3 may be hard to get used to, but all the "?" in the sections do help a lot, and there's a detailed faq page on ao3, check this one if you have any questions. i'll do one anyway though

first, you'll want to click on the "new work" button here (assuming you already have an account!)

then you'll see this section, we'll gradually get into each one, but for more info you can just click the "?" button

honestly the rating and warnings are a bit of a doozy for me too, but the general ideas behind them are explained in the help buttons. if you've read fics on this website before i think you'd have a foggy understanding of ratings, they aren't too complicated. i really can't explain it any better than the help buttons do, it's just spitballing a lot of the times for me

but! fandoms! i've seen people who list their fandoms in relation to how prevalent they are in a story (ie when you have a mostly, idk, cyberverse-related fic with lots of references, you should put it first), with or without the general tag for all media, that depends, i guess, on the audience you want to attract, or in case some things reference other things from a media. the tags DO auto-fill when you type a few words (be careful about the spellings and wording in general)

categories are pretty linear and expected, dunno how to even describe them. again, the help button helps lmao

relationships is an important part - they can be skipped, but a lot of people browse for specific relationships and not fandoms. i put them in a tier-list of sorts to the importance in the story - similar to that of fandoms. don't overdo it tho! it gets muddy fast (you'll be able to see stuff better once we finish making everything pretty). again, most of this can be auto-filled!!! in case it's very obscure and rare

characters shouldn't be listed wildly - put only the ones you KNOW are important, a tiny cameo may not count, it gets kinda annoying when you look at a character tag but it's just one line (speaking from experience lmao)

additional tags are what people usually call regular tags. you can list a genre, what people could expect beyond a summary, a few popular tags that fit (hurt/comfort, angst, that sort of stuff). don't overdo it tho! ao3 does have a limit, and it's easier for the reader to read short and concise tags. you can see a list of most popular tags here, in case you get stuck

now then! the preface! just learned what it's called and that's pretty cool!

work title is pretty self-explanatory - the name of your story. das it

co-creators are a thing for people who make works with someone else - don't tic it if you aren't doing that (i have no experience so i have no idea how it works)

summary is a short description of your story. shouldn't be too long, but i've seen people do long ones, that's not the topic of this post

notes are the creator's place to yell, tell something cool, promote stuff, whatever. i love to talk to my readers through there, explain some out-of-story context or aus in mind. it's not mandatory and can be totally skipped

this weird stuff

collections and challenges are wacky. i'm not explaining that, there are way more knowledgeable people out there for this section

"gift this work to" is used for... gifting a story to someone! who knew! but for real you just type a username and in the title it would say "(work name) by (username) for (username)", it would appear in the giftee's profile. or something

these other things are... complicated.

i've never filled this cause i never did this, but it seems pretty straight-forward

part of a series is easy! it's like collections but so much simpler. your personal hole to put stuff in. order doesn't usually matter. if you have created a new series, you can put it there, or you can create a series, its literally two buttons

multiple chapters is a thing in case it's not a one-shot. if you don't have an idea about how many chapters there could be, you can just leave it with a question mark. no need to name the chapters, either, they'll just be listed as "chapter 1, chapter 2" etc, or name it whatever you want

haven't used the publication date i have no idea what this magic button does!!!!

choosing a language is mandatory. just pick a language from their list and that's it!

i have no idea how work skins work

privacy is filled unless you're anxious about a guest (an unregistered ao3 user) seeing your work (sorry that's just a description of me. my bad). it's pretty clear though

now, let's get into the m e a t

html version of the text is the one where everything is filled with a command, but it's really complicated and i'm not a programmer, so i always use the rich text version

now, you can write your fic in the ao3 textbox, but if your website crashes - say bye-bye. people write in different apps i'm not listing here, so you can copy the text over and edit there however you please

there are a lot of nuances regarding the text editor, but you can test it yourself with anything, a bunch of things do cool stuff, like italics and bold text that can enrich your writing. i rarely use it for.... reasons (a bit of a ramble but i want my text to convey all these choices without me using them, but sometimes italics help)

the final stretch!

i always preview my works before they get published. period. you never know when an italic messed up your spaces, you forgot to delete a space inbetween paragraphs, and whatever

previewed works go into drafts, which you can publish once you check if everything is a-okay. if you take too long though..... ao3 will think that the date you made the draft is the day you basically published the thing. so be careful with that! don't rush it, but don't leave it for more than a few hours, you'll have to start over. maybe it's a me-only glitch, maybe it's not, i'm not willing to check

and there you go! once you do all that, and you've checked your tags and the text (preferably more than once lmao), you're ready to post it! should take about 5-10 minutes to appear in the tags and fandom. you're all set!

i do hope this was somewhat helpful bc i'm not a tech-savvy person and i just do things my own way. there are a bunch of posts on tumblr to help you post on ao3, so look for those in case there are questions