#just realized a lot of my art is non-rebloggable so trying to get them on a new blog would be so tedious...

[risingsunresistance]

admins are allergic to patch notes

[autumnslance]

Heyyy! I have a question! But first I would love to share how I love your work ^^! It's mostly why I come to you with this question... See, I uh- would love to have the courage to share my writing, and my OCs to the world. But I never found the courage to. Do you have any tips? Or do you know any good tags where I can show my work at, so that one day I will just "accidentally" press the submit button? ^^'

Thank you~!

Honestly, I still feel anxious about sharing my stories and blurbs. I still feel like my OCs are pretty basic and not super interesting for others to read about.

But they're my characters and I like them anyway, so I'll keep writing about them. Even if takes me time to put some things out. I've always needed to write and share what I write, and sometimes that need overwrites the fear and anxiety--but it can still be hard.

And you know me, this rambles, so have a cut--

I have a buncha prompts and Ao3 threads with an "unnamed generic WoL" that were in some ways me testing the waters, figuring out what worked. Eventually the "unnamed WoL" in those bits leaned more and more towards being Aeryn, until I was just now writing about my own WoL (and her friends) directly without apology. But even then...Even knowing people like my characters, even knowing people like my OC/NPC ship somehow, it can be a struggle

One reason I like prompts and challenges is they make me write something and post without dwelling too hard on it, in theory. That "Rak'tika Rendezvous" piece? I've been sitting on that for at least nine months. I have other WIPs and Drafts, some even older than that! Some are unfinished--and some I'm just too nervous to post, like that one, which was edited often and heavily revised at least once.

I could just leave my writing in a drawer or a doc folder on my hard drive--and for many years I did. I discovered fanfiction in my teens on some of the earliest sites and webrings in the 1990s. It was a different existence; I didn't have a home computer or know how to make accounts or post. I just wrote, having realized the stories I told in my head could actually exist on paper. Literally, at the time. But they also are all gone, not archived anywhere or saved where I can find them again.

Roleplaying helped me, in learning how to make characters and write about them, and then posting about them. Tabletop, LARP, and online, I've done it all. I got pretty good at editing chat logs into something readable, and sometimes even looking like a story. The forums and Livejournals they were posted on were meant for the specific communities I was in--friends catching up on story beats. My WoW server (Shadow Council) had a community-run website, RP-Haven, for years. I posted modified RP logs and stories about my WoW OCs there; a bit more open than my immediate RP group/guild, but still people whose interests I knew were somewhat shared. So the move to posting on Tumblr and Ao3 for me feels like another step, for a wider audience of people who inexplicably like what I write about. It's been mostly positive in my experience, but I write fairly innocuous stuff and my audience is still pretty small and contained.

The internet has changed over time, so any baby steps process will be different. On Tumblr, sharing writing is a lot of knowing how the Search and Tag functions work. So far as I know you can keep something in Drafts indefinitely, until you're ready to hit that "Post" button. Tags should be simple, direct, and consistent, and only the first 5 show up in the general tag search (though can pull up on your blog easily when going to that tag). Which is why I always go "Final Fantasy XIV", "whatever challenge I'm doing", "NPC Name", "own writing tags", etc. I end up following and getting followed thanks to the FFXIVWrite challenges in the last 3 years, where we're all throwing down whatever springs to mind within a 24 hour deadline to break those anxiety-induced perfectionist habits that keep people from posting. Many folks rewrite/revise their entries later, too, because why not?

On Ao3 a draft can only exist for a certain amount of time, before it auto-deletes or you have to post it to save it from oblivion. I don't know if changing the draft extends that deadline; I don't tend to save things in drafts in Ao3, keeping those in GoogleDocs. Knowing tagging on Ao3 is also a thing (I've yet to figure out as fully). Sometimes I'll share a draft from Gdocs with a friend or two for feedback and encouragement before posting ("That Green Umbral Wind" was one, and "Please" was because hooboy).

Pillowfort is a lot like Tumblr, but has features like making a post non-rebloggable, and also any edits to the post reflect in reblogs. There's a bit more control of one's posts there. Also communities, which are like collectively following a public feed people can post or reblog directly to. Pillowfort's also still smaller/less used than Tumblr, and gives out invite keys regularly. Sometimes starting small, with more controls over how it's seen and shared, can help with the anxiety.

I'm also in a largish writing Discord where there are channels for sharing snippets of one's writing, and people can react with emojis and discuss it in the related channels. That's always nice for feedback, for brainstorming, for encouragement. There are even rules now about self-deprecating and putting down your own work--it doesn't help you or anyone else to put yourself and your writing down. We're all learning and growing the more we practice and try new things, like any other art.

You can only get better by keeping on writing, but there's only so far you can get without any feedback. Even if it's just a Like/Kudos, someone read and cared. Comments and tags like "I like this line" or "I love you wrote X part" or "I like how they interact" can really help figure out your strengths, maybe what of the other bits could be worked on more, and of course bolster the confidence to simply keep posting. Trusted friends or finding good beta readers to ping things off of can make a difference, depending on how you write.

But in the end, it's making the love of your OCs and wanting to write matter more than that fear/anxiety. Giving yourself the freedom to make changes when needed, to know it's not written in stone and can be edited, or even rewritten and reposted when you know you can do it better--I see it often. Sometimes you sit on something for awhile tweaking it until it's ready, sometimes you yeet a new piece into the void as soon as you finish typing.

Knowing that if nothing else, on a day when you need to, you can go to that page on your device and reread that thing you posted and remember you still love your characters, even years later, and maybe even think of something new to write for them.