#now I can post things on LJ and DW

[ladysarai]

@inception30daychallenge, Day 31: A letter to Inception fandom.

Dear Inception Fandom,

Friends, I am Old. I have been around the block and back again. I am old enough to have read fanfic on the computers in the school library and printed out fics for my friends because they did not have computers at home. I read fanfic on dial up. I cut my teeth on fanfic on FF.Net, on AngelFire websites, and on AOL Message Boards.

I say this ONLY because I want you all to know How Long I have been in Fannish Spaces, and how many fandoms I have been involved in, so that you can believe me when I say: I have NEVER encountered a fandom like this one.

If you look at my AO3, you'll see that most of my posted fics are dated prior to 2010. I spent most of my 30s not being particularly fannish. I didn't post fics. Once LJ made the move to DW, I lost track of fandoms and friends (and never really grasped Tumblr, tbh), and whatever writing I did, I kept to myself. I thought I had lost the ability to get fannishly obsessive over a piece of fiction. There are a lot of Real Life reasons for this--jobs, health, family crap, mental health, selling my home and building a new one, working in healthcare during COVID... And I was put on a medication a few years ago that, it turns out, basically induced depression, but I didn't realize it until February of this year, when I stopped taking it.

It was like a switch was thrown in my brain, and I suddenly wanted to read fanfic and create again! It was great! And one day I was rereading old fics by a favorite author and thought "what else did they write?" and saw they had Inception fics. I thought "huh. That was a fun movie. It provided the premise for the very best RP game I've ever been involved in. Why not?"

As they say, the rest is history. I fell down the rabbit hole of Inception fanfics, discovered an obsession with Arthur/Eames, and dragged my bestie @nutterzoi down with me. I swear that in April, I watched that movie basically every other day for the entire month. And then we started writing fics. I have now posted FOUR Inception fanfics since the middle of June. With Zoe, I'm working on a Big Bang and on several other fics. We literally have a gdoc of ideas for fics because otherwise we will forget them all.

This is all great, Sara, but what about the fandom? Guys. Friends. Zoe and I have been writing fanfic together basically nonstop since before Y2k. We have not posted any of our fanfic since prior to 2010. UNTIL NOW. And the reason I am happy to write and post fanfic? For other people to see and read?? Is because of YOU, the fandom.

This movie is 14 years old, but the fandom is alive and active. Arthur and Eames have about 3 minutes of screen time together, but over 8,000 fics on AO3! @inceptiversary came along just as I was finding my footing here on Tumblr, and MAN, the things everyone has come up with for @inception30daychallenge just blow my mind! The creativity, attention to details, impressive meta and gorgeous fanart and graphics are incredible. Maybe some of the reasons this fandom is so calm and comforting is that I missed the early growing pains, but it is FUN to come into a well established fandom with so much to read and see!

But even more than that... this fandom is KIND, and WELCOMING. I point out again that I am Old. I have reached the point in my life that I do not want to spend time around people or spaces that are not comfortable, especially online, which is where I go for my escapism and fun. Every single person I have interacted with in the Inception fandom has been friendly and encouraging. I hope you all know just how rare this is for both a fandom and for an online space. THANK YOU for being so wonderful. In more ways than one, you have restored my faith in fandoms and fannish spaces, and in my place in them. I certainly hope you're all okay with being stuck with me, because I do not see myself going anywhere.

Thank you for giving back a part of myself that I thought was lost and gone forever.

Love,

Sara

[olderthannetfic]

Re: Dreamwidth.

Recently I've gotten back to it, even if except for a couple of communities I lurk I've yet to find my "circle" of people to interact with. The biggest problem, obviously, is that there doesn't seem to be people on there—but when there are, it feels like all the posts are... post-only? Like comments are unwelcome, at the very least on platform.

Granted, most people I've seen end up using DW as an archive for fan translations and metas, or maybe like a type of personal log to update people of what they've been reading/writing. But when it comes to discussions, it's like they aren't wanted. Even in posts that do raise questions to the reader, if you do comment it feels like intruding, and the comments you receive often confirm it.

I wanted to ask if I've just been unlucky with the people I've come across, or if you think that maybe the culture on DW has changed since it has become an appendage of other websites (like it happens for fan tls, posted on DW for reading comfort but usually discussed on Twitter), or again if maybe the culture has always been like this.

I got into fandom when the LJ era had already been dying, but most importantly I got into fandom through non-English communities so I never got to experience what it was like to use LJ or DW during their "golden age". I'm wondering now if the type of communities back then were more of a "your post inspired my post, but I won't comment"—even if that seems weird to me because I do look through lots of archives and I can see that many posts did have interesting discussions in the comments! So maybe it is really just the current use of Dreamwidth that is making finding a community of people difficult.

--

I think people remember some particularly good and active parts of LJ... but also the blogs of people who did like discussion.

I like discussion. There is no reason that people like that can't continue to be open to it on whatever platform they choose, including DW.

But I have noticed that a lot of people who claim to miss LJ aren't actually all that friendly to randos showing up to comment or can't handle comments that even mildly disagree. The thing they remember liking was either something other people fostered or is something they're no longer able to muster the energy and emotional space for.

That said, the main issue with DW is simply that there aren't enough people there. If you get unlucky now, that person who snapped at you for commenting is a significant part of who's posting. If you got unlucky on LJ, there were shittons of other active people around in every fandom of the day.

[bossymarmalade]

I generally don’t write much in the way of serious topics on tumblr because I don’t find it a useful platform for that, but I’ve seen a number of posts/talked with mutuals lately about what we’ve been noticing in the erosion of feminist theory and how it’s discussed.

To me the culprit is the nature of tumblr itself. There’s no one stationary place for a conversation; people reblog a conversation that has branched off in a bunch of directions. They argue a point that could’ve been addressed by the OP except the conversation continued without the OP. They end up in places that were never intended.

Add to that: a) the way a pithy phrase captures attention faster than a thoughtful analysis and b) the number of ppl reblogging to point out that their particular group was not specifically taken into account, and you have an attempt at discussion that’s hobbled from the start.

I wish we could have discussions here like we used to on lj/dw but we can’t. So instead any discussion of feminism has its teeth cracked out one at a time with “but men can be abused too” and “what about transmen” and “eyeliner so sharp it could kill a man” and “WOMEN!! She!! Her!!” and look. All of these things have their place in the discussion. 

But when people generally don’t even know what the core tenets of feminism are, don’t understand the kyriarchy, or multiple axes of oppression, don’t understand second- and third-wave feminism, and just choose to make everything binary all over again? Right now in tumblr discourse, either critique of Men is wrong bc it doesn’t take into account these particular men, or All Women are Right All the Time Actually. And neither of these is useful in dismantling what feminism is intended to dismantle.

Feminism is for everyone, yes. But feminism is also an ideology intended to make people uncomfortable with and outraged at the status quo, the kyriarchical messages we grow up with and live under. It’s all right if your feminism isn’t mine, but if yours doesn’t actually stand for anything and is more concerned with empty virtue signaling or pat catchphrases, then does it actually benefit the cause? Or is it just lip service in between nitpicking? Is it just window dressing for oppressive systems? Is it doing those institutional systems’ work for them?

I don’t have any concrete suggestions about this; like I said, I don’t think tumblr as a platform can provide any repair. But who knows. Maybe a bunch of like-minded feminists talking about it more (and by like-minded, I just mean “invested”; the faces of feminism are legion) will help rejuvenate something that’s been pretty good to a lot of us (or at least offered a helpful framework to build our senses of self on). Maybe I’ll go back to talking about feminist topics myself. Maybe that’s not quite a bridge called our backs but it’s more than being the second sex. Maybe maybe may be.

[lorata]

Twenty Questions: Fic Author Edition

tagged by @bodyelectric77 :)

1-How many works do you have on ao3?

111, lol

2-What's your total AO3 word count?

1,389,833 on AO3 officially

3-What fandoms do you write for?

Hunger Games by a wide margin, and then if I get rid of the one-offs here are the fandoms I've written for at least twice:

Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins (75)

Temeraire - Naomi Novik (6)

Marvel Cinematic Universe (4)

Wynonna Earp (TV) (3)

Dragon Age (Video Games) (2)

King Lear - Shakespeare (2)

Wonder Woman (Movies - Jenkins) (2)

The Deed of Paksenarrion - Elizabeth Moon (2)

Star Wars Original Trilogy (2)

Stranger Things (TV 2016) (2)

4-What are your top 5 fics by kudos?

Slow Work (Steve/Bucky)

you can take the boy out of the desert (Luke Skywalker post-ANH)

Patience, Friend (Temeraire, Volly's hatching)

Embrace the Fire: The Avenger Games

welcome to your gory bed (Hunger Games, victor backstories)

5-Do you respond to comments? Why or why not?

I really, really want to, because comments make me SO SO SO happy, and I occasionally have some wonderful people who go through and comment on every single thing I've written which is the DREAM -- but I don't always have the mental bandwidth to do it. So let me just say right now that if you've ever left a comment I have read it, and I loved it, and you made my day better.

6-What's the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?

Uhhhh .... there are a lot. People can cast their votes on this one, but I'd say maybe Ambrosia or Don't Flinch?

7-What's the fic you wrote with the happiest ending?

I had to leave THG for this one, lol. But I think Impossible Magic, which is a fix-it for the Enchanted Forest Chronicles that solves something that bugged me about a series I otherwise adore.

8-Do you get hate on fics?

the real ones will remember, lol. I had one specific reader who would leave, like, novel-length comments on every single chapter of every single fic about everything he hated / disagreed with. My favourite was the list of my D2 victors in order of who he hoped would get killed off from most to least (Petra was at the top and Emory was at the bottom SORRY MAN). I honestly don't know why he was still reading if everything annoyed him so much, lmao.

If ever I get a mean anon I delete it though. You won't catch me responding to anon hate.

9-Do you write smut? If so what kind?

Not....... really. I write sex in very specific situations but it's usually to serve a purpose and I'm kind of ... vague about it, even when I think I'm being explicit (for me). I'm sure people could pick out sex written by me pretty easily. It's not exactly fade to black because that implies skipping to later, this is more like ... elisions, I guess.

10-Do you write crossovers? What's the craziest one you've written?

Very famously, yes. I'm not sure what I'd consider the weirdest one. Temeraire / THG victors as dragons? Watership Down / THG rabbits?

11-Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Fanfic, no, I don't think so, but I have had original stories stolen and put up on Amazon. It's the reason I took down my FictionPress account and have all my original things locked on LJ / DW.

12-Have you ever had a fic translated?

I have!

Я хочу увидеть тебя храброй | I wanna see you be brave

【授权翻译】Don't Flinch/无所畏惧 | Don't Flinch.

13-Have you ever cowritten a fic before?

Yes, several! My usual co-conspirators are azelmaroark, @kawuli, @penfoldx and @xanify

14-What's your all-time favorite ship?

96 out of my 111 fics on AO3 are gen, so that should give you my answer on that one, lol.

15-What's a WIP you want to finish, but doubt you ever will?

Never say never???? But sadly, probably the Portal/Emory's Games crossover if only because all the notes on the super complicated Arena were on a computer that died and I don't remember anything

16-What are your writing strengths?

Character and feelings, babeyyyyy. Also my hallmark is making people care (or at least think) about characters they absolutely despised before

17-What are your writing weaknesses?

Plot is hard. Every time I think I've done something complicated I'll read a book by someone with an actual intricate plot and need to lie down for 500 hours

18-Thoughts on writing dialogue in another language for a fic?

Nah. Generally I use dialogue tags to tell the reader what language is being spoken

19-First fandom you wrote for?

Star Wars, when I was 12, though it was just me and my bff. Dragon Ball Z was the first time I actually realized fandom was a Thing

20-Favorite fic you've ever written?

I will always have a soft spot for Fixed to a Star, I think

tagging whoever wants to play -- I've been offline for a while so i don't know who's done it!

[pearwaldorf]

This post about how Livejournal and its clone sites (like Dreamwidth) work is useful and also appalling to me as a fandom old, because it has apparently been long enough that we need to explain how it worked.

It's also such a change from how we do fandom now. Because of the lack of stable image hosting (Photobucket, anyone?) and bandwidth, it was extremely text heavy. You made long personal and fandom posts, and people made comments on them, and that's how you interacted. It's certainly a more intimate and personal way to do fandom, but it also takes a lot of time and effort*.

Honestly though, the thing I would miss the most going back to this kind of fandom interaction is easy curation. I remember the main avenue of discovery being communities, so it means everybody posts their stuff there. You can take busy communities off your usual reading feed, but then you have to remember to check them. I know fandoms also had newsletter-type communities where people would compile the good/notable/interesting stuff, but it seems like so much work when now you have the option to just reblog.

And I'm probably biased, but curation is another way to contribute to fandom even if you don't produce fanwork or meta. There's always so much stuff, and having somebody whose eye and taste you trust makes it so much easier to find things you're more likely to enjoy.

--

*The thing nobody has ever really improved upon imo is the ability to do asynchronous threaded comments like LJ/DW. Discord is fucking useless in this regard, because it's just a chat room with slightly better search. I did my time in the chat mines and I'm not going back.

[banrions]

regarding transformative works of my stuff

hey yall, a lil while back i found out that some of my fanfics were listed up on goodreads, and i felt very weird abt it. and did not want them there, and took steps to get them taken down. (they're not published works, i'm not a published author, and i don't want them up there). some fic writers might be cool with this (for fucks sake ASK THEM FIRST) but i am not.

i also fell down a bookbinding rabbit hole a few days ago, and just went and bought a bunch of supplies and want to get into fanbinding. SO, i figured now is a good a time as any to just make a general statement that ppl can find with what i'm cool with and what i'm fucking not.

*clears throat*

i welcome most transformative works, such as podfics, translations, handmade bind-ups, fanart, playlists, etc. and would LOVE, nay, ADORE to see the results! You do not need to seek individual permissions for these things. (but pls pls pls show me them!!!!)

however, no one has my permission to upload my works to goodreads, or to any other fanfiction site (ao3, ff.net. DW, LJ, wattpad, YOU GET THE POINT) in english. if you want to translate one of my works into a different language, then you may do so freely, so long as you credit me properly and link it back to my original fic. if you do so, please let me know! (i'll want to link mine to it as well).

seriously, please do not post my works onto goodreads again.

i absolutely do not give permission for anyone to monetize any aspect of my works. including, but not limited to: for-profit fan merch, or fanart, commissioned book binding/commercial printing of any of my works, locking access to typesets (or other transformative products of my work) behind subscription paywalls, or otherwise profiting from a product based on my works.

you do not have permission to attempt to fanbind my works with barnes & noble, lulu, etc. I DIDN'T EVEN KNOW THIS WAS A THING, but it is, and it's verging on illegal/copyright shit that i DO NOT want to deal with, and at the very least it’s DEF not ethical.

fandom is, and should be, free and collaborative. stop monitizing shit that you don't own.

at this time, i do not feel comfortable with allowing any of my works to be commissioned for fan binding. as such, i ask that any binders currently offering any of my works for commission remove them. this does not affect anyone who wishes to bind my works for themselves, (so long as it's not the above, B&N etc) or as free gifts (as in, zero exchange of money in any capacity). you have blanket permission to fanbind in that regard. if you do, PLEASE tag me/show me your creations, i'm trying to learn fanbinding myself and would very much love to see them!!

i think that covers it? if you're unsure on anything and you want to make something, just shoot me a dm and ask, i'm not on this site as regularly as i once was, but i promise that i will see it eventually!!! (most other places to find me are linked on my blog somewhere, but here, just in case you're feeling lazy).

[snowflakechallenge]

Fandom Snowflake Challenge #13

Introduction Post* Meet the Mods Post * Challenge #1 * Challenge #2 * Challenge #3 * Challenge #4 * Challenge #5 *Challenge #6 * Challenge #7 * Challenge #8 * Challenge #9 * Challenge 10 * Challenge 11 * Challenge 12 *

Remember that there is no official deadline, so feel free to join in at any time, or go back and do challenges you've missed.

One of my favourite things about fandom is screaming, "Did you see that amazing thing?" to someone, and having them scream back at you (hopefully positively) that they have now! Sometimes, it's about the canon itself, but a lot of the time it's about fanworks our community has made. In that spirit, today is the day to sing the praises of our fellow fans' hard work and creativity (or shitposting instead of sleeping, one of those).

Challenge #13 Make a rec list! Post your answer to today’s challenge in your own space and leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

You can include three or three hundred links to any kind of fanwork that strikes your fancy: art, crafts, fic, filk, gifsets, icons, layouts, manifestos, meta, multimedia mixes, picspams, playlists, podfic, vids & whatever else strikes you as having been pretty darn cool. Make the list themed if you like, or the last three things you made heart eyes over. Include fandoms big or small or only you and that one other person.

I totally encourage people to include a note of why they liked the thing, but linking to them with accompanying emoji and exclamation marks also works. (But please double check that if you're linking to LJ or DW, it's not to a locked post.)

Tip: When you post your link here, it helps to indicate what fandoms you're including in your list, so that other folk can find your recs more easily.

Check out the comments for all the awesome participants of the challenge and visit their journals/challenge responses to comment on their posts and cheer them on. (And because we were gifted with paid time for the month of January, you can search comments! So don’t forget to list the fandom(s) in your comment so people can search for it.)

And just as a reminder: this is a low pressure, fun challenge. If you aren't comfortable doing a particular challenge, then don't. We aren't keeping track of who does what.

[speeed-and-power]

new fic page + fandom statistics

continuing on my quest to make my blog generally more accessible and generally better all round, I’ve updated the page where you can find all the fics I’ve written. it has filters so you can sort by pairing, rating, and genre, and is infinitely more readable than my last one!

it’s also allowed me to do some ~fun fandom fic statistics~ which my autistic self loves! I’ve put them below the cut because they’re dull.

Pairings

I’ve written 22 fics about Clarkson, Hammond and May, but for the purposes of these statistics I’m excluding my dribble/drouble/drabble roundup fic because I can’t be bothered including those 12 or so little ficlets. So, of the 21 fics:

Je/R was the first pairing I wrote

it was obviously my favourite for a while, because 10 of the 21 fics are Je/R

7 are J/J

3 are OT3

1 is Ja/R

I find this interesting—I like reading all pairings equally, and in theory like the idea of writing all pairings, but clearly I find myself drawn overwhelmingly to Je/R and J/J. I adore OT3 but find it tricky to write, and I also enjoy Ja/R but it doesn’t come as easily to me as anything with Jeremy in, so that’s why I think I’ve neglected it up until now.

This compares interestingly to the fandom overall, where the most popular pairing differs by platform! I’m just focusing on the main four pairings here (sorry Andy, Stig, and others D:) in order to more easily compare to my own writing.

On dreamwidth (which includes aggregate posts from the old LJ comm):

Ja/R leads with 1,551

J/J comes second with 1,455

OT3 is third with 1,109

Je/R is last! with 1,003

On ao3 under the Top Gear (UK) RPF tag:

J/J is first with 746 fics

Ja/R is second with 540 fics

OT3 is third with 442

Je/R is last again with 396

It’s fascinating to me that clearly the LJ comm was the place for fics, even though ao3 has been around since 2007. Although in saying that I believe it only really started to get popular from 2010 onwards (the first thing I ever posted on there was in 2013, a since-orphaned, really bad James Bond/Raoul Silva fic that I wrote when I was 16 LOL) and I know the comm has been active at least back to 2008.

Lastly, on ao3 under The Grand Tour (TV) RPF tag:

J/J is first with 200 fics

Je/R is second with 146

Ja/R is third with 125

OT3 is last (just!) with 124

Obviously we can’t take these numbers as being set in stone because fics may have multiple pairings and thus multiple tags (and I know most people tag both fandoms on ao3, which doubles up the numbers), but they do give us a good idea. What’s consistent about all three platforms is that J/J is at the top or very near the top (this doesn’t surprise me; anecdotally I always thought it was the most popular pairing) and OT3 is at the bottom or near the bottom. It’s also interesting to me that in recent years Je/R seems to have leapt in popularity, and I wonder why. Were there a bunch of primarily Ja/R writers back in the day who have since left fandom?

Moving on to...

Ratings

When it comes to my fics (and keep in mind I’m using the Australian rating system of G/PG/M/MA/R here) it’s not an exact science and I’m not very good at rating but I’ve done my best:

9 are G/PG (maybe a little smooching)

3 are M (perhaps some over-the-clothes action, or more mature themes)

1 is MA (slightly smutty without being explicit)

7 are R (smut)

I’m surprised at this, because I didn’t realise I’ve written that much smut. Of those rated R fics, though, 3 are Je/R, 2 are OT3, one is J/J and one is Ja/R. So I’m at least a somewhat equal opportunity porn provider.

To make it confusing, both ao3 and the DW comm use different rating systems to each other and to me (the DW one I think is the american system and is thus incomprehensible to me, and ao3’s has always seemed vague), but let’s look at them anyway:

dreamwidth

rated G - 178 uses - 5th

rated PG - 272 uses - 3rd

rated PG-13 - 329 uses - 2nd

rated PG-15 - 133 uses - 6th

rated R - 228 uses - 4th

rated NC-17 - 505 uses - 1st

I find it interesting that these numbers don’t correspond to the amount of fics with pairings that are listed in the comm, meaning I guess a lot of fics on there aren’t tagged with their ratings. I’m thus not too sure about the accuracy of these numbers—but regardless, of what’s tagged, the people want smut it seems! LOL

ao3 - Top Gear (UK) RPF

General Audiences - 618 uses - 3rd

Teen & Up Audiences - 736 uses - 1st

Mature - 525 uses - 4th

Explicit - 668 uses - 2nd

Not Rated - 155 uses - 5th

ao3 - The Grand Tour (TV) RPF is largely the same, except General Audiences and Explicit switch places:

General Audiences - 197 uses - 2nd Teen & Up Audiences - 225 uses - 1st Mature - 146 uses - 4th Explicit - 177 uses - 3rd Not Rated - 80 uses - 5th

I find it interesting that Mature is as unpopular as it is, but otherwise, I’m not too sure what else to glean from these statistics. Moving on to my final data point...

Genres

This was nearly impossible for me to quantify because I am good at tagging my fics but a lot of the tags I use are quite specific (“First Time”, “Episode Related”) so I find it hard to fit my fic into the commonly-accepted overarching ‘genres’ of fic: fluff, angst, hurt/comfort, and smut are the four that first come to mind. A lot of my fics ended up being fluff, a few smut, one or two angsty, but there are more than a few that I left untagged completely when it comes to genre because they’re kind of nothing! If anything they were maybe fluffy, but fluff to me implies tooth-rottingly sweet and these pieces didn’t really scream that to me.

smut (everything rated R basically): 7 fics

fluff: 6 fics

untagged: 5 fics

angst (but it’s weak angst by my standards, ‘minor conflict’ or ‘morose pining’ would probably be a better tag, LOL): 4 fics

double tagged (fluff/smut, smut/pwp x2, angst/smut): 4 fics

porn without plot: 2 fics

alternate universe: 1 fic

Let’s look at dreamwidth first. It has a lot of tags, which is excellent for my purposes! I haven’t included all of them; I limited myself to the top 7, an arbitrary number just cuz.

alternate universe: 428 uses

humour: 317 uses

fluff: 159 uses

gen: 150 uses

dribble/drouble/drabble: 144 uses

established relationship: 138 uses

angst: 111 uses

I suspect we’re looking at the same issue we had when examining the ratings (where people in the past have tagged their fic with the pairing but nothing else). I also suspect AU leads the pack because there’s no corresponding ‘not AU’ tag, but in all honesty I’m surprised by those numbers. Keep in mind, though, I don’t really read AU fic and don’t tend to write it (with one exception) so of course that would surprise me LOL. Humour is kinda a given with these boys, and I’m not surprised fluff is up there either. Now onto ao3!

ao3 - Top Gear (UK) RPF

Fluff: 317 uses

Established Relationship: 226 uses

RPF: 174 uses

Angst: 163 uses

Hurt/Comfort: 157 uses

Slash: 134 uses

Episode Related: 126 uses

ao3 - The Grand Tour (TV) RPF is quite similar with one amusing tag added:

Fluff: 133 uses

Established Relationship: 83 uses

Hurt/Comfort: 83 uses

Angst: 60 uses

Friendship: 46 uses

Not Beta Read: 44 uses

RPF: 39 uses

The addition of ‘Not Beta Read’ made me lol because I can identify with it a lot, but I didn’t expect it to show up in the tags! Hey, if anyone needs a beta, let me know—I love doing that shit. :D

But let’s not get bogged down with ‘oo didn’t beta ‘oo, I find the fact that RPF is on both lists to be interesting because I’ve never bothered tagging for RPF (especially as it’s already in the fandom tag). I guess it’s polite to, I just hadn’t thought of doing it! Otherwise, unlike dreamwidth, the denizens of ao3 largely seem to shun AUs (it does not appear on the list of tags at all for Top Gear (UK) RPF, and appears last in the list for The Grand Tour (TV) RPF), but we can see that fluff is right up there just like in the comm.

Conclusions

I found it interesting how the tastes of the fandom mirrored or differed to my own when it came to my writing. I found the pairing breakdowns especially fascinating with how they seem to have changed over time!

More personally, looking at my back catalogue, I truly think that anything written pre-2017 (published before of sunlight and smoke; I had my fics on a pseud of one of my kpop accounts before I deleted them all and reuploaded them on my current ao3 account which is why the dates are all a bit shonky) is a bit shit. The titles are meh, the descriptions all end in ellipses, and I just don’t think the writing is all that good.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing egregiously wrong with them. They’re just not particularly memorable; they don’t have strong plots or story beats and most were written as prompt fills. There is NOTHING wrong with prompt fills—I still love writing prompt fills—but a lot were written to fulfill a purpose (fill the prompt) and as such I didn’t have complete creative control and didn’t desire to expand on them any more than I had to. And I’m not saying my most recent works have groundbreaking premises either, but at least I can read through them and not cringe, LOL!

Anyway, if you’ve read this far, feel free to expand upon these stats yourself! I’d love to see how your writing compares, or see your own hypotheses about why the pairings have shifted so much in popularity over time!

[viklikesfic]

some rambling observations about being an autistic fan

So I've been thinking a lot about ✨The History of the Internet✨ lately, and in particular the history of how fans find community, and I thought I'd share these observations into the void. I'd be curious to know others' experiences!

Specifically, I'm thinking about how my autistic way of communicating and socializing maps (or doesn't) to fannish norms and how that's changed over the years.

Some facts about my specific neurotype (because every neurodivergent brain is different!):

I strongly dislike small talk, but I LOVE going on at length with someone about a special interest.

Shared SQUEEE is super affirming to me.

I tend to think in systems and lists, so I love to do things like think through the details of worldbuilding.

I'm on the ace spectrum, and I both experience a lot of my sexuality through my muses and interacting on their behalf and don't really have a personal feeling of desire towards actors (and sometimes squee based in sexual attraction makes me uncomfortable because it feels like I'm misrepresenting my own identity if folks don't get the whole muse thing).

I have highly variable spoons and social anxiety.

I tend to hoard information, and if I like a creator I want to see EVERYTHING they put out, and it makes me anxious to think about missing things.

Okay, cool, so given all that, here's how I've experienced socializing in fandom, and what I'm realizing in retrospect about how different "waves" of this map to my communication and social needs. Note that the "waves" are just how I personally interacted with fandom, of course your mileage may vary!

Wave One (2004ish-2008ish): LiveJournal, mostly. In this era, I was primarily interacting through LJ, and finding fic on random sites around the Internet. I didn't have a ton of sense of connection to other fans, except those I met in real life.

Wave Two (2008ish-2013ish): Dreamwidth, Ao3, and RP. And then DW and Ao3 were born, and choirs of angels rejoiced. This was my personal golden era. First, DW, where I started forming more personal connections through a journal site and its communities. This was the point at which I felt like I actually knew people through being "mutuals," and I generally tried to read everything on my feed, interacting regularly. I went to ConTxT a few times and met fans in person, as well as a few local hangouts hosted by fans. I also started RPing in this era, and for a few years spent regular time in an AIM chatroom pretty much daily with RP partners. I started dating two people long distance from this group, and most of my friends were here. Ao3 also came out in this era and made reading fic SO much easier. My brain fucking loves a database and structured tagging! I also did a bunch of prompt challenges, big bangs, and the like, which I think really helped structure my participation in fandom. Through co-writing I was getting a lot of my sexual needs met (though I didn't really understand that at the time, since it wasn't "real") and the nature of the RP chatroom meant that I could focus on a fictional world and building relationships there, which was far more interesting to me than hearing about the minutae of people's lives.

Wave Three (2014ish-now): Since that golden era, I've mostly been engaging with fandom just through writing and reading, with the exception of one fantastic RP partner I met two years ago through the comments on my fic, who's become one of my best friends. I tried Discord for a little while, but got super overwhelmed. Creating a Tumblr, I'm noticing how spoiled I've been by Ao3! I'm so used to engaging with fic in a way that I can easily see when there's new stuff, and it's really freaking me out that I can't do that here, unless I'm able to dedicate the time to reading everything the author posts about their life in addition to their stories. I think we hypothetically did that back in the DW days, but maybe the difference is that folks are used to social media here, so rather than posting a couple of essays a week like a blog, it's standard to do a bunch of short posts per day? Perhaps in some ways, Discord is more autism-friendly, because it's possible to say "I only want to communicate about THESE topics" and then get to know who the people are who are talking about those things. It's weirdly isolating, I think, to show up to a platform like "HERE ARE MY SPECIAL INTERESTS I WANT TO TALK ABOUT THEM" and then to see others doing that but not be clear on how to engage. To be fair, that may be aging more than autism 😂

I'm not sure if this is, uh, actually reaching any conclusions, but hey, having space to process the thoughts and feelings is nice nonetheless!

[superborb]

Feelings about fannish platforms: Discord edition

https://superborb.dreamwidth.org/489961.html

I briefly discussed some of this on twitter previously, but wanted to more long-form discuss, which of course means moving to DW!! Anyway, these are somewhat scattered thoughts, but putting it together + talking with people about it always clarifies my thoughts. I like a lot of things about Discord! I wrote previously that it fannishly descended from the instant messaging programs of yore, and has similar dynamics as places with large group chats to mingle and meet friends and small ones to settle friendships. When it goes well, those are indeed both niches that I personally find essential to a ~balanced social media diet~. The difference is as fandom increasingly moves to Discord-only, its weakness as a primary fannish platform becomes more obvious to me. There's two main problems IMO: 1) no way to call out important / top level discussion aka curation; 2) difficulty in propagating social norms and thus community feeling. There is also the 3) "difficulty in FINDING a server" problem, but I think that is far less structural. 1: Beyond the obvious difficulty in backreading a busy server, it's really hard to point out a specific message as important without resorting to dedicated 'low traffic' channels or such. Partially, this is a me-problem, as I am completionist... But I also think this means Discord requires an alternate host to serve as repository for longer or more polished thoughts. OR a server with a very strict and different culture than I've usually observed. I wonder if that would be possible with a long slowmode? (For non-Discord users, slowmode means a user must wait a mod-defined amount of time before sending another message, though edits are allowed on previous messages.) In contentious debate, having a slowmode set really helped cool tempers and force a more reasoned argument, but I've never seen it used to force longer thoughts. Also, "curate your feed" became so central on tumblr, and caused problems on twitter, with its inferior curation tools, that I wondered how Discord-based fandom would deal with it. On Discord, there are even fewer tools to curate other than leaving a group, because everything is intrinsically shaped like a conversation and even blocking people, it's ...shaped like a conversation you're just ignoring one person in? 2: Within a server, you're essentially all in one room with EVERYONE AT THE SAME TIME. And this might work if the group can establish shared social mores, but that's non-trivial to do. One way that LJ had shared norms propagate is through lurking before having to participate; you can still do that, but it's much less interesting to lurk a conversation than polished (or not) public posts. Sure, messaging is probably a native way to communicate for a lot of people in their 20s and 30s, but the norms of that messaging are wildly different (and have changed over time! I was reading an AIM log from LJ days and wow do I message differently now!) This seems minor, until you have a disagreement and those norms suddenly clash over how you're supposed to resolve a conflict in the first place! One norm I've encountered often is the 'doubling down on shared opinions to distinguish in and out group', which I fundamentally disagree with. However, if you're trying to resolve a conflict and one party is used to seeing conflict as an in vs out group disagreement (and therefore looking for a common opinion) and the other is offended by viewing the world that way, this is not a path to success. Of course, I think the problem of 'how to disagree and still be in community' is at the heart of being a community in the first place, and not a Discord-specific problem. On the less outright conflict front though, every community has people you like or dislike to varying degrees, and I've discovered that in a Discord server, when you're sharing a space that can't be easily filtered, perceived norms-violations irritate me way more than in any other platform or real life situation I've ever encountered. I don't know if other people feel that way, but I've had enough discussions around it that I think it's relatively common, and more common on Discord than elsewhere. It's the lack of ability to socially get away, perhaps, combined with Discord being a difficult place to transmit those norms? 3: It is unfortunately a really opaque barrier to finding servers; getting access to comms, even if it required an essay, or figuring out a crufty forum feels different than 'make friends and become cool enough to get an invite'. This problem becomes more difficult to solve when fandom is less active on other platforms, decreasing the ways you can make friends! Even worse, you can't easily lurk to learn the social norms beforehand. However, fandom is just bigger now too, which means there are many more public Discords available, from which to splinter off. In some ways, it's a return to requiring active involvement in order to get access, instead of being able to passively consume from the firehose of public twitter/tumblr. It's harder to go track a specific person you think is cool back to their fannish home, but easier to find someone to chat with at all hours of the day. (And lead to friendships and new servers spawned. Ideally.) I don't know! I don't think Discord is even a good primary fannish platform, but it does seem to be where people are moving, for better or worse. At least I find it more amenable than tumblr, which means I might not disappear until the next migration?

[batshieroglyphics]

Fic: Haat’Mand’alor be Yaim’ol ~ Star Wars ~ Obi-Wan/Jaster ~ Mature ~ Chap 3/10

Title: Haat'Mand'alor be Yaim'ol Fandom: Star Wars Author: Batsutousai Rating: Mature Pairing: Obi-Wan Kenobi/Jaster Mereel Warnings: Time travel, canon-typical violence, fix-it (apparently), not everyone dies/some live, the Kaminoans are the worst, Jaster is the Mand'alor we deserve, character death, the clones deserve better, Jaster has 3 million grandkids, mental manipulation, Mandalorian culture, Mandalorian morality, an excessive amount of murder (of Kaminoans), Jedi culture respected, Jango needs a hug, Rex needs a hug, Fox needs a hug, EVERYONE GETS A HUG (except the Kaminoans), asexual Jango, nonbinary clones, trans clones, polyamory mention, disabled characters, happy ending (eventually) Summary: Jaster Mereel doesn't die on Korda VI, but is instead thrust forward thirty years to Kamino.

As soon as the five commanders were set about dividing their teams, Obi-Wan stepped in close and murmured, "I don't need a babysitter," then glanced at Seventeen.

Seventeen snorted. "You're not wearing armour, and you're the only jedi general–" Obi-Wan stiffened, instead of the twitch that Jaster only just realised they'd always made when a clone called them 'general' "–here on Kamino. Someone is going to stay with you, at least during combat situations."

"I'll wait to use the 'fresher until the fighting's over, then," Obi-Wan said, tone dry as the land scarred by the Dral'Han.

"That might be wise," Seventeen agreed, sounding equally as dry, even through the modulator of their buy'ce.

Obi-Wan raised an eyebrow at Jaster, and he shrugged in response. "Much as I'd like to cut some very long throats, I believe I would like to hear what answers this prime minister might give, more."

Obi-Wan hummed. "Very well." Then they stepped past Jaster and into the organised chaos of clones and Cuy'val Dar sorting themselves into their new teams. Just as they had for the clones with the traumatised ade, the clones parted before the jedi, with those Cuy'val Dar who ended up in the way quickly following suit.

"They know where they're going?" Seventeen muttered.

Jaster shrugged and hurried after the jedi, Seventeen quick on his heels, before the path could close behind them.

Chapter can be read here on AO3.

Postly reminder to support your local creators by reblogging their posts! ;)

[olderthannetfic]

Tumblr seems to be sliding in a downward spiral, and it feels like the start of the end of a fandoming era for me. I've been through it before; platforms are born then die, and life fandom finds a way. I'm just not looking forward to floundering for a bit, and dreading what the next hub will look like.

AO3 isn't really a place geared or meant for the same thing, and that's fine. My only fandom-related activity took place on AO3 only for a few years between my leaving LJ and joining Tumblr, and I lived ;-) But during that time, I was my own little island in fandom. Reading, leaving a few comments, not being super active. It's only when I found a community again that I was back to being really active in fandom once more.

And it's not that I actually use Tumblr to post about myself, but I do use it to read and reblog cool things - art, gifsets, science stuff, discovering new fandoms, and the like. I'm not sure where else I could find my people, with sameish purposes. The other sites I've tried didn't fill that niche in a way that suited me, in part because of how they look and work, in part because of who and what is(n't) there.

I have DW & PF accounts just to be safe, but I'm not very fond of group chats Discord-style - and without Tumblr, IDK how I'd even hear of new communities where I might pop in once in a while, loins girdled and everything. The micro-blogging platforms are not what I'm looking for either. Sure, I can follow a few DW comms and blogs; I already occasionally do and I will be more consistent about it if I must.

But one of my greatest fear is that the next platform will be phone-based, app-only, or some such BS - and that is something I just won't be able to deal with. Phones are tiny, it's uncomfortable to write anything, I don't like touch screen and much, much prefer a proper keyboard and a mouse (copy-pasting on a screen? (x_x) << it me), art/pics are too small to properly appreciate, a phone isn't comfy to hold for a long time for me, and the app system means you have no control over anything as a user… and that anything there must be Apple Approved, dick-free, blood-free, and tasteless. And I say this as someone who's pretty much uninterested in sex IRL or in my entertainment ;-) I still support and want the tits, the gore, the everything, and as long as I have the tools to curate - oh, wait. Curate things myself? That's not something that's popular these days, is it? It's not going to generate money, if I'm happy ;-)

So… I guess I'll play some more on Neocities, and see if anyone wants to have webrings again? (it would be fun and nostalgic, but not really viable on a large scale; people who haven't known those would just laugh and point and go on the InstaTok of the time).

So here is my little cane-waving rant of the day! I know things evolve and change and that in ten years I'll be rolling my eyes at my moping. It's only that I feel tired of moving from one shitty platform to another, of fearing I won't adapt (or more accurately won't want to adapt given the annoyance/benefit ratio) to whichever new place things will move in a few years. It's saying goodbye to a former home, moving, and hoping you'll make another home elsewhere kind of sniffles today!

--

We already know the next platform. It has been Discord for a few years now.

If you want the one after Discord, I think you're looking at waiting things out for quite a few years (or until Discord makes a major misstep as a company).

True, real time chat is not for everyone, but small discords with well-chosen channels can operate more asynchronously. Just like a lot of people who hated the look of Tumblr early on eventually capitulated, a lot of chat haters have jumped ship to Discord already.

Realistically, 90% of fandom always goes where the action is, no matter how much they claim the features make that space impossible, and 10% disappears.

We might get the 10% back on the next platform or they might leave fandom for good. There were LJ-haters who resurfaced post LJ era.

But as for where you'll find out where people are... probably AO3 author's notes.

[definitely-not-an-alb]

Disjointed Dreamwidth Tips (written by someone who wasn’t on LJ)

Edit 05/01/22: It’s fictional_fans not fictional_friends!

So as always when Tumblr decides to break its own gear, people are contemplating Dreamwidth. One thing I don’t really see much are recs on what to do after you’ve figured out how to use the site for yourself and are in that time where your feed is empty and you are discouraged from screaming into the void. I was also never on LJ, and for a long time after getting a Journal I didn’t use it because my feed was dead, and I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do.

Some general tips past the obvious to get started

When making your journal, you should fill out your profile and interests, but what I find way more useful is to have a pinned post. You can either actually pin it on your journal or just set the date to some ridiculous date in the future, and it’ll stay on the top. On that pinned post go your interests and maybe your posting habits (are you doing regular updates or rapid-fire shitposting whenever you feel like it? Are you often gone for a while and answer slowly?). It’s also the place to put stuff about how you handle privacy, like ‘If you want to be added to my nsfw filter, shoot me a message here’.

A lot of people like and use the tumblr anon-ask function, and dw doesn’t really have that. So here’s an idea on how to set up something similar: Make a dedicated pinned/predated post, put in the post that it is your ask post, how to use it, what kind of anons you aren’t comfy with maybe. Set the comment function to ‘screen all comments’ or ‘screen anon only’. This gives people a way to leave you anon messages only you can see and copy over into a post. You can turn it off at any time by editing the post’s comment (not comment screening!) setting to say Disabled. I haven’t actually tried setting this up myself, but it should work. People who don’t have a dreamwidth account can message you this way, too.

People who like anon prompts might also be advised to go look for kinkmemes for their fandoms. A kinkmeme is a community or journal that lets people post and fill prompts anonymously. Contrary to what the name suggests, in a lot of them neither prompts nor fills must be sexual nor even romantic (thought they often are, so go browsing on your own risk). Requests are all anonymous, fills can be posted anonymously directly on the com, or on anon on ao3, or deanon’d on ao3, or any combination thereof.

So, you’re lonely on Dreamwidth

Dreamwidth has no reblogs and no algorithm, so there’s nothing to push stuff at you and help you find new friends. You’ve got to go looking for them, and invite them over to your place, too. Basically, think of tumblr as one giant, never-ending, really loud cocktail party – it’s easy to drift around and find a group to stand with, and you don’t even have to talk to have fun. Dreamwidth is more like bouncing from friend’s place to friend’s place for tea and gossip, or having a nice wine and dinner with The Squad or spending all night smoking and chatting on the balcony or something like that. Fewer people, slower conversations, more effort, more payoff. That doesn’t mean you can’t rapid-fire shitpost over there, people absolutely still do that. But keep that comparison in mind.

Type in an interest in the search and look for active people who also have that interest tagged. Look for communities with that interest. Look for people you vibe with in the communities you share. You can see everyone subscribed to a specific com in the com’s profile, and you can see people’s mutuals in their profiles, too.

A lot of stuff doesn’t show up in the interests tho. A great way to find people on Dreamwidth are friending memes. A friending meme is a post in a community or on a personal journal where people post little bios with personality, interests, posting habits etc. in the comments, and then go browsing for other people to chat with and follow. I don’t know if there’s any active right now, but participating in those does a lot ot liven up your dash and find people, especially people who want to be found and are actively looking for new people, too! There’s one at the end of Snowflake every year.

Etiquette – Likes

One thing that throws people off about switching from Web 2.0 to DW is that there’s no likes. I’ve found that posting a <3 comment is totally fine with many people tho.

Etiquette – Linkspamming

No reblogs means Linkspam is the name of the day. Linkspam is absolutely okay on Dreamwidth! I know it feels weird! Just do it! Websites like tumblr constantly discourage us from linking off-site or even to other stuff on themselves – Dreamwidth is not like that! ‘One/three/six interesting articles I read this week’, with a link and a sentence or two are a valid post, and people will chat with you about them in the comments. Posting a rec-post on your own journal and then just dropping a Post that’s like ‘I rec’ed seven Character X/Character Y fics over here’ in a relevant community is valid. To embed a link, copy over this

<a href="Link">Text</a>                                                

and replace the Link part with your link, and the Text part with what you want it to say. Go ahead, spam away!

Posting images

Honestly the best way is to embed them imo. Host somewhere else (Imgur, or your Insta, for example), and then use this code

<img src="IMAGE URL" alt="ALT TEXT">

To make dreamwidth display them. If you want them centred, use

<center><img src="IMAGE URL" alt="ALT TEXT"></center>

When you want to show off other people’s images, consider just posting a link, thought. Embedding is not like reposting (if the source is deleted, the embed won’t load anymore), but it looks like reposting, and a lot of people don’t like that.

Other HTML

Ironically, I cannot link you to any, or tumblr will nuke this post, because tumblr sucks. Copy “html basics for dreamwidth” into your search engine of choice and you should find several journal entries that are just that, though! HTML is not as scary as it looks, and the Rich Text Editor also works fine.

Some communities to fill your feed, let you find stuff and get to know people:

These are obviously centred around stuff i like, but they are also pretty central and active in my experience.

fandomcalender and fandom_on_dw – People advertise new/restarted/repeating communities, fests, exchanges and such here! Great place to find stuff you want to participate in or just keep an eye on.

snowflake_challenge is running this year – it’s a one-month challenge were you get a blogging prompt every other day for all of January, so it starts in only a few days! Prompts are something like ‘write or update your bio’ or ‘what was your first fandom? Tell us!’ or ‘create something for the prompt X’. You fulfill the prompt and post about it on your dw and in the comments of the prompt post. You can always catch up later if you get busy and you're always free to just drop a day. Chatting on the prompt-posts and going to others’ journals to comment is considered good form. Gives you ideas to use your journal, lets you connect with others and generally get a start at Dreamwidth. sunshine_challenge does the same in the summer.

fictional_fans – A community specifically to let you be a Dreamwidth Noob among other people! Great place to ask embarrassing questions about where to find what button.

fancake and recthething are pretty active multifandom recing communities. Fancake has a theme each month, and recs are one fic per post, only finished fics, no self-recs. Recthething is less structured, for making posts directly in the com or linking to rec posts on your journal, and they also have a weekly catch-all post every Thursday for making recs in the comments. Asking for recs is specifically allowed here.

fandom_icons is a community for people to post links to their icon uploads, with a good tagging system. Just go look for some nice stuff for your fandom and remember to credit the artist!

You can find any of these communities (and also other people’s journals) by setting the drop-down menu by the search to ‘Site and Account’ and typing them out like that, or by dumping them into the search engine of your choice with ‘dreamwidth’ at the end. Unironic tip, that one, dreamwidth search is Not Great for finding specific people or coms sometimes.

[chacusha]

Dreamwidth pitch

Sometimes I wish more people would talk to me on Dreamwidth but then I don't really talk about Dreamwidth and why it's good or how it works, so maybe it would be good for me to do that??

So I guess some of the basic selling points about Dreamwidth:

Signing up is free and quick. (Also, I believe you can have any number of accounts associated with the same email address.) It has a similar vibe to Tumblr -- a geeky/fannish space.

It is a journaling website based on LiveJournal. By this I mean that it's almost like having a diary where you can choose to make some parts of that diary public or semi-public (at which point it becomes a blog). Counter to the direction of a lot of social media sites which increasingly focus on metrics, engagement (in a numeric form of views/likes/notes/retweets/etc.), and wide availability and easy (or automatic) sharing of content so as to maximize those metrics, Dreamwidth goes in the opposite direction with a focus on privacy. Each post you make has three possible privacy settings: public (viewable by anyone visiting the site), friends (viewable only to people who you have intentionally granted access to your friends-only posts -- you can also freely define custom friend groups to select subsets of friends, although I don't usually use this level of compartmentalization), and private (viewable only by you). It's very easy to check which privacy setting you've used for a post and to change them after the fact. Because posts on Dreamwidth cannot be shared or reblogged, when you revoke access to your post, it is immediate and total because you control the only copy of the post. Usual internet exceptions apply: People may screenshot your post; the internet archive may manually or automatically take a snapshot of older content; or a person might still have "friends" access and then leak the details of a post outside of "friendslock", which would make semi-private material accessible to the public again even though you've tried to lock it down. But for the most part, you much less run into the issue where something you wrote when you were 16 is still public knowledge and can't be scrubbed from the internet. And because privacy settings are such a big feature of the site, there are strong social norms against violating someone's privacy by sharing details they've posted semi-privately outside of that space. I really like this aspect of Dreamwidth because being able to write up my thoughts on very personal things I'm thinking about or going through and have some close internet friends who I trust share their thoughts in response has been so helpful to me throughout my life. There are a lot of mental health benefits to keeping a diary and even more so when you can get semi-anonymous advice from people you know and trust on the internet. I cannot tell you how invaluable it has been to panic or vent about some situation I'm encountering for the first time and have an older and wiser friend give me some advice on how to approach it. I've really grown as a person through first LiveJournal and now Dreamwidth as its replacement because of the semi-anonymous (pseudonymous) AND semi-private way you interact with the site and other users, and I don't know any other social media website that can do this, except I suppose through DMs, but that always feels like having a side conversation whereas doing it on a journaling site makes it the main conversation, where it's easier to organize/search/sort through.

Dreamwidth was forked from LiveJournal many years ago by a small group of people who are very thoughtful and intentional about site design and purpose. You can see in the way DW and LJ have diverged since what the value is in having site runners who have a philosophy about approaching websites that's more than just "make money/break even." Dreamwidth is very "shoestring budget" in its feel -- it has fewer features, development is slow and (I'm guessing) largely done by the site founders or volunteers, and bugs are slow to fix. But on the flipside, the site is simple and loads quickly, the default look of the site is very clean and easy to read, and in addition, the site allows you to fully customize the default style in which content is displayed to you, something that other social media sites will never do (aside from a "dark mode", I suppose) because being able to establish and fully control the site look is key for a company's/website's branding. However, Dreamwidth goes another direction, because accessibility and accessibility features have been a value of the site owners from the founding, and they take that seriously. Dreamwidth is also very intentional about its content policy and takes pains to maximize free expression while still maintaining a safe environment conducive for dialogue and debate for its users. Finally, there are no advertisements on the site anywhere at all. Zero. How does the site support itself, then, you ask? It's based on a paid subscription model where a core of passionate users are willing to pay some money each year so that the site is able to support the amount of users/traffic it gets. This funding model means that the site remains the product being sold rather than the users (and their data/eyeballs). This is a good alignment to have because you want the site to be incentivized to be useful and valuable to users rather than to harvest as much as it can from its users so as to be useful and valuable to advertisers. Dreamwidth takes security seriously and keeps its users informed about potential security breaches (e.g. one where LJ's passwords were compromised, which led to DW accounts using the same password being similarly compromised). A comparison of what Dreamwidth and LiveJournal are like now is illustrative -- I find LiveJournal almost unusable because of the ads, loading times, and just general janky interface; LJ has also been subject to multiple purges and controversial content policy changes over the years. Being on Dreamwidth is almost calming and relaxing by contrast, even though it is clearly missing some obvious and sometimes very useful features like post-/comment-liking, video uploading, post scheduling, etc.

How tagging works on Dreamwidth: This is probably the biggest difference in how Tumblr/AO3 and Dreamwidth work. On Tumblr and AO3, tags are universal across the whole site. When you tag a post with something, then it will appear in global searches for anyone browsing that tag. Heck, on Tumblr, it might pop up unsolicited on someone's dash if they follow that tag. Tags are the main way people find and are recommended content from people they're not already following. On Dreamwidth, though, tags only apply to your blog. There is no universal tag search. I mean, you can search Dreamwidth for content you're interested in; you can also search users based on what tags they've listed in their "Interests." In my experience, though, this tends to not really turn up much useful stuff; you'll likely get a lot of weird/niche content probably not meant to be viewed by a wider audience, as well as users and communities who haven't updated their journal in, like, five years. Not very useful. (In general, content production and content discovery are extremely anemic on DW, a downside I discuss more fully below.) However, what this means is that tags are 100% geared toward the function of helping you organize your own blog. You have full control over your tagging scheme. Much more than any social media website I can think of (Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, and Instagram for sure), Dreamwidth facilitates having a complete record of every post you've written and helps you easily find specific content again even if you wrote it years in the past. This is why I say the site is very good for journaling. It's easy to double-check things like: "In order for people to understand this part, they need to read that post where I talked about that grocery store incident. Where is that post?" "How long have I been having this issue at work? Oh wow, my first post on this was eight months ago." "Where are all the posts I've made with my TV show reviews?" (Tip: The default setting on Dreamwidth is to display only a selection of the most frequently used tags in alphabetical order on your main journal page; I would recommend overriding this immediately to set it to show all tags because your tags are going to be a SUPER useful navigation tool for sorting through your own posts.)

Features that support having actual conversations with your friends rather than shouting one-sidedly into the void and maybe getting a supportive like in response IDK: Fully-threaded comments (and also, no "like" button). *old lady voice* Kids these days don't appreciate the value of a fully-functional comment threading system! Okay, so Dreamwidth allows you to start new comments in response to a post and reply freely to other comments, creating a kind of hierarchical tree structure. All the discussion associated with a post is viewable on a single page, and this means you can have a pretty detailed back-and-forth with the author of a post without coming off as hostile or without awkwardly spamming your followers with one half of the conversation, which is how conversations work on Tumblr. The comment character limit is 16k characters (~2500 words) so you can reply fully to a post rather than needing to condense the essence of your reply into a brief comment. You can talk not only to your friends but also to your friends' friends who are contributing to the discussion too. Separation of public and private spaces: I won't go into this too much but Dreamwidth has "personal blogs" (private spaces) and "communities" (public spaces moderated by the leader of the community) that work very differently (have completely different mechanics underlying them). Unlike Tumblr and Twitter, this means there is a clear separation between public and private spaces, behavior norms in each, and who you're accountable to when interacting in each space, which does a lot to ease social interactions and make them less fraught and contentious. And unlike sites like Reddit, you actually GET a private space without having to interact entirely in communities/special interest forums. These sets of features means that you can have a very deep, easy-to-follow conversation in a semi-public forum on a wide variety of topics while keeping the conversation all in one place and allowing interested people to follow the conversation. It's just a set of features that prioritizes responding to content with high-quality conversation rather than the mere sharing of content without comment.

If you're interested in joining Dreamwidth, here is a word of warning and then advice:

The warning is that, unlike Tumblr, it is very hard to make friends on DW. On Tumblr, you can make friends by browsing tags and journals of people who post things relevant to your interests or who interact on the posts YOU'RE making and sharing; you can follow someone whose content you enjoy and want to continue seeing and maybe they follow you back and start interacting with your posts! Cool. Easy. DW makes this process problematic in many ways: (1) as mentioned earlier, content discovery is difficult, (2) in some cases, most or all of people's content may be friendslocked which means you cannot preview it before you decide to approach someone suggesting to be friends, (3) assuming you do find a stranger whose (public) content is interesting, you can "subscribe" to them (the equivalent of following on Tumblr; their content now regularly shows up on your dash ("friends page")) and/or "friend" them (this will give them access to YOUR friendslocked posts); the person you subscribe to or friend will get a notification of this action, but this doesn't actually mean you are or will be "friends." You see, in order to be friends, someone needs to subscribe and friend you back. For the first thing, that means being interested in your content (usually not an issue; even if you don't have any content, people are willing to take a chance on you and subscribe back). But the second thing is more important -- by friending you back, that will grant access to all the friendslocked entries. Just because some stranger on the internet is interested in what you post and is like "Friends?" and give you access to their friendslocked entries doesn't mean you actually trust that person enough to give them full access to your years and years of friendslocked writing, you know what I mean? So making a random friend request might just result in being completely ignored. Instead, you often need to give someone the context for why you are interested in being friends, introduce yourself, and ask for their permission to friend before hitting that button.

Okay, so what this means is that it is very hard to find potential friends on DW and trying to friend people can be way more work than creating a new account and clicking some buttons on people's profiles. So how do people make friends on DW?! In order to get around this, people have come up with several things:

Friending memes: These are activities that happen every so often where someone gives people a form to fill out (where you talk about various interests and type of things you post about on your blog, potential dealbreakers in your content, etc.) and people browse through other people's comments and when they find someone who looks interesting, they can reply and be like "Hey! You seem like an interesting person. I also post about camping and photography. Want to be friends?" It's like, uh, speed dating but for online friends? This is much better than a cold approach as described above. In particular, every January on Dreamwidth, a group of people runs an activity called the Snowflake Challenge, where they have various fannish activities and challenges and you can choose to participate in whichever ones you like. A lot of them act as kind of icebreaker questions, and you can strike up conversations with other people by browsing things they've posted, and at some point in the activity, there's always a friending meme. Usually reccing active communities and helpful resources on DW is also part of the Snowflake Challenge (which is SUPER useful because being on DW can be like walking through a graveyard sometimes), so it's great for people who are new.

Stickied friending posts at the top of journals. These posts will often explain what kind of journal the person keeps, what content they post, how much of their journal is friendslocked, requirements for friending, etc. Comment there to introduce yourself, explain why you are interested in friending this person, ask to be friended back, etc.

Participate in public-space "communities" first and use that to find friends. Okay, okay, a bit difficult because there are a lot of communities on DW that are *tumbleweed blowing in the wind* -- dead. Abandoned. So quiet and unresponsive that it's almost worse than being fully dead because there are people there who will sometimes give you a bite but it's just not enough to feel worth the time and now you're all embarrassed for yourselves and each other. Here are some recs of active communities: dw_community_promo (for finding (newly) active communities, not necessarily fannish in nature); fandom_on_dw (any kind of fannish activities/communities); fandomcalendar (fannish events); thefridayfive (a currently active community that posts a collection of five questions each Friday; great for icebreakers and you can browse other people's answers); addme_fandom (if a friending meme were a community instead; this comm also has a lot of resources for new joiners of DW in its sticky post). Active but maybe a bit drama-llama-y (you may or may not enjoy these): fandomsecrets (an EXTREMELY long-running community run by maybe the most tireless/superhuman mod I know of; you can anonymously submit images containing a fandom-related secret you have, and they get posted in random order over the following week and people discuss in the comments -- it's a great multifandom space, especially if you want to vent about some fandom drama you're going through or an unpopular opinion you have, but can be intimidating to interact there non-anonymously due to the nature/contentiousness of the secrets/discussions sometimes; also, sometimes people are mean :(); fail_fandomanon (a fandom gossip comm, essentially, but also a good multifandom discussion place; very difficult to find friends, though, due to the anonymous posting requirement but it's very active and gives you plenty of reading material if you largely like to use social media to read interesting stuff you didn't know about before. Also, its "Ask meme" threads and its personal posts are great for getting anonymous help and advice -- like you know those newspaper advice columns or r/AITA or r/relationships? That kind of thing. You can be very detailed about an issue you're having in your personal life and people will give you advice. Even more so than fandomsecrets, "lightly bitchy and petty" is kind of the vibe of this place, and anonymous trolling is commonplace (one rule of the comm is "don't be THAT much of an asshole" which kind of gives you an idea of what baseline level of politeness we're talking about here). It's got a complicated set of norms that have developed over time (see, for example, the elaborate comment titles and the sheer number of acronyms flying around), which can make the learning curve for delurking pretty steep.

Weirdly, the type of communities in which I have made the longest-lasting LJ/DW friends have been "landcomms," a special kind of competitive fannish activity community. I think they were based on the House Cup of Harry Potter. At least, it's easiest to explain it that way: there are multiple "games"/"rounds" (each lasting 3 months, say) where all the participants are sorted into teams, and they earn points for their team by participating in various challenges and activities set up by the mods. I no longer have time to really be active in any of these but WOW they really help you make friends who you know pretty deeply because you're interacting and strategizing with your fellow teammates, and over time you get to know the regulars quite well. These communities often lock all their content and activities to members only, which means that it's a good sandbox to experiment with fannish creation because the audience is fairly small and a priori quite supportive. You can experiment and put your work out there in a way that isn't like "now everyone on the internet has access to this and can judge it." Anyway, I'm too old to participate in these, but apparently lands_of_magic is an active multifandom landcomm and might be worth checking out.

Some other random features of Dreamwidth that I like, and also the major weaknesses of Dreamwidth as a site:

Strength: You get multiple icons/userpics. It's kind of weird to me that social media sites have done away with the ability for users to have multiple userpics (I suppose it does make it easier to identify who is saying what!), but in any case, this is a weirdly unique feature that LJ/DW have -- you can upload multiple 100x100 little images and choose which one to accompany each post and comment you make (or just use your default icon). Icons on DW, to me, are like custom emoji on Discord. They are ways to be expressive through images without the need for words, they can be quite personal, you get some slots for free, but because a lot of people get REALLY into them, users are literally willing to pay money for more slots that they can use. Anyway, you get 15 icon slots by default, and there are a lot of users and communities dedicated to making icons that people can use. It's fun!

Strength: Dreamwidth has a very powerful and simple HTML editor. Weakness: I have never used Dreamwidth's rich text editor, and everything I hear from people who have used it suggests it is an unusuable eldritch horror. Cannot verify that experience, but even without using it, I am pretty confident that DW's "WYSIWYG" editing ("what you see is what you get" -- that is, however you format a post while drafting it, that's what it will look like to other people when posting) is extremely far behind other social media sites. If I were to post and format this post on Dreamwidth (and I will), I would be able to do a lot more with controlling how the bulletpoints look and are nested, and I could do things like create sections in the post that make it easy to navigate to specific sections, and I could do things like add tables and collapsible sections because I think Dreamwidth allows almost any HTML5 tag (more so than e.g. what AO3 allows). On the negative side, however, it is much harder to do things like arrange images in a photoset on Dreamwidth. In short, you WILL need some kind of HTML knowledge to do anything fancier than paragraphs of text (images, embeds, polls, bulleted lists, etc.). However, if text is all you're doing, it's a really nice editor. And for power users, HTML is a good skill to have and unlocks a lot of possibilities with your posts, and DW is one of the best interfaces for doing pared-down, simplified HTML editing I've ever used.

Strength: Some more on accessibility: So remember how I said that DW lets you control the way the site is displayed to you? This means you can heavily customize how your reading page and blog looks, what links and sidebar widgets are available and where they're placed on the page, etc. But you know, that kind of freedom can be dangerous. As you might know well from Tumblr, what about people with custom blog styles that are a horrendous viewing experience -- autoplay music, flashing gifs, low text-background contrast, color scheme that makes your eyes burn, etc.? Well, DW has thought about that. Whenever you get a link to a DW post or someone's DW blog and you don't like the style, you can just append ?style=site OR ?style=mine OR ?style=light to the URL and voila -- it's readable again. ?style=site will display the page in DW's standard style which is a light grey + red/pink highlights style that is designed to be easy on the eyes. ?style=mine will display the page in YOUR custom style, so if you've made tweaks to the site style to optimize your reading experience, you can now apply it everywhere you like. Finally, ?style=light displays the page with minimal styling so that it can be loaded quickly in situations where your connection is bad. All of these things allow you to have an optimal reading experience.

Strength: Polls. If you have a paid account, Dreamwidth lets you make polls. This is probably the number one reason why I have a paid DW account, to be honest, because polls are really useful for running communities and getting feedback. Like, when I mod communities and I want to get the opinion of members, I can post a poll, and my paid account lets me do this in any community as well as on my personal journal. I used to run a lot of fanwork contest type communities, and you can conduct voting pretty easily that gives each user one vote, which is hard to ensure through third-party voting mechanisms. The downside here is that the opposite is not possible -- you can't run a poll that is open to the general public. I believe all poll participants need to have a DW account in order to participate.

Weakness: Dreamwidth's image-posting capabilities are still quite weak. It is only relatively recently that Dreamwidth allowed you to upload images to the site at all. A free account gives you only 500 MB, which is enough if you want to post a graphic or a photo here and there but not a lot if you're posting e.g. your full set of vacation photos or gifsets or reams of screencaps or whatnot. The upload interface leaves much to be desired. It is very difficult to add images to posts -- you either need to use the rich text editor (which comes with its own set of challenges) or you need to be pretty comfortable with HTML and understanding what <img src=""> means. DW does provide some copy and pasteable HTML code to put your image into the HTML post editor, but yeah, putting an image in a post is not the click-and-drag experience that it is on most modern social media sites. When I want to add some images to a post, the process is like this: Open a new tab and go to the DW homepage. Click Create > Upload Images. Upload files. Make sure the privacy settings of the images match my post. Get each image embed code and go back to my other tab where I'm editing my post and paste it in. Repeat for all images. Yay. It is certainly not a simple experience.

Weakness: There is no reblog function. This can have some benefits: as mentioned, you own the only copy of your post -- if other people want to share it, they have to give people the URL to it. However, let me be very frank about the downsides: it means that Dreamwidth is not a low-effort content-sharing website like most social media sites are nowadays, which has two major ramifications: First, you cannot create an interesting blog simply by following interesting blogs and curating an interesting feed. I mean, I suppose you can kind of do this by collecting interesting links and posting them as a DW post every so often, but that's still very different from how modern social media works where you just directly share the interesting content and that IS your blog. What this means is that in order to have an interesting blog, YOU have to consciously craft/draft your own interesting content from time to time; you cannot just rely on encountering interesting content from other people. What THIS means is that your DW blog is inevitably going to be quite personal. This can be pretty intimidating for someone who is starting out. I remember my first LiveJournal post (which even 18 years later took me about 10 seconds to pull up on my laptop -- the archival functions of DW are AMAZING) was essentially me saying "Hm… well I got this LJ but I don't know what kind of things to use this thing for or how long I'm going to keep it…" Anyway, it's always very awkward starting up a DW blog because you can't just find some content you find really cool and just share it and people get to know you and your tastes and your interests that way. Nah, you're kind of thrown into the oversharing deep end here. You're going to have to personally write something if you want people to have something to read. Second, keeping a DW blog can be a non-trivial amount of effort. Like I mentioned, you can certainly use your blog to curate content, but it requires some amount of work and effort to do even that. You can't just scroll and click and bam, you've added some content to your blog.

Weakness: Dreamwidth is very lo-fi and text-based. I mentioned the difficulties of uploading images; I mentioned the lack of a share button. What Dreamwidth is geared toward is plain text posts. I recognize this is very not ideal -- where are the visual aids? The images to break up all the dry walls of text? The whole experience of being on Dreamwidth is doing a lot of reading. And a lot of writing. A LOT. Sometimes people just don't have time for that. I get it. I mean, you can choose how often and how much to write and how much of your reading page you want to read, but regardless of how frequently and for how long you choose to engage with the site, it is never going to be an easy scrolling, filling-a-three-minute-lull-in-the-middle-of-the-work-day sort of experience, IMO. The content can be very interesting but it's got a high barrier to entry.

Weakness: Content discovery is very difficult. I discussed this earlier. But Dreamwidth really doesn't do much to shove content in your face. It doesn't have recommendation algorithms. This can be good because it helps you curate your feed to content you enjoy and people you trust, so you rarely have to block people because they are irritating you. You can just not follow them or easily scroll by their posts (DW is very text-based and high barrier to entry, right, so it takes a lot of conscious effort to consume content; it's not the type of site where you can run across the worst opinion you've ever read in your life and by the time you realize what it is, you've consumed the whole post). Spammers also aren't really a thing. But it means that you really do need to build up an interesting set of people/communities to follow or there's nothing for you to read or DO on the site. It also means that people will not just stumble across YOUR posts unless you put forward effort to promote them somewhere (e.g. in an active relevant community, which, you know, may not exist). You're never going to get that dopamine hit of people liking and reblogging your stuff instantly after you post it. And even when you want to share something widely, it can be tricky trying to figure out whether that's possible at all. Strength: On the plus side, I suppose it really is like having a private little sandbox. Like you're over here going "vroom vroom" with your toy cars or whatever, and it's extremely unlikely you'll get some rando barging into your replies talking about how your car-playing is all WRONG and here's what you should do instead.

Weakness: Dreamwidth is "dead." I mean, you can still find plenty of people who are active on DW. I have a great, very active set of friends whose posts I enjoy reading (and they all post different sorts of things; I have enough friends that I can't actually read all the content I'm interested in, but I do try) and who regularly respond to my posts. I'm very happy there. Personal blogs are doing fine. But personal blogs are only one half of Dreamwidth -- the other half are communities (public spaces) and those are not doing so well in my experience. You have a couple of active islands I mentioned above, and if your fandoms are sufficiently big, you can probably find an active discussion comm for them. But if your fandoms are small or even if you're in a big fandom that just doesn't seem to have found a dedicated mod and a critical mass of active users interested in public discussions, then you're shit out of luck when it comes to public discussion venues on DW. Depending on your needs/interests, this might be fine, or it might be a dealbreaker. For me personally, as someone who was on LJ in its heyday, the lack of communities is a bit demoralizing. It's certainly quieter and it has this feel of there being a few towers of refuge in a barren landscape that people are flocking around. And like I said, communities help you make friends. And it's just a different way of interacting with people, which I value in a social media site, and I can't really meet that need on DW with the current size of its userbase.

Weakness: There is no ask system. There are DMs; sometimes people play askbox meme-style games in the comment of posts (someone posts a list of questions, people comment to select the ones they want the OP to answer, OP replies in the comment thread with their answers); and I suppose you could create a stickied post with anonymous comments enabled to act as your askbox, but there's really no equivalent to the big set of functionality that is the askbox system on Tumblr. There's no way to privately ask someone a question, and that question can then easily be published or replied to privately at the discretion of the blog owner. If you'd like to poke someone to check in with them, the only way to do that is with a DM or a comment posted on a random blog entry; there's not really an easy way to ask a question or propose some content to someone's blog with asks the way there is on Tumblr.

Anyway, I think I've covered the main things about using Dreamwidth. I always want more people to come talk to me on Dreamwidth because I feel like that site is the only place that facilitates people getting to know me both on a purely fannish level and on a very personal level (I know people can make the personal + fannish sharing combo work on Twitter and Tumblr, but having everything be out in public just really does not work for me). But I realize it's hard to just start using a site you're unfamiliar with, especially one like Dreamwidth that tends to have a bit of a learning curve and is generally out of step with the direction of modern social media. And especially when you don't have many friends there already, which is probably the case for most people. But it's a site I respect and trust a lot, and I think it facilitates deep, long-lasting friendships. More than anything, I think the main difference between DW and Tumblr is that Tumblr is mainly a site for sharing content with other people and reacting to it, while DW is more geared toward helping you organize your life and your thoughts. They have a lot of overlap in terms of the kind of personal and fannish musings and experiences that can be shared, though. Anyway, if you're interested in joining Dreamwidth but it's intimidating/confusing, please reach out! I have lots more recs for active communities depending on your interests, too!

(Probably the best way to do that is on the Dreamwidth version of this post.)

[earlgreytea68]

Tagged by @setting-in-a-honeymoon​!

1. How many works do you have on AO3?

An even 200!

2. What’s your total AO3 wordcount?

Um. 3,328,002

3. How many fandoms have you written for and what are they?

Six:

Inception in the lead with 67 fics

Sherlock with 56

Fall Out Boy with 36

Doctor Who with 14 (this number is incorrect, I have written waaaaay more than that, they just live on LJ and DW)

and then one each for Sports Night and The Office (UK)

4. What are your top five fics by kudos?

Nature and Nurture

Saving Sherlock Holmes

Working on the Edges

The Radovljica Apicultural Museum

John Watson’s Twelve Days of Christmas

5. Do you respond to comments? Why or why not?

I try to! Sometimes I get busy or depressed or sick, etc., and I fall behind, but I try to respond, for a number of reasons - they give me so much joy that I want to acknowledge that they have brought my joy; it is so wonderful to see what people to respond to and love and laugh at and cry over, it definitely makes me a better writer, and so I want to acknowledge that, too; and comments when I’m in the middle of posting a fic are especially helpful to me because they often result in me tweaking what’s coming next in response to questions I see people have that indicate I’m not being clear enough, or maybe I’m not hitting the tone I want, etc. And so I like to respond to be like, “Thank you! You have no idea how important and wonderful this is to me!”

6. What’s the fic you’ve written with the angstiest ending?

Oh, wow. While I actually think I can write good angst, when I do it I try to have it in the middle of the fic, so that it gets properly resolved to give you a nice, happy ending. I’m sure someone’s going to be like, YOU ARE FORGETTING THIS HEART-WRENCHING THING YOU WROTE, but all I’m coming up with right now is that, in my long Doctor Who ‘verse I wrote, I did a fic in which their family dog died. That was pretty angsty. (omg I just scrolled down to see how I ended this story and OH MY GOD ahahah I forgot that I wrote this after I’d broken up with the Tenth Doctor and so it ends with Brem being like, “Plus, my father is useless so I have to hold the entire family together all the time” hahahaha what an extra-angsty ending, Brem, my love lol)

7. Do you write crossovers? If so what’s the craziest one you’ve written?

I do sometimes! I feel like most of my crossovers make some amount of sense. Like, okay, maybe you wouldn’t think to cross Inception with Fall Out Boy (this was a special request) but I think the premise of the fic makes total sense. And I once crossed Oliver with Brem, but those were my first two beloved precocious fic songs, so that made some sense, too. And I still think Inception and Sherlock crossed together made SO much more sense than actual seasons of Sherlock lol. So I guess if I had to choose the craziest I would go with the Doctor Who/Gossip Girl crossover I wrote lol. But wait, that one actually also made sense as I wrote it, I think, so I’ll go with the Sherlock/Fall Out Boy crossover because that was just bonkers.

8. Have you ever received hate on a fic?

Yes. I wrote a fic that was really horrible to Mary in “Sherlock.” I hate Mary. I feel like I can say that now. I haaaaaated Mary. But in those days “Sherlock” was an incredibly tense fandom to be part of and if you didn’t say that you loved Mary all the time forever and always then people were like !7@((!*(@(!& at you. I have a million massive warnings in all caps all over the fic, like, DON’T READ THIS IF YOU LIKE MARY, and people still would leave rude comments on it lololol. And then we wonder why I left that fandom lol. (I mean, many people in the fandom were wonderful, and I don’t always have REASONS why I leave fandoms, it’s not like anything is that logical or rational. But it wasn’t a very fun time to be in Sherlock fandom. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

9. Do you write smut? If so what kind?

I do. My smut almost always has to be advancing some kind of emotional beat in the characters’ relationship. I’m never super-explicit because usually the whole point of the scene to me is what the characters are thinking and feeling, not really what they’re *doing.*

10. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Sometimes my fics show up somewhere without my knowledge. People are really good about letting me know when that happens.

11. Have you ever had a fic translated?

Yup!

12. Have you ever co-written a fic before?

Yes!

13. What’s your all-time favorite ship?

This is like asking who my all-time favorite child is.

14. What’s a wip that you want to finish but don’t think you ever will?

I have this high school Peterick AU that I started at the beginning of the pandemic. For some reason, when schools shut down, all I could think about was all these bands that wouldn’t get formed because the kids couldn’t go to each other’s houses, like Pete Wentz couldn’t just show up at Patrick Stump’s to hear him play. So I started this story where Pete and Patrick meet right before the pandemic hits, and then everything locks down and they’re stuck Facetiming each other and coming to the realization that their soulmate is on the other side of the screen.

Anyway, I actually think this fic is super-hot?? And I never think I write hot things, but it’s got a hot phone sex scene and I’m really happy with it and I would love to finish the story...except that the pandemic turned out to be...this. And in my head, Idk, I thought there’d be this triumphant moment where everyone would be like, “Yay! We can see each other now!” and Pete and Patrick would reunite, and instead everything petered out into, “Can we see each other now........????? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ “ and I didn’t know what to do with that in my fic, it made it not as neat as I was wanting it to be.

But I hate to lose that hot phone sex scene hahaha. And also after the hot phone sex scene Patrick adds “Hotline Bling” to his and Pete’s shared Spotify playlist they’ve been working on and I’M SORRY, I FOUND THAT SO CHARMING, PATRICK STOLE MY HEART WITH THAT MOVE, anyway, as you can see, I love so much about the fic and I really want to find a way to make it work and maybe someday I will the end.

15. What are your writing strengths?

My dialogue.

Also I think I write the same story over and over (person realizes that they’re deserving of being loved for exactly who they are), but I think I’m REALLY GOOD at that one story lol

Also I like to think that I write family relationship stuff fairly well, like, Idk, I love doing that stuff, whether found family or biological.

Oh, and I think I usually get the ratio of angst::happy ending pretty good (in my view for my personal preference lol).

16. What are your writing weaknesses?

I don’t think I’m especially good at smut. I’m terrible at paying attention to things like setting, what the characters are wearing, what the characters even look like, etc. As mentioned above, I tell the same story over and over and over, and I’m okay with that, but yeah, I’d be bad at telling a story where people aren’t, like, nice people who you’re rooting for.

17. What are your thoughts on writing dialogue in other languages in a fic?

I think I couldn’t do it, because I don’t speak any other language, but I’m always happy when people translate my fics!

18. What was the first fandom you wrote for?

Doctor Who. Although maybe, like, New Kids on the Block self-insert stuff counts from junior high??? But Doctor Who was first published.

19. What’s your favorite fic you’ve written?

Please see above re: favorite child lol

I tag every writer who wants to do this and I hope every writer does this because I always think these are fascinating!!

[authorangelita]

I'm new to this, so please enlighten me. If I ask for a prompt from you, is it a prompt for everybody this current month or for the next month (September)? And do I post separately on Archive and add a caveat of "drabble prompt" or do I post it as part of a drabble collection? I would love to get involved in this, so I'm eager to play. BTW I am not on tumbler, so where can I see the monthly prompts as they change.

Hello and welcome!  This is the first time that we've done the drabble challenge, so it's not a monthly thing.  I was misleading when I titled my AO3 work with August, and I apologize for the confusion.  I used August in the title so that I could remember what/when it was and give myself a cutoff point. 

The way that it works right now is that you look at the prompt list and send me an ask on Tumblr with the prompt that you'd like me to write.  I'll write a drabble based on the prompt and post it on Tumblr and in the AO3 work.

Unfortunately, you can't post prompts on AO3 as a work by themselves - a work has to be a complete story or artwork, so I'm not sure how to make it work if you don't use Tumblr.  I'll look into it. 

MacGyver fandom as I know it exists mainly on Tumblr.  This is the first fandom I've been in that's on Tumblr, so I'm still learning about the platform.  Tagging is not my strong suit, lol. I miss the days of LJ/DW. 

I hope that helps a little bit.