#this is my zine fic so I'm also trying not to give too much away lol but i am down to final days and John is a dick😅

[fandom-hoarder]

Maybe John's visiting his favorite son Adam and he doesn't want you to know...

👀👀👀👀

🤔🤔🤔

Mm, actually it doesn't fit this particular timeline, but notes for another time✍✍✍

[robthegoodfellow]

summer retrospective time because i'm feeling down about term starting up and not writing as much as i wanted to but I KNOW this is ridiculous and my goals were unreasonable.

so totally unasked for and unprompted here's what i got:

Chapters 8 and 9 of Upside-Down - 32k (total wip 118k) - E - Harringrove - Crazy long March chapter wherein an ominous phone rings and rings, Billy experiences some firsts (first time playing D&D against his will! first time fucking Steve! first time enduring a birthday party!), and Eddie drags Billy to a thrash metal concert. In Flayedville, the kids rally the troops to save Billy, he and Steve share body heat, and plans don't go as planned.

Two fics written for upcoming @strangerthingscharityzine totaling 4k words in their original state, trimmed down to 1.5k words each for the zine edition. Idk if I'm allowed to summarize but one of them made Remy cry!

That Bartender Sure is Something - 1k - G - Harringrove - Sideways scene rewrite from alt character's POV wherein I try to lay groundwork for why Steve's parents are out of town so often (aside from my need to give boys safe space to fuck and be super freaking domestic).

Chapters 11 and 12 of Only One Bed - 13k (total wip 59k) - E - Harringrovesoningham or whatever Steve/Billy/Eddie/Chrissy is called - Chrissy POV and Eddie POV chapters wherein Chrissy and Billy bond and then Billy/Eddie/Chrissy navigate their dynamic as asymmetrical polyamorous triad. Mostly cute!! Minimal angst!!

¿Por qué no los dos? - 18k - E - Harringroveson/Metalsandwich - What was supposed to be an excuse to make Steve and Eddie thirst over Billy in space buns becomes unexpectedly harrowing exploration of aromantic experience for me and apparently others, some of whom may be entitled to compensation. But there's smut... at the end?

Drafted aaalmost first half (7k) of @bigbangharringrove fic wherein Steve flirts with necromancy and necrophilia and NO STOP where are you going it's all gonna be fine!!! See, Billy died in this contemporary fantasy version of Hawkins where magic and supernatural creatures are just kinda there and so Steve tries to revive him but he imports the wrong file. The wrong Billy. Because there happens to be a lust demon that goes by the same name as Steve's dearly departed husband and let me tell ya he is NOT jazzed to be here. Working with @LucaDoodleDoo who is awesome AND so far has not run away!

Drafted 1.5k of fic for upcoming @harringrovezine. Still on track to be way too long but I WILL trim it down. Not sure what else I'm free to say but I'm excited how it's shaping up?

what follows is me convincing myself i did a good job

And that's... that's it. About 76.5k in all. Which is more than I realized (and also according to haphazard math is more than last summer by maybe 10k?)

I'm not usually fixated on word count much (aside from like laugh-crying when a fic just balloons way bigger than anticipated), and more words does not equal better words by ANY means, but I think this gives me a reality check about getting down on myself. I didn't finish the major things I originally set out to finish but... yeah, such is life when you have more than one WIP in which you are painfully invested 😅

And it's not like I won't EVER finish them which is prob my biggest fear because i had a rep growing up for all my grand plans and projects just losing steam and going nowhere. But I am capable of finishing fics because look ma, there's 3 whole multi-chap fics with the little green check mark (please actually DON'T look, ma).

I'm just babbling now. When work starts I'll be back to writing in random libraries after last bell and my output will slow, and I'm sad about it. But wow you know what I did shit out a bunch of words in like 2.5 months so at least there's that.

(Hesitant to post this because I'm sure it looks like flexing or fishing or something? Or like I'm implying that unless you too are shitting out words you suck? Which uhh I am not! The intent is more for Present Me to flex on Past Me, maybe? And fish some reassurance out of cold hard numbers to more easily put things in perspective.)

Mostly this did work, though! I feel better about the summer. If you need a boost, look over what you've done across a certain span of time using whatever measurement suits you and talk yourself into a pat on the back.

Pat, pat.

[elmelloill]

i put this on twitter but what if i put it here too! my favorite lines (more like...sections) from the fics I wrote in 2022 :)

(with slightly more commentary than on twitter, perhaps) (edit: a lot more commentary than on twitter)

I included my aa4 zine piece on twitter but I don't think I will here, since I didn't actually write it this year and just happened to post it on ao3 in January after the zine released. So the rest of these are all Waver fics, because in 2022 I finally unlocked the ability to write about him.

i'm the one you can't ignore [rated M, excerpt is some implied nsfw]

So first, I'm so pleased with the concept of this fic. I didn't really take the idea seriously at first but the more I thought about it the more I realized that it's really the premise with the best of both worlds when it comes to the question of whether Iskandar remembers Waver in Chaldea or not. All of Waver's heartbreak and inner conflict AND the actual reunion all in one fic! One of the comments called it a "delicious little misunderstanding" and I love that. I know this is very much tooting my own horn but it's also my most popular fic of them by a Lot so it feels a teeny bit justified. And my goal this year was to write the things i really wanted to read so! I love everything I wrote this year a lot!

Anyway. Excerpt.

He had thought that, in this situation, it wouldn’t make a difference if Iskandar remembered him or not. It was purely physical self-indulgence, after all—what did it matter if Iskandar only thought of him as some attractive stranger to share his bed for a night?

But something in Iskandar’s touch was different now—they had never done this before, not remotely, but it was as though Iskandar had figured him out nonetheless, like he knew even better than Waver did what would make him unravel.

Actually half my reasons for this section being my favorite is because when I thought of it I felt like I unlocked the path to the end of the fic. It was simultaneously like "yes! this is it! this is the whole point!" while also giving me something to talk about through my sex scene that wasn't like, the actual sex, so i was able to get through it without my usual ordeal. But it's also my favorite because I'm just a sucker for the concept of Iskandar seeing straight through Waver, in any context. Being around Iskandar means being subjected to the mortifying ordeal of being known, for Waver, or at least I like to see it that way.

His Rightful Place [rated G]

But despite everything, when he raises his head to meet Iskandar’s gaze, an unassailable sense of reassurance overtakes him, and even though his heart is still pounding hard enough to echo in his ears, he feels as though something has slotted into place in his chest.

Waver Velvet, second-rate mage and stand-in Lord of the Clock Tower, should not be here in this alien place, trying to save the world, but at the same time, looking into his King’s eyes, he knows that he is exactly where he is meant to be.

I actually don't have much more commentary than the title itself. His rightful place! (Shameless use of the CE name because it makes me emotional and I'll never actually have it unless they rerun accel zero order just for me.) This one was fun though, and also sort of started from an idea I didn't take seriously right away. I definitely watched the entire Solomon movie hoping Waver would show up, but if my disappointment led to me writing something about it, then maybe that's fine.

Warmth [rated T, maybe it should be M?? i really couldn't decide.]

I really really wanted to write a kiss and (mostly) just a kiss. Making out is so often just a prelude to smut (in doujins especially. maybe I was flipping through too many doujins at this time lol) so I just really wanted to focus in on the kiss and that's probably why it kind of got out of hand. That and Waver's just so fun to write when he's a repressed gay 19-year-old.

All that said, my favorite part is just about Waver being Seen, again:

Waver hadn’t meant to look at him, but now he couldn’t look away. According to legend, Alexander’s eyes should have been different colors, one dark and one light, but it was hard for Waver to imagine anything more striking than the dark burning crimson that he was so used to. Had anyone ever looked at him the way Rider did? It was frustrating sometimes, how he seemed to see through Waver so easily, but that meant he was actually looking, when so many other people just dismissed Waver at a glance.

Waver couldn’t feign indifference to that gaze. Everything he wanted was laid excruciatingly bare, from his petty ambitions and his desperation for recognition, to the desire he had told himself had no place in the heart of a mage—Waver could hardly stand it, but at the same time…Rider was still looking, wasn’t he? Not with disgust, not with scorn…despite their disastrous first encounter, Alexander the Great was still looking at Waver Velvet with undeniable interest, as though he saw something of value where nobody else had, value that even Waver sometimes doubted was there.

And because I can't get enough of this whole concept, I wrote about it from Iskandar's perspective, next.

Bloom [rated G]

I loved writing this one. Giving myself an excuse to write about Waver's character development in Zero by making it into a fic! Iskandar POV was really fun and I hope to use it a little more in the future. While it isn't the excerpt I chose as my favorite, I really liked thinking about him getting excited about talking to Waver about the Iliad. I love when Fate points out (accurately) that he's basically a huge fanboy when it comes to Homer.

But I basically centered the fic around this metaphor so, it should be the chosen excerpt:

He’s changed.

He had the feeling of watching a desert flower burst into bloom after the briefest deluge. It was always a delight to witness the prickliest, most forbidding plants unfurl the sweetest blossoms after a rare rain, and Iskandar felt the same satisfaction now. His first impressions had not been wrong—Waver was weak and cowardly, overconcerned with frivolous matters, impatient, self-centered—but the spines and the flowers were of the same plant, after all, and it was just a matter of the proper conditions to bring out one or the other.

While this fic was largely just inspired by the thought of Waver wrapped up in Iskandar's mantle (shout out to the 4th hgw for taking place in February) I think I was also influenced by the scene right before Iskandar fights Saber (which I happened to be rewatching) because I hadn't noticed before how Waver stands next to him and just sort of...holds on to the mantle while he thinks about Iskandar's history and ideals. Prior to the scene on the bridge, it really felt like a point where Waver's attitude towards Iskandar is shown in it's final form, more or less, so I sort of wanted to place this fic directly before that scene and show Iskandar's feelings reaching that point, too.

Okay that's it! I had a lot of fun writing this year even if I didn't write a lot. My goal was just to create the things that I really wanted to see and I think I accomplished it, even if I still have things I'm working on that I haven't finished yet. If you read and enjoyed any of my fics this year, thank you!!!

[ltleflrt]

AO3 tos anon here, thank you for all the explanation.

I actually sometimes wonder myself what’s my stakes in following a lot of spntwitter drama 🙈 I think in this particular case, I just wanted to know the truth. I understand you don’t have concrete proof but as I said I take your word because I know you from outside of the twitter echo chamber and trust you. I also wanted to figure out if AO3 is basically deleting fics just like that but your explanation makes sense as to why they’re doing it.

The fact that reporting trolls should chill, though, I fully agree with.

GAH, THE TUMBEASTS ATE MY FIRST ANSWER. I'm still gonna end up being long winded about this though cuz it gets me pretty heated. I try not to talk about it, but then someone asks me about it and oh lord here I go lol

I honestly don't care if there's a ringleader or just a well organized group. I just wish that the Reporting Trolls would consider printed fics the same as classic 'zines and get the fuck over it. Reporting printed fics can bring down the attention of the IP holders too, so they're not the Fandom Heroes they think they're being.

And when it comes down to it, I don't think they're really trying to protect fandom. If that was the case, there wouldn't be fanfics publicly posted on Lulu that have been sitting their for several years. They're targeting specific creators who have gone out of their way to keep the links hidden or private. So I think there's a kernel of truth to the idea that they're doing this out of jealousy. If it's That One Author that seems to be the ringleader, she may be upset that other people are getting more attention than she does. If it's her fans, they may be upset that their favorite author isn't getting as much attention as they think she deserves. It's even possible that they're not aware of what they're really doing, so they fall back on "BUt pRoFIT".

This whole thing about "but Lulu makes money!" will forever drive me nuts. Lulu would make the same amount of money selling paper and ink on a book that's just 700 pages of the word "Orange" typed on repeat as they would selling paper and ink on a book that's 700 pages of my story. The paper and ink is only worth paying for because of me, and I'm not making any money from the work I'm doing.

Look I can prove that, at least :D

Hell, I'm losing money on it. I pay fanartists to create covers for me. I'm bad at formatting the PDF, so I pay people to format it properly for me. I've spent hundreds of dollars to make these prints look nice and semi-professional. I give away copies for free to the artists and the people who help me with the formatting, and some of these are over $20 because of how thick they are.

Everyone is getting something out of this EXCEPT for me!

*huffs and puffs in irritation*

The AO3 stuff is, unfortunately, squidgy. Over the years I've heard of other things getting reported on AO3 where authors have complained that they weren't given enough opportunity to clean up whatever the violation was, or the AO3 staff wouldn't/couldn't tell them where the violation was hiding. If something is reported, it's going to come down to a judgement call from an AO3 employee. As someone who has had to make judgement calls on things that are grey areas, I can tell you it's tough. And sometimes it's best to err on the side of caution, which is usually not in the customer's favor. Without knowing exactly what was behind the AO3 staff's decision to delete, I can't say whether their decision is fair or not. It is scary though, because it's hard to tell whether an offhand comment will get you in trouble or not, and it puts us all on edge when we hear about something getting deleted.

Anyway, sorry I went on a vent session again. I'm glad you got some answers that at least made you feel better ;D

[mysticmikalla]

I need advice I'm sorry for asking I know you don't know me but please I'm trying to be a content creator, have fun but I always have this problem whenever I make something. Before I post it, I always think that it's not good enough and I'll delete it. or if I'm about to audition for something, I'll stop because I'm not good enough. I need to get over this because there's an art and writing school that I really need to go to for my future, and I'm too scared. (Continued in ask 2)

(2) if I don’t go to this school, I’ll have to keep going to my home school. That place is a nightmare. That highschool breaks everyone. So many people have either commited suicide or are seriously thinking about it, and I don’t want to. I know this is way too much to ask, but may I please have some advice?

***

Okay so, first I’d like to say that I COMPLETELY understand what you’re feeling. I made my blog in January, but it took me a month and a half to get the courage to actually start posting my writing here. Its so scary, opening yourself up to rejection and criticism like that (especially when it means getting/not getting accepted into a school.)

Hell, it was such a dramatic experience applying for Saeran Zine, let alone a school. I kept finding flaw in everything I wrote, I found it either boring or melodramatic, and I kept reading my friends’ work and comparing myself and loathing my writing even more. Even when I got in, I kept raining on my own damn parade with thoughts like “I only got in because those friends of mine didn’t apply.” Like lmao I’M NEVER HAPPY with my stuff, no matter how many acceptance emails or notes I get, I’ll always find flaw in it or think of something I could have written to make it better

Then I read this one quote, which went something like, “You will never be satisfied with your art because art is never complete.”

The person who wrote this quote was talking about paintings and drawings, but it applies to writing, too. No matter how many times I write and re-write stuff, a few weeks later I’ll come back to it and think, “Damn I could have done this differently.”

So I guess this is my first advice; don’t worry about not finding your work perfect, because unless your ego Is This Huge, you won’t!! Finding it good or acceptable is a journey itself, but you’ll get there the more you write and post!

My second advice I guess is the Ten Second Of Bravery. All you need is ten seconds of “FUCK IT IMMA DO IT” to hit send, submit, post, email, etc. Just ten seconds rid of self-doubt and anxiety, that’s all you need. You can hate your work and everything later, but it’s done, its out there, and that’s all that matters.

Loving your work (or at least in my case, not hating it as much) is a slow process. The more I post, the more confident I become. That fear of posting and showcasing your work does go away the more you do it. I recently applied to something and I didn’t even think twice about it, whereas in Saeran Zine, I spent DAYS filling out the application, then quitting, then filling it out again, then closing the tab because I felt I wasn’t good enough. 

So I think you should start small! Post a few things here on tumblr, just to get comfortable with the idea of other people reading your stuff!

(I’m rambling at this point I hope this is all making sense kdjhdsjfh)

Stephen King, the Literal King Of Writing And My Heart, said something that changed my life lol. Like I used to write my first draft and then compare it to other people’s finished products, thinking that my first draft had to be already perfect. And when I heard Stephen King saying that first drafts are NEVER good, it changed my life lol. He said to just get your ideas out, as messily as you possibly can, just to get the shape of the story. Once you see the shape, you can begin to outline and sculpt it in your 2nd, 3rd or even 4th draft. So don’t be afraid of writing badly on your first draft, even Stephen King does it!! You can always go back and rewrite everything later, it doesn’t have to be perfect the first time through!

And I think the last thing I wanna say is that you shouldn’t trust your own judgement that much when it comes to your writing. Our writing always seems predictable and boring to us, of course, we wrote it! We went over the scenes and dialogue a thousand times in our head, so the element of surprise is gone. That’s why its always good to have a readers or betas to give us pointers! Not saying that you should 100% only trust someone else, but think of it like a maze; you are in the maze, your point of view is limited to whats in front of you, so its hard to see the right path, so you need a bird’s POV to guide you through it most times! (This is also a quote I read once but I’m so bad at wording things. And I dare call myself a writer? smh)

I don’t know if these made too much sense, but I hope some of it helped! It’s unfortunately very common for us content creators to love our work. Just remember that you are creating something from nothing, its very hard to do and it takes a lot of effort, and you should take a look back at it and feel proud of what you’ve accomplished, no matter how small the fic or poem or headcanon is. 

Chances are, you are A LOT better than you think, so please don’t let self-doubt and anxiety keep you from going to that school and following your dreams!