a character whispering “kiss me” to their love interest is kinda hot and you can’t really go wrong with it
enemies to lovers? check the slow burn of finally being able to kiss each other. friends to lovers? confirmation that everything you’ve been feeling hasn’t been unrequited. fake dating? it was never a lie to begin with
forbidden love? screw everything else, all that matters is you and i. second chances? i’ve never stopped loving you. opposites attract? look at me. i love you for who you trulyare.forced proximity? we can hereby no longer fight this thing going on between us
So yet again, someone decided a fun thing to do on Twitter would be to invite people to give their “cancelable” opinions about fanfic and how so many things are terrible or overrated or not well-written or whatever (not gonna lie, a loooot of the criticisms have real big not-like-other-girls energy).
An author saw it, leading to them removing all of their fics from AO3.
The pushback to this author being upset has been along the lines of, don’t put your work out on the internet if you don’t want feedback.
I’ve been trying to understand why that response just falls flat for me, and here’s what I’m thinking. That feels very much like a capitalist consumer viewpoint. “Fic is a thing I consume and as a consumer, my opinion is IMPORTANT because you are marketing a PRODUCT to me. This is a transaction.”
And I realized, that’s not how I experience fic or fandom. For me, fic isn’t a thing that I buy and consume, it’s a gift given to me.
This is the example I keep thinking of. When I got married, we were given a wedding gift by one of my IL’s friends, a hand-painted bone china pitcher (think Spode or Wedgewood). Beautiful. Classic. Elegant. Like, entirely not us at all. You know what we did? We wrote a heartfelt thank you letter, expressing our appreciation of the gift, the thoughtfulness, etc. What we didn’t do, have never done, is tell them that it didn’t work for us. Because that’s just rude.
Engaging with fic, for me anyway, comes from this emotional space in my heart. So the connection between writer and reader for me, is much more a relationship, even if the relationship is simply that we’re both engaging in a fandom around something we love. It’s not a transaction.
Of course not all fic is for me; I doubt there’s any fic that every single person without exception has adored! And obviously I know my fics aren’t for everyone either! And that’s okay! Fic is such a gorgeous, lush, rich and realized landscape where so many different things flourish together, and I think that’s really beautiful. There’s something for everyone and there’s room for everyone at the table.
So absolutely, you can put your critical and negative opinions of the gifts others have given you out into public spaces, knowing that the people who have given you those gifts occupy those spaces with you. No one can stop you!
Personally, I’d much rather focus on the joy that fic has given me, and the gratitude I feel for people’s willingness to share their gifts with me and the world.
Nobody tells you that 90% of being a fic writer is telling yourself sternly that you CANNOT start a new wip until you finish one of the old ones, and then failing to write anything at all as your brain sulks like a toddler.
idk man, i just wanna write a fic that someone reads obsessively at 3am. a fic that someone loses sleep to finish because just one more chapter and tries to give multiple kudos. a fic that people will leave a comment on every chapter. i want to write a fic that people will recommend to others, that they think nails the characterization and relationship dynamic. i want to write someone’s comfort fic, someone’s favorite fic, or someone’s fic they read when they want to re-read something. i want to be that fic writer. i want to write that fic.
Oh god, please delete the extra spaces between paragraphs in your fics on AO3. Please. I know it takes ages and it’s really annoying to do, but it is an immediate backspace away from your story if I’m on mobile because I get one sentence per page and acres of white space.
I can help! There is an easy way to do this if you have a word processor! Instructions with screencaps follow:
1. Before you paste your text into the Ao3 text box, make sure “Rich Text” is clicked.
2. Paste your story into the Ao3 text box (like you usually do)
3. Instead of hitting post, go back and click “HTML.” Your story will suddenly show the HTML markup, including all those pesky extra spaces:
4. Open a new, blank document in your word processor. Copy all the text from the Ao3 window and paste it there.
5. Do a find / replace for all the lines that say “<p> </p>”, replacing them with nothing.
6. Now you have a document with HTML markup and no extra carriage returns.
7. Copy this and open up your Ao3 window again. MAKE SURE “HTML” IS CLICKED. Paste your nice new text into this window.
8. When you click “Rich Text” again, your story will look beautiful and have no extra spaces!!!!!!
9. Now you can post your story!
10. Congratulate yourself on your amazingness, win $100,000,000,000,000, become best friends with Idris Elba, roll around with a pile of happy puppies
oh look! @thepurrbutton i may be able to give you chapters with proper spacing again!
Also! You can stop it from doing this in the first place by using the right settings in your word processor. From the Rich Text Editor (RTE) help text (linked from the question mark next to “Type or paste formatted text.”):
Press Enter once between paragraphs. Pressing Enter twice will insert a blank paragraph, creating additional, and likely unwanted, space between paragraphs when you paste into the RTE. The Archive uses top and bottom margins to create the appearance of a blank line between paragraphs; you can use the paragraph formatting options in your text editor to create a similar effect without adding extra <p> tags.
InGoogle Docs, you can go to the “Format" menu, choose “Line spacing,” and then choose “Custom spacing.” It will let you set how much space you want before and after paragraphs.
InLibreOffice, go to the “Format” menu and choose “Paragraph.” Under the “Spacing” heading, there will be options for Above and Below paragraph.
Those are the only programs I have handy, but generally, you want to look in the formatting menu for something about either paragraphs or spacing, and you’ll find a similar option there. You can then use any amount of spacing that’s pleasing to your eye and it will still have AO3′s usual amount of spacing between paragraphs.
(I could teal deer about all the whys involved – why did fandom start hitting Enter twice, why do paragraphs on computers and paper have different amounts of vertical space, why does the RTE not know what to do when given text where someone hit enter twice, why don’t we we change the parser if we can’t change the RTE – but that’s probably a little more detail than necessary to be helpful.)
Also, there’s an easier step - if you go to your word processor document that the fic is written in, and go find>replace, replace ^p^p with ^p. This replaces all double-paragraph-breaks with just one. Boom you’re ready to cut and paste.
If you use gdocs, I highly recommend the gdocs AO3 posting script! It converts your gdocs styles (italics, spacing, etc) into HTML so that you can post straight into the HTML editor on AO3 instead of the Rich Text editor. I use it every time!
I mean, honestly, I just delete them in the rich text.
It’s a bit slow, but when I’m writing, for my own sake, I need the extra spaces, and I can’t stand dealing with any more HTML than absolutely necessary, so I stay in the Rich Text Editor pretty much exclusively.
Really, you can just manually go through, which is usually a good idea anyway for a last pass to check for typos and the like. I do both at once! It’s not foolproof, but I have absolutely caught things! It doesn’t take that long; it’s a bit tedious, sure, but not that bad and no more than dealing with HTML is.
But, here are many other options that will probably work for a lot of other people!
Seconding@eidetictelekinetic bc I also delete the spaces manually. I like having line spaces between paragraphs as I write and because it makes formatting easier when I want to send a chunk to soneone to get a second opinion on it. It takes a bit of time when posting comes around - but it also encourages me to reread over what I’ve written and fix any typos or awkward phrasing I and my betas missed the first time around. I find it helpful!
But also, for anyone who hates doing ut themselves, please use these options for removing bonus spaces; it really will drastically reduce the number of people clicking away.
tagged by @gayeddiaz@queerpanikkar@rewritetheending@eddiediass (thank you all ❤️), here’s more from the pre-5b time loop AU that won’t leave me alone. I swear the rest of this fic isn’t as angsty as the snippets I’ve shared lol
“I’m not refusing,” Buck says tiredly. “I’d do anything for Chris, you know that. Youjust seem convinced that I won’t be there.”
“You won’t,” Eddie throws back at him. “Buck, you’re not moving to San Clemente. You’ll be across the country. You’ll be miles, time zones away. Even if you get on the next flight, you’ll be here six hours later. You’ll come to visit every month in the beginning, and then it’ll be every other month, and pretty soon it’ll be a trip down for Christopher’s birthday and that’s it. We’ve seen this happen to people, it’s the way the world works.”
“What do you want me to do, Eddie?” Buck asks quietly, pleading. His chest feels entirely hollow, like it’s never known the warm rush of blood through its cavity, never held a beating heart that once lived there. “I have no one here. Why shouldn’t I follow the one person who asked me to go with her?”
“You have us,” Eddie says again heatedly. “You have all of us! If you can’t see that, Buck, then maybe we’re done here.”
Buck nods and opens the door. “I guess we are.” His legs feel disproportionately weighted down by his body as he steps out and shuts the door of Eddie’s truck behind him.
“I’ll drop by to talk to Christopher tomorrow,” Buck calls out. “I’ll—I’ll explain it to him so he understands.”
Eddie looks at him through the window. “So you won’t even reconsider this? For him?” Eddie hesitates before he adds, “For me?”
