(no subject)

[olivermoss]

Chapter 3 of 4 of The Light Ahead is up. I have just shy of 12k words posted.

I have done a lot of work on the other WIP, but I couldn't get the first chapter to cooperate, and I need that set up for the conversations and feels that are the second chapter I do have written. Unless a miracle happens, that is not going up before the new episodes hit. I am always so worried that new canon will explode how I think about characters and I wont be able to go back and finish it. But, that hasn't actually happened yet with any canon? Maybe I'll be able to write that after volume 2?



I need to get back to Sharkskin at a point, but considering my earlier Sharkstantine fic is the most kudos'd fic on my new account STILL*, but my current one is one of my lowest... there really is no rush. I need to finish it to finish that project, but anything faster moving like Stranger Things takes priority.

(* I am a little grumpy that with as big as Steddie is, my niche crossover fic that is basically a meta joke about choices the TV versions of DC comics contrasting with the comics canon is still more popular and even has more hits than my Steddie fic.)

Once I am done with Stranger Things fics and Sharkskin, it will be time to start posting my Leverage Train fic.

My brain keeps reminding that that I have a Jeeves & Wooster steampunk horror fic that's been sitting in draft form for years at this point. I just keep thinking the ending isn't strong enough. I am also worried some people will read it without looking at the tags properly and think I am insane. I've also been told point blank that my fic is not what people want in a J&W fic. Oh well, I am going to finish it someday and we'll see how it goes.

A local business had posted about hosting a queer writer's group, but the event link makes my browser freak out and the linked Instagram for more info is privated. So, I had plans to join that and work on my Orig werewolf fic there but I guess not.

Comments

[mistressofmuses]

Kudos counts are fucking weird, tbh. A short PWP that was written in one sitting can rack up kudos like nobody's business, and then the same author's fic with a ton of care taken in telling a good story with a lot of effort behind it gets a fraction of that. So frustrating, sometimes!

I hate hearing that - "the type of story you tell is not what people want for this fandom/ship/etc." IDK, that seems super reductive. Maybe it isn't every person's preference, but there are also probably a lot of people who may never have considered that type of story for the fandom, and could turn out to really enjoy it.
Too many fandoms have that kind of "soft" gatekeeping - not as blatant as some, but still a push toward discouraging people from writing what they want to write.
IDK, I've mostly made peace with the idea that my stuff may never get much in the way of attention or readership, but I enjoy writing it anyway.

That's frustrating about the writing group. Is it worth contacting the business over, if the insta isn't accessible and the link seems maybe-semi-broken?

[olivermoss]

I used to know people who would pre-write for various canons just to post as pairings blew up just to turn on the kudos faucet. For a while, a lot of top Dragon Age: Inquisition fic had key canon details and even names wrong. Even a tag wound up having the wrong version of a name. It's just my eternal frustration at [long list of things I've mentioned before]

Also, there are over 1,300 in the Steddie tag on Ao3 so it's easy to get lost in all that. It would just be nice to have things go the other way for once.

I am not too concerned about J&W fandom, it's just weird to be told that. Every fandom should have steampunk horror AUs! I am often out of sync with fandoms in some ways, but oh well. At least I've make what I want to be making :)

[mistressofmuses]

Lol, there was a HILARIOUS spate of an adjacent phenomenon for Bioshock: Infinite. People went All In on Booker/Elizabeth as a ship, churning out fic to grind early engagement and enthusiasm based on previews and teasers, and then, uh... didn't want to stay committed to it when they finished the plot.
(And it's absolutely different when it's "the later seasons of this show/the sequel film/the fourth book/etc. made this fic non-canon-compliant" vs "I didn't finish the game/the series/etc. before churning this out, because I wanted to be able to say FIRST!" vs "I saw other people getting attention for this so I'm going to spew it out purely to try and get hits even though I don't even care enough to spell the character names right.")
Doesn't make that kind of thing less frustrating, though. *Insert similar rant about people attempting to game the system and sometimes being rewarded for it despite the soulless nature of the attempt.*

I understand the frustration. It sucks to be dealing with either small fandoms that will never bring about much engagement AND it sucks to be trapped in a fandom/ship that blows up pretty quick and makes it easy to be overlooked. (Though I thought The Light Ahead's numbers looked pretty good when I last visited it! But that doesn't remove the annoyance of having a different/unexpected fic doing the *best* numbers, when it feels like something else deserves more!)

Every fandom should *absolutely* have steampunk horror AUs. I'd like to think that every fandom *deserves* steampunk horror AUs, and it's a crying shame when they don't get them.
I think it's easy to be out of sync with fandoms, because so many fandoms wind up with some popularized fanon that steers everything. That's not always terrible, but it does mean that certain things go counter to the fandom average.

Genuinely, making what you want to make is going to be 1000x better than making what other people want to be made. If the two sync up, cool. But if not... even if the numbers are smaller, there will likely be people THRILLED that you made and shared something that ISN'T the fandom-norm, plus YOU get to put it into the world as something you genuinely wanted to see.

[olivermoss]

That's hilarious about Bioshock. I am glad it blew up in their faces. Some of the Iron Bull fanon will always be weirdly skewed, but overall it worked.

My ratio on the fic is good, but I checked at a point and I was in the bottom 10% for both hits and kudos. With more fic out there and less readers it's likely started to even out, but at a point it was not getting views. I know they say you shouldn't check that sort of thing, but how else are you supposed to get a feel for what's going on? On all my IronStrange fic I knew something was wrong, and people called me entitled or obsessed over it, but I was sure something was actually wrong with the postings and I turned out to be right! I just feel so out of the loop. People made fun of me for not realizing. I don't want to be gaming the system, I just want to be in the mix. (If I was going to game the system my actual TABB fics would rank higher than the prompts list posted there that have more kudos purely due to being older)

I don't think anything is wrong with my Light Ahead posting, it's just that it's a WIP and some people wanted one-shot smut instead of trusting a WIP would deliver. I was just taking a look.

When Gimli/Legolas became popular again during the Hobbit era everyone wanted fic of Sansuk, not the books or films... as I've talked about before.

Yeah, I'm clear on what I want to do and that I want to become a stronger writer. I have an pretty strong idea of what Stranger Things kudos bait would look like and no. I just want to figure out how to navigate modern fandom enough to be seen.

And yes, all the Steampunk Horror AUs. Particularly in cozy J&W fandom. The contrast is fun!

[mistressofmuses]

It was truly beautiful to see so many fics unceremoniously abandoned, lol. Ordinarily I'd never feel that way, but they were SO clearly nothing but engagement-bait gambling on what would be popular. It was delightful to see them get it wrong so spectacularly.

I try (and am usually pretty good at) ignoring my numbers, but it's true - those are the only metrics available to try and see how stuff is going.
And particularly when there have been issues - like glitches relating to posting times or whatnot skewing the post date (and making it so your fic never shows up in the recent list.) I still never remember the exact parameters of the known issues, and would have no idea about any newer ones that could be there.
It's certainly not gaming the system to just... want to know how it works. It shouldn't be a matter of luck on whether everything works as intended vs. having something glitchy going on.
But yeah - sometimes it's just that people are only looking for oneshots, or only completed works. Or they're just in it for the PWPs, ha. Hopefully the people who want some plot find it!

I think I've mentioned before how I'd kind of idly wondered if I should try to edge into a more popular mega-fandom and a popular ship and just churn out some tropey crowd-pleasers solely for the novelty of writing for a non-dead fandom/ship... but it never got beyond "idle wondering" because... nah. That just... doesn't appeal, and I'll stick with my "double-digit kudos is a triumph" unpopular fandom posting, haha.

However... it does feel like an uphill battle to even get things seen sometimes. I wrote very little when fandom was centered on LJ, but I feel like that was the last time I at least vaguely understood "how to fandom." Nowadays I feel like I'm in the same boat - I don't know how to navigate things to give what I *do* write the best shot at being seen by the people who might be interested.

I am extremely pro-Steampunk Horror AU. And I demand that all of my fandoms be granted some. And yes, I *like* when fic contrasts against the tone of canon sometimes! It's extremely fun to see the characters placed into a 180. What changes? What stays the same? Super enjoyable, imo.

[olivermoss]

Investigating numbers and what's going on with fics is a good thing sometimes, just to get a handle on the landscapes we're in. I wish people would stop acting like even noticing numbers is a one way ticket to a breakdown.

I mean, I still post Buckaroo Banzai stuff. One of my ships is so rare it took a few years for it to even get hits! I think if you stumble across an idea that vibes with you for something current that can be fun, but also getting lots in the mix can be a problem. Over 1400 Steddie fics already. If the ship remains popular after the next two episodes hopefully people will comb through for quality over 'wirren in notesapp typos not my fault'.

Also, write the fic and sometimes the audience finds it. No one even read Caves of Icewind Dale for years and now it's got over 1k hits. Always better to focus on the art rather than the promo (because sad elf in snow is art)

[mistressofmuses]

Right? I understand that *obsessing* over numbers can very easily cause problems. But just... wanting to utilize the data that is provided to you isn't bad. If it ISN'T causing problems, then it isn't a problem.
Again with the death of nuance - just because "please don't make yourself crazy obsessing over your numbers" is good advice doesn't mean you have to go to the "never ever look at numbers ever" extreme.

Ah, the pain of rarepairs.
I hope the ship remains popular, because I like the dynamic! And I hope it's not all about to be fix-it fic, lol. But yes, eventually people will probably grow more discerning. (I'm not demanding pro-level editing here, but oh god can I not stand those notesapp-type didn't-even-give-it-a-read-through fics, lmao.)

I'm 100% in favor of art over promo. Promo over art easily seems to turn into "promo to the exclusion of art that you care about."
It IS nice to see older fics finally find their audience, even if it takes a while. (Sad Elf In Snow absolutely sounds like art to me.)

[olivermoss]

The Steddie tag is a trainwreck. I've tried to read a some but, so much is so bad or gets derailed by having gone to the Tumblr School Of Queer History. I feel like an ass saying this, but I don't read a lot of fic typically. I wish I did, it might making easier to figure out fun story ideas that are smaller in scope if I ever... read any. But between reccing culture being so dead and kudos being so wacky the fun/work ratio just sucks.

[mistressofmuses]

Solidarity fistbump.

I read... very little fic. I'm actually more likely to follow a writer whose work I enjoy to a fandom I've just absorbed by osmosis that has a ship *dynamic* I enjoy (I've read a lot of Witcher fic, despite never having consumed any incarnation of the canon), rather than try my luck at a ship I really AM invested in. I KNOW I've missed some really good shit, and I DO often mean to wade in... I just often don't feel up to the hunt through stuff I wind up noping out of.

But oh jeez. The "Tumblr School of Queer History" was a big problem for a while in the Good Omens fandom a few years ago. Possibly not as badly as stuff is guilty of now, but... some if it was super clunky and like it was trying to be Educational in a way that was obnoxiously distracting.

And both with Stranger Things set in the 80s, or with Good Omens having immortal characters, there could be really interesting opportunities to utilize the time period and what the queer community was like at the time... and I'm sure there are some fics that really do it well! But boy is that not the bulk of them.

I do feel like the fact I don't read a lot of fic might negatively impact my own writing a bit... If I spent more time on the reading side, maybe I'd have better luck with how best to categorize/market my stuff. As well as finding some inspiration!

But reccs are my absolute favorite way to find fic, and what does exist in terms of reccing these days is often pretty... weak. I've found some really good stuff through recc lists on tumblr, but usually on like... personal accounts that I just happened to follow. A lot of the posts/blogs that set themselves up as *actual* recc sources, just... share links, without any of the info that makes me really want to give it a try. "This was so good you guys, just read it!" doesn't give me enough info!

You're 100% right - the fun/work ratio makes it often not worth the effort to try and find fics on my own, haha.

[olivermoss]

Queer History can be obtuse and hard to access. There is no 'here are the super basics' as a starting point. And tumblr is just bizarre about so many things. I remember that it was a major thing on tumblr several years ago that 'saying AIDS shaped gay culture is homophobic'. There was a weird AIDS impact erasure circle jerk going on. These days that rhetoric wouldn't fly, but I wish I'd screencapped some posts as to showcase how bizarrely people thought communities would react to a pandemic.

And in one of my major fandoms we have a whole ass adult MNF who thinks homophobia is pretty much made up my H/C writers to lean into the H side of things. (thankfully, she seems immersed in OFMD right now. maybe she'll stay)

Yeah, I definitely have trouble knowing how to categorize / tag / etc. I've also been in small fandoms when it matters a lot less. Learning some satisfying short fic formats and just reading more of it would really help me... but also I know that plotless vingettes that are basically 'tumblr fanon is right and yes, everyone in this canon is autistic' is what most people want to read in some fandoms. And, again, nope.

Anyway, it's a two sided problem. Tumblr is a terrible place to get queer theory and history, but there isn't a good alternative.

I know Neil Gaiman and lots of other writers stress that you need to be well read in your genre, but if you genre is fanfic? I'd rather find writers who write in styles I like and marinate in that.

I will try to put together some decent Steddie reccs... at some point. I think I've liked one... but it also didn't really scratch my itch.

One of my main fandoms is J&W and the historical grounds is overall surprisingly good. Lots of the major writers either went hard on accuracy or tagged 'happy homos' which is the tag for a deliberate break from reality

[mistressofmuses]

It's true - it's not like there is an easy primer for the topic. Parts of actual queer history are weirdly contradictory, or hyper-localized to specific scenes of specific cities. But tumblr has a weird attitude toward a lot of things. A post that started as a fairly accurate portrayal of one very small or specific thing can suddenly be taken as The Way Everything Was. Or a bit of misinformation circulates for YEARS and a hundred thousand reblogs

Oh god, I remember the "talking about AIDS impacting the queer community is homophobic" thing. Ugh, that was a MESS. There's also the related and occasionally still-seen "talking about homophobia perpetuates homophobia".

Or... "homophobia is fake and invented for drama in fic." Wow. I'd missed that particularly ice-cold take. (I still haven't watched OFMD, though if I ever wind up with HBO I will.) Still, hopefully she stays quarantined in that fandom and doesn't stray back to yours, lmao.

I'm awful at tagging, haha. And yeah, I feel like I'd maybe have a better idea of good fic structures if I read more than I do. And there are certainly some short little snippets - single scenes and such - that I've caught on tumblr that I enjoyed. But yeah, "tumblr-style fic" brings up a very specific idea of what it means. Specific fanons/headcanons and such... most of which don't appeal to me.

That is part of the problem though; getting your idea of queer history from tumblr isn't great... but the other option is getting it nowhere, so...
I just wish people wouldn't take "I read a tumblr post once" as "AND NOW I HAVE A MASTER'S LEVEL UNDERSTANDING".

I'd definitely love any reccs you do come up with. (When and if you find some you enjoy and want to curate!) I often promise myself that I'll try to wade into a ship I like... but when I do have the time, I want to spend it on something with a better work to fun ratio, haha.

I'm glad the J&W fandom is pretty good about the historical stuff! I'm in awe of people who can go hard on the historical accuracy (though I'm also intimidated! I don't have the will to go to that much effort!) but also appreciate on-purpose "this is for fun, so it works this way because I want it to."

[olivermoss]

I've heard in panfandom spaces about the whole people thinking homophobia is mostly a literary devices. It's not super common, but there are definitely very online bubbles who think it's mostly a fic thing and people like me who write it are traumatizing the young lgbts.

Also, what deviations from strictly proper grammar are okay in professional fiction writing and what's allowed - or disallowed - in fanfic are different. I'd rather be exposing my brain to published grammar.

I wish tag/summary polishing was a type of beta-ing we could ask for. I almost forgot to tag TLA 'first times' and that is like... an important tag.

J&W fandom is usually good at either historical stuff or 'history is boring'. Some of the later J&W novels are in a sort of alt-UK where the world wars didn't happen. They are mostly prohibition/edwardian, but some of the later ones are sort of '40s but without the war'

[mistressofmuses]

I feel like I've seen people mention how some young queer people these days don't understand how omnipresent homophobia used to be (even in the very recent past), but I... somehow had missed out on "homophobia was invented for literary drama" as an *actual take.* Though I HAVE seen the "writing about homophobia or including it in any fashion is automatically trauma porn and it's immoral to even allude to it because yes, it will traumatize The Youth to see it portrayed". Ugh, seen that one WAY too much.
(And like... I GET the general "why does your third-world fantasy society replicate the biases and prejudices of our current society" question. It's a thing to think about! But particularly if you're writing real-world historical, real-world contemporary, or just want to explore those things through your writing, it is RIDICULOUS to claim it's for some reason off-limits. I also get it if someone wants to write a world in which the characters DON'T face any type of discrimination. That's cool too. But quit telling everyone that they're only allowed to write one way!)

Yeah, there are some LOOSE interpretations of proper grammar in fic. (And just... plain wrong word usage that drives me nuts.) There are a couple things I'm fond of. Ellipses, for instance, particularly to signify trailing off in speech or in thought. I love that shit, despite it being mostly frowned upon in published work. See above, lol. And the sentence after this one. But for the most part... yeah, I'd rather fill my head with "correct" rules, which I can choose to break if I choose to, as opposed to surrounding myself to common errors that I accidentally start to replicate.

Yes! Multiple times I've just drawn an absolute blank on what to tag something as. A couple times a comment will mention something like "oh, I love the fairy tale elements in this" and I go "oh yeah, that would be a good tag, huh?" Summaries are a common bane, but that's also somewhere I struggle. I feel like those are areas where improvement could certainly get the right interested eyeballs on my fic, but I flail every time.

I love both accurate history AND alt-histories, so that sounds good to me, haha. I can understand the appeal of avoiding the kinds of major world events that would realistically overshadow any other story you were trying to tell.

[olivermoss]

I've read a lot of good, respected published authors who use a lot of sentence fragments and also, brace yourself, the occasional epithet. The fanfic scene is actually way more particular about proper sentence structure and adhering strictly to POV than the pro scene. But then also weird stream of consciousness stuff is fine. Also, errors are considered fine. Now, I like POV strictness. I'm good with that. But I also don't need to completely lose my conversational 'bloggy' writing style. Also, I like my sentence tagging and love of ghost tags. All the authors I like use a similar mix of ghost and action tags. Action tags are not bad, or if they are it's part of my style and IDC :)

I am horrible at noticing some of my own grammar errors. It's like my brain auto-corrects certain ones when I re-read.

The Youths just let the algorithms determine what they see and have no concept of curating their own online experience. A lot of them fundamentally don't understand, partially because they have no context. It's hard if they grow up on twitter, tiktok and amino instead of LJ. It's not that they are dumb or incurious, it's like trying to explain green to the color blind. Still, it's not our job to cater to them and only create for them.

I suck at summaries. I really need to make a list of tags I should always check to see if I can put them on my fic. First Time, [types of sex acts], etc. Now... if only there was a way to SEE the fandom-wide cannonicals...

[mistressofmuses]

I also like POV adherence (or at least being clear about changes) - headhopping within a paragraph, or worse, a sentence drives me nuts.
I see a lot of... variable rules when it comes to fic, and sometimes it varies fandom to fandom. But it does seem like fic-writers are often a lot stricter on adhering to *certain* rules of structure and such that they consider "good." Or it's, again, utter dearth of nuance. "Overusing epithets in ways that are unnatural for your perspective character can be very jarring and weaken the POV" is good advice! "Never use an epithet OR ELSE YOU SUCK" is a bad rule!

I fucking love action tags and they can be taken out of my cold dead hands. :)

Noticing errors when editing, my beloathed. I'm fucking atrocious at catching mistakes between it/is/in/if. It's a silly typo to write the wrong one, but spellcheck won't catch it, and it's such a short word that my brain always leapfrogs over it when I'm editing, and just assumes it's correct.
Sometimes reading it out loud as I edit helps me catch wonky grammar - there are some rules I'm just plain bad at remembering, but hearing the sentence aloud will make me notice if something is off.

Yeah... algorithms have fundamentally changed HOW people find content, and whether they even know how to find it for themselves. You aren't wrong - it's not even a thing that's their "fault"; it's a learned skill that they simply haven't ever needed to utilize or had much of a chance TO learn. Even so... learning the basics of how to curate their own experience is something that I think everyone should do, for their own wellbeing if nothing else. But yeah, not creating for an algorithm to hand to someone - I'd rather make things for the people who would seek it out in some fashion and hopefully enjoy it when they find it.

That's a good idea - just keeping in mind all the kinds of tags I do look for (or didn't seek out, but am glad to see on a fic). It might give me something other than a mental dial tone when I look at the tags field on a new fic upload, haha.

I feel like there *is* some way to view cannonicals and which tags are wrangled to each other, but I definitely don't remember how to do it.
I think you can use the tag search without filling in the tag field, and can just put in the fandom and what type of tag (relationship/character/freeform/etc.) and whether you're looking for canonical vs. noncanonical. That *does* create a list... but hoo boy, my test search gave me some pretty unwieldy results, and I'm not sure how to narrow it down effectively.