News: Bad and Good.
I hate doing these, at least the bad news parts. Really feels like I’m making excuses in place of stories, which I don’t like to do to the people following me, at all. But I think it’s a better alternative than going quiet and leaving everyone in the dark as to what I’m doing, especially if it’s going to span over the next few months, so here goes, first off with the bad news:
The bad news is that four of my Zootopia stories on AO3 were deleted, apparently around Dec. 22nd, and I didn’t find out about this until the first few days into 2018 when I went to find one of the stories for a contact of mine on Discord. The four stories deleted were:
-The Zootopia I Love -A Howling Good Time -Love Stands With Pride -I Give My All to You
I managed to send a note to the site administrators over the matter and after a bloody week of waiting, they finally responded. I’m not going to pull the exact quote from them, but basically they got deleted because some people (most likely the adult babies of Critics United) made “multiple complaints” against my stories for using those brief song excerpts during certain chapters, just as part of the background. This came as a huge surprise to me, because the FAQ for the website talks about use of song lyrics and says that it’s fine as long as it’s not the whole song. When I got a response from an admin though, they said “typically a few lines used is fine”. So basically, their initial information on their site regarding the subject was vague, and their response to me was even more vague. They told me that they’d sent me multiple warnings since November asking me to change it, but I never got any such warnings myself. It would have been a lot more convenient if AO3 had a way to contact other users directly, other than leaving a comment on their stories. I would have noticed that way faster and immediately made the necessary corrections. But because of some asshats who need to validate their existence by demanding the deletion of stories that I work my ass off for free so others can read and enjoy them for free, I’ve lost all of the views, kudos, comments and bookmarks those stories accumulated while they were up. They’re gone. Deleted. Poof. They told me that when I make the necessary corrections I can repost the stories, but the fact remains that I’m never going to get those stats back.
So, moving forward: There’s a new website I’ve been made aware of, because I’m not the only writer who’s had their stories removed for BS reasons, and that website is Archive of Zootopia. It’s still in the beta phase, and I haven’t even created an account yet, but I’m hoping that if enough people support it, it might become for Zootopia what FimFiction is for MLP (without the terrible mod support and overall disregard for its users). I’m hoping I can start mass uploading all my old work on a weekly basis, which I’ll be posting links to for each upload. Don’t worry, you won’t see me float multiple chapter updates twice a day for stories I’ve already done; I’ll post all the chapters at once and provide one link for the day that I do it. I might repost the stories to AO3 with the revisions made, but that’s going to be far down on my to-do list.
What this means: New stories are going to be delayed. Yup. Hate to say it, but I don’t feel good about making new stories with a huge chunk from my catalog missing (even though they’re still available on fanfiction.net, but I hate that websites format, so that knowledge does little for me). Once I get all my stories up on AoZ, then I’ll try to get around to making new stories, and I’ll make a post about that too once I’ve gotten around to it.
So that’s the bad news; but here’s some good news:
Those of you who saw this post already know I’ve been hired by Atrolux, an artist I’ve been a long time fan of, to write out a script for an origins comic he wants created for his snake characters Kyra and Amon, two characters he’s been drawing for at least three years now and is probably most known for them by this point. I can’t go too in depth about our update process, but I think it’s fine for me to say that the script is almost completely done, and Atro himself has begun drawing some early sketches of what the pages will look like (can’t show them here, but I can say that he did an amazing job of translating what I wrote into something visual; it’s like he pulled the images straight from my head). Even though my part is mostly done, there’s still some discussions that’ll take place between he and I as he makes more pages, and it might require some revisions on the story depending on what’s needed. So that’s potentially even more time that I’ll be taken away from me writing any new stories for a little while.
Sorry if this is disappointing to anyone, that I’m pushing back new story content for a little bit; but I’m hoping that the news of my involvement with what’s going to be a beautifully drawn comic might be some sort of consolation for most of you. Once I get a good window between school, reuploading my deleted stories and finishing this comic, I’ll try to get back to writing new stories in my own queue. Thanks for understanding, everyone.
