a writing blog

hi i like to write (reader-insert fanfics) requests: open🌻 (Connor, Markus, and Kara)

[mehlwrites]

should i try to write again?

[figayda-rights]

We could have had it alllll...

[dieantik]

NOT ME REPOSTING THIS AGAIN BC I REALIZED REBLOGS DONT SHOW UP IN SEARCH 😭🙄

bringin back my... b-bad rat au... 👉👈

[crownoflaurelandbramble]

*A show ends*

Me: Ah, cool. Nice. My show is over. That’s cool. Lemme just hop on AO3 and Tumblr and stuff and get some more content. All’s good. 

Me, two days later, having already gone though all the fan content I could find: *frantically refreshing the page* I. Need. More.

[takkytakk]

[ghostresidues]

sometimes u just have to read a poem and feel yourself fall in love with the world again

[weltenwellen]

Rainer Maria Rilke, Selected Letters, 1902-1922

[sunshine-and-happy-things]

Source: @vikkichu

[hozieer]

Visit Original Link

To Be Alone (Live Version) by Hozier 

[ahotknife]

more examples of tenderness

“have you ever been in love?” “once.” “how did it end?” “it hasn’t.” (the get down, 2017)

“I try to be kind to everything I see, and in everything I see, I see him.” (hanya yanagihara)

when you kiss me, heaven sighs (la vie en rose / edith piaf)

“the heart is the toughest part of the body. tenderness is in the hands.” (carolyn forché)

oh, if only I could nestle in the cradle of your cabin, my arms around your shoulders, the windows wide and open (amoreena / elton john)

“the curtains stir. there you are on the bed, like a gift. like a touchable dream.” (carol ann duffy)

I loved you in the morning, our kisses deep and warm, your hair upon the pillow like a sleepy golden storm (that’s no way to say goodbye / roberta flack)

“you’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and he won’t tell you that he loves you, but he loves you.” (richard siken)

love me always, love me always (oscar wilde in a letter to his lover)

“with you, intimacy colors my voice. even ‘hello’ sounds like ‘come here’.” (warsan shire)

if I could fly, I’d be coming right back home to you (if I could fly / one direction)

“do you want to dance?” “I don’t know how.” “me either. do you want to figure it out?” (stranger things, 2016)

[ahotknife]

more examples of tenderness

“have you ever been in love?” “once.” “how did it end?” “it hasn’t.” (the get down, 2017)

“I try to be kind to everything I see, and in everything I see, I see him.” (hanya yanagihara)

when you kiss me, heaven sighs (la vie en rose / edith piaf)

“the heart is the toughest part of the body. tenderness is in the hands.” (carolyn forché)

oh, if only I could nestle in the cradle of your cabin, my arms around your shoulders, the windows wide and open (amoreena / elton john)

“the curtains stir. there you are on the bed, like a gift. like a touchable dream.” (carol ann duffy)

I loved you in the morning, our kisses deep and warm, your hair upon the pillow like a sleepy golden storm (that’s no way to say goodbye / roberta flack)

“you’re in a car with a beautiful boy, and he won’t tell you that he loves you, but he loves you.” (richard siken)

love me always, love me always (oscar wilde in a letter to his lover)

“with you, intimacy colors my voice. even ‘hello’ sounds like ‘come here’.” (warsan shire)

if I could fly, I’d be coming right back home to you (if I could fly / one direction)

“do you want to dance?” “I don’t know how.” “me either. do you want to figure it out?” (stranger things, 2016)

[viktorhargreves]

- SOPHIE HEAWOOD

[valtsv]

me consuming fictional work after fictional work to distract myself from the fact that i exist: i can have little a escapism. as a treat.

[msavignon]

[mayday1284]

[mehlwrites]

Nines x workaholic!Reader HC Part 1

You're quiet but you're also known for your temper. Nines is kind of amused at how you can be frighteningly silent for a moment and then suddenly rapidly throwing cuss words the next

The two of you are frighteningly efficient at your job, mainly because you maximize whatever features Cyberlife had put on him

But seriously, even Connor kind of got worried that you were overwoking the RK900

"Nines, I need you to analyze whatever it is that culprit sprayed in the room."

Hank still can't believe Nines just licked the floor the moment you said those words. (Although the results helped you guys solve the case faster than you expected)

Nines noticed that you stared at him in a peculiar way whenever he would do something that you wouldn't be able to without a team

Later, after you had too many drinks, you'd admit to him that it was because you were jealous ("god, imagine if i can actually fucking do something that useful in a heartbeat??? or if i can take on 4 men in shootout without a sweat??? or even just not have sleep get in the way of my job??? fucking hell being an android is so fucking useful")

You were insecure. It was odd, because Nines knew you to be the best detective in the precinct. ("Despite what you believe, you're proven yourself more than enough.")

You only squint at him when he tells you so, partly because of the hangover and also because you weren't sure what to say

Anyway, your partnership was still the same after that (but not really, no, because for the past two months you've been treating Nines as a typical android because he said so himself, didn't he? He was an android made before the android revolution, he was the "ideal machine" with no chance of deviancy, and so you treated him like a machine. But machines don't have thoughts about you, they don't have opinions of you, and they certainly don't try to comfort you)

(but he does, and you don't think he even realizes it. the moment that you realize that Nines can /see/ you, you can't help but see him as well)

[saucywenchwritingblog]

I’ve seen five different authors take down, or prepare to take down, their posted works on Ao3 this week.  At the same time, I’ve seen several people wishing there was more new content to read.  I’ve also seen countless posts by authors begging for people to leave comments and kudos. 

People tell me I am a big name fan in my chosen fandom.  I don’t quite get that but for the purposes of this post, let’s roll with it.  On my latest one shot, less than 18% of the people who read it bothered to hit the kudos button.  Sure, okay, maybe that one sort of sucked.  Let’s look at the one shot posted before that - less than 16% left kudos.  Before that - 10%, and then 16%.  I’m not even going to get into the comments.  Let’s just say the numbers drop a lot.  I’m just looking at one shots here so we don’t have to worry about multiple hits from multiple chapters, people reading previous chapters over, etc.  And if I am a BNF, that means other people are getting significantly less kudos and comments.

Fandom is withering away because it feels like people don’t care about the works that are posted.  Why should I go to the trouble of posting my stories if no one reads them, and of the people who do read them, less than a fifth like them?  Even if you are not a huge fan of the story, if it kept your attention long enough for you to get to the bottom, go ahead and mash that kudos button.  It’s a drop of encouragement in a big desert. 

TL;DR: Passively devouring content is killing fandom.

[shells-void]

Reblogging again

[hannibalsbattlebot]

So much this

[genufa]

You know, kudos and comments are much beloved by all esp. yrs truly, but I have to say: I’ve been posting fic for 20 years, and I have never in my entire life had a story stay above a 1:9 kudos to hits ratio (or comments to hits, back when kudo wasn’t an option). Usually they don’t stay above 1:10, once they’ve been around for a few weeks.

I also have a working background in online marketing. In social media 1:10 is what you would call a solid engagement score, when people actually care about your product (as opposed to “liking” your Facebook page so they could join a contest or whatever). If BNFs are getting 1:5 - and I do sometimes see it - that is sky-high engagement. Take any celebrity; take Harry Styles, who has just under 30M followers and doesn’t tweet all that often. He regularly gets 3-400K likes, 1-200K retweets. I’ve seen him get up to just under 1M likes on a tweet. That’s a 1:30 engagement ratio, for Harry Styles, and though some of you guys enjoy my fics and have said so, I don’t think you have as lasting a relationship with my stories as Harry Styles’s fans do with him. XD;

Again, this is not to say we, as readers, should all go home and not bother to kudo or comment or engage with fic writers. That definitely is a recipe for discouraging what you want to see in future. But this is not the first post I’ve seen that suggests a 20% kudo ratio is the equivalent of yelling into the void, and I’m worried that we as writers are discouraging ourselves because our expectations are out of whack.

[avoresmith]

I think about this a lot, because it’s important to know what a realistic goal to expect from an audience is, even though I admit it definitely is kind of depressing when you look at the numbers. I was doing reading on what sort of money you can expect to make from a successful webcomic, and the general rule of thumb seems to be that if your merchandising is meshing well with your audience, about 1% will give you merch. I imagine ‘subscribe to patreon’ also falls in this general range. 

Stuff that is ONLY available for dollars are obviously going to have a different way of measuring this, but when it comes to ‘If people can consume something without engaging back in any fashion (hitting a like button, buying something, leaving a comment)’ the vast majority will.

And as a creator that is frustrating but as a consumer it’s pretty easy to see how it happens. I have gotten steadily worse at even liking posts, much less leaving comments on ones I enjoy, since I started using tumblr. It’s very difficult to engage consistently. I always kudo on any fanfic I read and comment on the vast majority, but then again I don’t read a lot of fanfic, if you are someone who browses AO3 constantly/regularly for months or years, I could see how it’s easy to stop engaging. I don’t remember to like every YT video or tumblr fanart I see, much less comment on them.

When we are constantly consuming free content it’s hard to remember to engage with it or what that engagement means to the creators. And lol, honestly that sucks. Certainly as consumers we should be better about it. But also like, as a creator be kinder to yourself by setting a realistic bar of what you can achieve. 

And IMO, if numbers matter to you (kudos, comments, etc) be honest about the fact that you CAN improve those things by marketing yourself better. The ‘I just produced my art and put it out there and got insanely popular because it was just so brilliant’ is less than a one a million chance. Lots of amazing content is overlooked every day because there is a lot of good content and a metric fuckton of mediocre to bad content. You can only SORT of judge the quality of your work based on the audience it generates, but if what you WANT is an audience there is way, way, WAY more you can be doing than simply producing whatever you immediately feel like. Marketing yourself is a skill and if you want the benefits of it you have to practice it.

[calpatine]

I have a professional background in internet marketing as my day job and a moderate hobby business. My definition for “moderate” is “it pays for itself, keeps me in product, and occasionally buys groceries.” In the day job, which is for an extremely large global company, there are entire teams of people whose entire purpose of employment is to ensure a 3% conversion rate. That’s it. That is for a Fortune 100 company: the success metric is for 3% of all visitors to a marketing web site to click the “send me more info” link. My moderate business that pays for itself has a 0.94% conversion rate of views to orders. Less than 1%, and it’s still worth its time – and this is without me bothering to do any marketing beyond instagram and tumblr posts with new product. I know it feels like no one is paying attention to you and you’re wasting your time if you don’t get everyone clicking kudos or commenting but I promise, I PROMISE, you are doing fantastically, amazingly well with your 10% rate. You probably aren’t going to go viral AND THAT’S FINE. You’re only hurting yourself if you’re expecting a greater return – don’t call yourself a failure, because you’re NOT. You’re just looking at it the wrong way. I promise, you’re lovely just the way you are.

[lilacwine1966-deactivated202212]

i can have a little unrealistic romantic fantasy. as a treat