been thinking about grace and adrian being alike

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Andulka
Claire Keane

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Not today Justin
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Today's Document
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he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
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$LAYYYTER
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let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
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@rossrandir
been thinking about grace and adrian being alike
He that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life for my sake shall find it.
— Matthew 10:39 (KJV)
you don't even have a dog
so yeah. update on the fics I am writing. one of them hasn't been updated since December if I remember right (not good) and one of them hasn't been updated in two months.
'but ross!' you might say, 'that is a disgustingly long amount of time!' true. I have no defence.
the main issue is that in Otedama, I've stumbled across a major decision that must be made before I post the next chapter, and I am conflicted.
I have no excuse for Hadal Zone, I'm just slow. I'm working on an update now, hopefully in the next couple weeks.
I appreciate the patience <3
Dr. Ryland Grace -> Interstellar Fashion Icon
major brain worms. I've watched this movie three times in the last two weeks. and I'm like 70% through the book rn.
anyway. phm phone.
PROJECT HAIL MARY 2026 • dir. Phil Lord & Christopher Miller
am i sitting in a tin can
far above the world
Let’s pray
i might elaborate later but fanfic replies literally develop writer’s metacognition and make them better writers
so, Metacognition is the practice of thinking about thinking or identifying one’s cognitive process . in essence, metacognition is understanding how you prepare for academic challenges, exams, or tasks, and then being able to reflect on whether you did well, you prepared adequately, and what was most effective. in a writing setting, this type of self-awareness helps you transfer skills in writing, say, fanfiction into writing academically, competitively and professionally.
here’s an article from brown university on the subject i’ll discuss further. there are 3 parts of practicing metacognition identified in this article: planning, monitoring, and evaluation. how might this look like for a fanfic writer?
planning: asking oneself ‘what is my goal?’ ‘what strategies should i use to meet that goal?’ ‘how much time/length do i need to meet my goal?’. so maybe my goal is to write a meet cute where two characters kiss. i’ll need to use a perspective, an upbeat tone, and forward characterization to do this. it’ll probably take 5000 words and two days to write.
monitoring: asking oneself: is my story making sense? am i reaching my goal, or do i need to summarize more succinctly to keep it to 5k? maybe you started with a lot of exposition and now you’re 6k in and the characters haven’t met yet. what went wrong/changed? is it ok that it changed or did you not realize it got away from you? what now?
evaluation: asking oneself: did i reach my goal? was it effective? what would i change next time?
this is where comments come in
it is incredibly difficult to evaluate yourself. comments like “i love this!” actually do begin to touch on the evaluation step of metacognition. it means, in general, the writer is on the right track. comments like “i loved the dialogue between x and y” or “the emotions of this section really hit me” begin to answer the questions of was it effective, did i reach my goal and conversely answer what would i change next time (by adding more of whatever was specified as working well). HYPER SPECIFIC comments, like analyzing the story between the lines or pasting in a line that you really liked and explaining why, is like jet fuel for the metacognition process and i’m not exaggerating. specifically pointing out what was effective and why is incredibly useful
i can straight up credit my writing style to all of my friends and readers who have given incredibly detailed comments. when i found a community who gave feedback like that, my writing improved a thousand times faster than before. so! i guess what i’m saying is give feedback! it goes so much further than you realize!
This is exactly the post I was thinking about when I wrote that recent post about how fanfic authors develop as authors by adapting to what they perceive as successful with their audience -- based on positive feedback.
Feedback absolutely does not need to be "critical" to help an author improve, and anyone who insists that fanfic authors need negative feedback or they'll never grow is. Well. To start with, incorrect.
I have some thoughts about comments and feedback and I will put them behind this cut tag.
First of all: positive feedback absolutely is important and helpful to writers, or at least to me as a writer. It's actually more important, and gives me more useful information, than negative feedback. Constructive criticism is also useful, but constructive criticism, if you're doing it properly, incorporates positive feedback.
By this point in my life as a writer (if we're talking about fiction, I cannot call it a career, I am an amateur there) I can pretty much do my own critical feedback. Yeah, this is too long, it fucks up the pacing, I must grit my teeth and make it shorter. Doing this scene this way isn't working, I need to find another way. Too many clauses in that sentence, slow it down so the reader can follow the action. That kind of thing.
What I am really bad about is predicting how other people will respond to my writing. I know what *I* like about it, and usually there is some overlap between that and what other people like; but there's also usually a lot of divergence. No matter how accomplished you may be technically, the one thing you cannot do is read your own work from the perspective of someone who didn't write it. And this is why it's really valuable to get feedback from people who aren't you, during the process and afterward.
Pointing to things you liked about a story is helpful to the author even if you don't explain why you liked them. It lets us know what's working, and that is as important to know as what isn't. Cause you don't want to take out the things that are working because of some rule you're trying to follow regarding the things that aren't.
And also, the positive reinforcement helps with motivation, especially at the WIP stage. It's always been really helpful to me to know that people are reading and enjoying the story while I'm working on it; I am willing to disappoint myself by not finishing something but not to disappoint other people!
Anyway, this is just to say: positive feedback is helpful not just emotionally but technically, and I deeply appreciate the fact that AO3 the site and AO3 culture is pretty well optimized for it. Think of it as casting bardic inspiration or something. Leave a positive comment today! Give writers courage in the doing of their work! God knows nobody else will.
And what of the readers who comment "I love this!" even when the writing is utter garbage? Will they not teach the author to cater to what's popular with low-brow audiences and hinder their development because they get positive feedback no matter what they write?
Because that's been my experience on AO3. Most of the stuff I wrote ten years ago makes me cringe now, it's awful in every way, but all I got was "I love this!"-type comments. Every time I backbutton out of a story because it's an unreadable mess of typos, or clichéd to the point of complete predictability, the comments are filled with sycophants.
If the positive feedback isn't genuine, or if the readers have no goddamn taste and would cheer on a bag of dog poop, it doesn't teach fuck shit. It teaches mediocrity at best. For positive feedback to have any desireable effect, it has to steer the author in a "right" direction. Plant watering, not carpet bombing. Targeted application.
But what comment culture on AO3 has taught people is to uncritically appreciative of everything and anything, to reward the attempt no matter the outcome, and to treat pulp fiction the same as high fantasy. That lack of discrimination has eroded any ambition anyone might have had left.
Why bother improving when garbage rakes in the kudos?
I've got the time, so I'm going to treat this as serious question rather than a rhetorical one.
This post reminds me a lot of conversations we used to have about fanfiction and feedback in the 1990s. At the time, at least among the people I knew, there was a sense that we wanted fanfic to be taken seriously and that it was important for that reason for fan readers to give fan writers constructive criticism so that they could improve their writing and therefore support the argument that fanfiction was worthy of the vast investment of time and energy that we were all making in it.
Since that time, the following things have been established:
Fanfiction will never really be taken seriously outside the community of people who write and read it. It doesn't matter how many well-constructed arguments we make about how the Aeneid is fanfiction, etc. Fanfiction is not devalued by The Outside because of the quality of the writing. It is devalued because a) it is unmonetized and unmonetizable; b) it is largely created and consumed by women; c) often, the sex is the point. Even professional and profitable approximations of fanfic (50 Shades, Heated Rivalry) which command attention because of the money they make are devalued. Most mainstream media coverage of the Heated Rivalry phenomenon, for instance, is explicitly or implicitly answering the question, "How has a show that Can't Be That Good generated such a large and passionate fan base?"
Most fan readers aren't equipped to provide criticism which is useful to the author from a technical point of view. In my experience, criticism in AO3 comments is usually either the expression of a personal taste (I don't like stories where X happens), an attack on the writer's presumed beliefs/ideologies, or the airing of a generic pet peeve (you broke my favorite writing rule). The kind of critique you would get from a writers' workshop, in which the focus is on making the story better through revision, is rare and honestly, not part of the reader's job. If you want that kind of criticism what you need is a writers' group where everyone has agreed to do this work for others, so that others will do it for them.
No attempt to raise the general quality of fan writing has had any significant impact or staying power. And my theory is that this is because
Most readers of fanfiction don't care much about the quality of the writing. For some readers a certain level of technial skill is a basic requirement. But for a lot of readers, what they want is more of whatever they're consuming, and if it 'works'--if it produces the desire emotional/sensory effects--then its 'quality' is irrelevant.
Thus it is true that a lot of positive feedback on AO3 is instrumental rather than evaluative. It is often either a veiled attempt at marketing (readers praising a story because they want other people to see it and enjoy it) or a veiled attempt to encourage the writer to keep producing more fanfic. At the same time
It is also true that people wouldn't provide positive feedback, even for these reasons, if they weren't getting pleasure from reading it. So from that POV, the kind of positive feedback you're talking about is sincere, even if what is being appreciated is not technical skill.
To the question of "what can anyone learn from this unearned positive feedback?" I would answer: You learn that someone liked your work. I personally find that both cheering and useful. If the commenter is sufficiently enthusiastic you might find out *what* the reader liked about your work, which I find even more cheering and useful.
To the question, "Why bother improving when garbage rakes in the kudos?" I would answer: For the same reason most writers improve: because they want to. Or, to put it more idealistically I guess, for the love of the game.
Because here is the thing: many of us, especially Olds such as myself, have been taught that in order to become professional writers we have to improve our writing technically. Many editors do have a preference for distinctive voices, elegant style, complex plotting, etc., and also have Secret Style Rules that authors are not allowed to break. So we're used to the idea that you should improve your writing because it will make you more attractive to literary agents and editors and thus bring you closer to the dream of getting money and fame for your writing.
Whether or not things ever worked that way, they don't now. Look at what just happened with Shy Girl. Or things like the Left Behind series, or 50 Shades. Popularity and salability are not necessarily or even primarily linked to what critics and academics would consider good writing. Good writing as defined by critics and academics has always been something important to a relatively small minority of the reading population. Misconceptions about this are maintained partly because academics, who value innovation and complexity, select for those things when they teach literature. The number of people reading James Joyce's Ulysses in the 1920s was much smaller than the number of people reading, say, Paul de Kock, a bestselling 19th century French author whose trashy novels are name-checked in Ulysses (because Leopold Bloom's wife Molly likes to read them in bed).
So why bother to improve your writing? Because you want your writing to be better. That's the only deep and durable motivation any of us ever really have. Whatever reward you get from your publishers or your readers--whether it's money, fame, or comments and kudos--is as much a matter of luck, connections, and self-promotion as it is the quality of your writing.
I mean I absolutely understand the frustration here. It's very frustrating to put in the amount of work that, say, I've put in on my AO3 fiction and watch other writing that doesn't have any of the technical features I spend so much time creating get orders of magnitude more positive attention. It was even more frustrating to write what I thought was a pretty good original series and be unable to move it past the gatekeepers of what was even then a shrinking and increasingly profits-driven publishing industry. None of that is the fault of your readers, though. People liked your work even though it had flaws? Enjoy that! And if you see in your earlier work, or your current work, things you want to improve, improve them! It may not lead to increased readership or more meaningful comments, but it will satisfy your own desire to be a better writer.
"there's no platonic explanation for this" WRONG my characters are staving off the heat death of the universe through the power of friendship
writing pacific rim au in 2026 is awesome, cause like 70% of the people who read it have never seen the movie. like I might as well have dreamed this all up in my head for all you know.
people are like 'I'm nervous what's gonna happen?' ooomg this is so much better since you have no idea.
trying to work on chapters, but the beast is really limiting my arm mobility
we are reaching UNPRECEDENTED levels of yaoi. godbless studio orange
add another to the list
It's a sad love song
guys. I'm trying to write chapters, unfortunately anatomy is eating me like a dead whale carcass
Hello winterhawk people,, here’s a comic I did two years ago that I never finished!
Enjoy