#offseason chatter

[snack-o-ween]

It's probably been noticeable over the past year, but I've tried to flex my brainstorming and writing muscles by doing the 2023 round of the Year of the OTP prompts, specifically by writing something for a different rarepair ship each month. I initially started out by trying to get something done each month, hence one or two drabbles, but I definitely switched over just trying to finish by the end of the year.

I wasn't sure if I was going to do one ship per month, a few prompts per ship, or one ship for every prompt when I first started this. For example, I have an old note brainstorming a Goyle/Malfoy idea for "Fresh Starts" in March: Voldemort forced a partial Veela Inheritance to shame the Malfoy line, Goyle didn't react well at the Reveal [beginning of Year 6], and they reconnect post-war. (The use of the slash is supposed to suggest more of a 'reacquainted friends to lovers' approach, but my starting idea had too many stories/plots bundled together and trying to write a oneshot in a month wasn't going to handle that very well.)

I hit a point - around trying to figure out if I wanted to write a sequel to the 'Ron having a crush on Dean' fic, possibly as an Eighth Year war recovery fic - where I realized that I was heavy on the M/M slash. So, I tried to make a self-imposed goal of an even split of F/F and M/M, which led to some certainly different brainstorming. (Admittedly, I'm not expecting a ton of people to love some of these ideas, finished fic or otherwise. Time Travelling Accident fic that was supposed to have Bellatrix~Petunia while Bellatrix helped her raise Harry. Fake Dating fic where, as decided by The Order, McGonagall would try to date Umbridge as a distraction during Book 5.)

I didn't exactly succeed at my F/F goal, and my notes have more 'Other' ships involving gender shenanigans than I initially thought might happen. (Example: Ron's Polyjuice Potion in the Ministry of Magic is for the witch; cue post-Battle of Hogwarts gender questioning. The particular plot bunny also involves epistolary fic and enough other post-war Stuff that it didn't seem like a small oneshot.)

I don't think all of these brainstormed ideas are bad per se, and I might even get around to one or two when I can devote enough time and story space to give their plots and character arcs enough room to not feel rushed by this event. I mostly didn't want to start a multi-chapter work-in-progress for YOTP, because, well, my track record for finishing multi-chapter works isn't high enough that I feel confident putting yet another one out there.

[thepassionthatunitesusall]

Would you look at that, another young star signing for 8 years at a reasonable number. Would love to know what that feels like

[snack-o-ween]

Over on Pillowfort, I’ve dabbled a little in sharing (mostly old) content that can fall under meta for the March Meta Matters Challenge. After ~yourlibrarian and a few others ran into issues with certain episode reviews being reported on AO3, a recent 2023 post includes an alternate place to save meta to: SquidgeWorld Archive (aka SqWA).

I have a fanwork that includes episode reviews, so I figured that I’d post to SqWA as a backup to AO3. I don’t have any plans about removing any fictional works from AO3, and I haven’t made any decisions on archive-locking or removing my nonfiction works. This isn’t a sign to panic, or anything. Whenever I get done with transferring old works, I’ll cross-post to SqWA and AO3, and I’ll probably share links to SqWA in posts on this blog at some point in the future.

I thought it’d be easier to keep the same usernames and pseuds, so I’m still queerlybeloved777. It’d unsettle my brain too much to only transfer the relevant meta or nonfiction works, so I plan on transferring everything over. Right now, I’m working through my non-HP fiction pseud, but I’ll eventually get around to transferring the works for my HP pseud.

27 Feb 2023

[snack-o-ween]

Discussion of Dead Dove: Do Not Eat fic. Warnings are provided, but I cannot guarantee the basic summaries may not still squick or even trigger readers.

I’m not certain that I’ll be able to take part in Dead Dove December.

Those who were subscribed to my ao3 pseuds back before I put two of my fics - Skeletons In The Closet and Electrafluxus - in the Anon collection would be well aware that I’m not an absolute stranger to writing them. (Definitely be advised about #Necrophilia, #Necrobestiality, #Flobberworm As Fleshlight, and #Necrocoitus before opening those links. ‘Skeletons In The Closet’ includes Colin and a dead flobberworm, and ‘Electrafluxus’ includes the necrocoitus post-Battle of Hogwarts.)

However, I also associate my Dead Dove fics with intrusive thoughts that I can’t ignore and a certain amount of personal distress. I tend to have a short cluster of similarly themed works that I can’t break out of thinking about until I’ve written it down and gotten it out of my system. In the case of the above fics, the cluster was ‘what if basilisk petrification caused side effects’ and there’s a certain type of necrophilia associated with each character.

I know Dead Dove fics don’t reflect actual intentions, activities on or offline, or personal desires in the world, and I know there’s no actual harm befalling any characters, people, or animals just on the basis that the fic exists. Yeah, even #Extremely Underage #Parent/Child Incest that shows nice, loving parents and no apparent signs of harm to the infant. Or that Hermione/Crookshanks fic written as a gift for someone else.

Still... It’s not really a matter that I’m proud and unapologetic about the Dead Dove fics that I’ve written. It would actually be far less stressful and/or distressing if I just did not have the intrusive thoughts/thought loops that I have to cast off into the Anon collection in the first place. I really hope I don’t have any new Dead Dove fics by December, tbh.

[snack-o-ween]

Even though I am aware that a subscription, hits, or kudos count on ao3 isn’t supposed to be the absolute most important thing on ao3, I still feel kind of anxious when I can see, for example, the user subscription count decrease. I recently realised that I could just put all that CSS that most people talked about putting in a site skin into a Stylus theme for ao3.

The first part below the read-more is mostly copied over from vriddy's Dreamwidth post about hiding various stats on the Statistics page of one's AO3 account. Inspired by @ao3commentoftheday creating a Spooky Season site skin that substituted different stat words for emoji (example: 💬 instead of 'Comments'), I then got rid of the numbers for blurb stats in the second part.

Hiding stats on one’s own Statistics page

Changes from vriddy’s provided CSS: I added an 's' to comment in order to hide 'comments' (trying to hide 'comment' didn't take away the numbers themselves). The line for 'dt.comment.thread.count' removes that stat in the top section; 'dd.comment.thread.count' removes the numbers. I removed the 'statisics .group' section in order to still list out all the works on the page. The only stat visible is word count.

.statistics .subscriptions {  display: none; }

.statistics .kudos {  display: none; }

.statistics .comments {  display: none; }

.statistics dt.comment.thread.count {  display: none; }

.statistics dd.comment.thread.count {  display: none; }

.statistics .bookmarks {  display: none; }

.statistics .hits {  display: none; }

.stats-index .chart {  display: none; }

.stats-index .actions {  display: none; }

Replacing the numbers of blurb statistics with something else

The first section of each grouping leaves the words alone and just gets rid of the numbers. For example, for the first one that says "dd.kudos", the resulting stat goes from "Kudos: 5" [Kudos colon five] to "Kudos:  " [Kudos colon empty space]. The second section that says "dt.kudos::after" then replaces the empty space with whatever is in between the quotation marks.  I did not want all of the bright pops of color and different shapes of actually using different emoji, so I've got the Trigram for Heaven in the content spot right now.

dl.stats dd.kudos {    display: none; }

dl.stats dt.kudos::after {  content: "☰ "; }

dl.stats dd.hits {    display: none; }

dl.stats dt.hits::after {  content: "☰ "; }

dl.stats dd.bookmarks {    display: none; }

dl.stats dt.bookmarks::after {  content: "☰ "; }

dl.stats dd.comments {    display: none; }

dl.stats dt.comments::after {  content: "☰ "; }

[snack-o-ween]

Follow up to looking back on Snack-O-Ween 2022:

What will happen to this sideblog now that Halloween is over? It might depend on my ability to write, plan, edit, etc. after focusing on Snack-O-Ween and whether I need a break, but I do have other works in progress and I could write for other events.

For example, I started writing "The Winter of Our Discontent" with HP De-stress December 2021 prompts last year, but I clearly didn't finish before 2022 started. I have "Correspondence Chess Fic" [the good titles for posting happen later], which involves something I like (writing letters) and something I am so, so bad at (chess). I haven't tried to list out all of my works-in-progress since one of those ask games prior to 2019, but I'm a little afraid that I'd discover the character limit on tumblr posts if I tried. That being said, I think "Playing House" will be interesting, since I've never attempted doll roleplay before; (I'm aiming for neutralisation, it/its pronoun experimentation, and agender-adjacent gender exploration via scenes).

Ideally, I'd like to keep any offseason chatter still focused on Sirius/Severus or Sirius & Severus in some way, but I'll definitely tag 'not a snack' and any other specific ships for blacklisting purposes.