Fell down another plotting hole and now I have over 17k of worldbuilding for my "this isn't going to Become Something" silly little batfam crackfic idea-turned-full-AU, and even more points in my Aeon Timeline file.
Like, I cannot stress enough the extent to which this has Gotten Out Of Hand. This is a somewhat unprecedented level of sarcastic folder notes:
(also ignore the fact that I only have bio pages for 4 of the batkids. So far I've found a way of including all of them up to Damian in the AU. I just haven't gotten as far as writing anything for him, Steph or Cass yet, so they don't have dedicated folders yet either. Which ALSO means that this is all going to get even worse.)
...Did I mention I tripped into a whole side-tangent plotting out what the various Flashes are doing in the background, and will, inevitably, end up doing this for probably most of the other main JL as well? Honestly at this point I half wish I could just yeet this entire thing onto the internet and share it as it is, because at least that might exorcise it from my brain. ...But also. no.
the best fanfiction you've ever read was written by a woman in her 40s before she made dinner for her kids. it was written by a teenager after school when they should've been studying for a history test. and a barista came up with the idea while they cleaned the espresso machine and busser fact-checked it on their break and the post-doc edited between writing grant proposals and the nurse apologized for typos in the notes after a long shift and behind every drabble and one-shot and multi-chapter fic there is a person with a wonderful and interesting and chaotic life and it is such a privilege that we get to be apart of it because they decided to do this thing we all share, for fun.
turns out, the summer my eldest is waiting for her A-Level results; in which I have to plan/source evidence for an educational tribunal for my youngest (so she isn't dumped in a school which will further traumatise her); when my 96 year old nana has a health scare and I need to plan time to visit even though it means leaving the kids alone for the first time; when I'm approaching the third anniversary of the last time I was able to visit my mother and the first since I functionally cut off my brother for being radicalised by the alt right; when transphobic laws are passing which will further threaten my daughter's safety, and a prolonged drought is threatening multiple heatwaves which endanger the health of myself and my kids because we have no functional access to a temperature controlled environment...
...It's not a great time to not have a counsellor any more, apparently.
Sorry if I'm just sharing random memes and other miscellanies for a little bit, folks. I think I finally found a level of stress which matches the prospect of quasi-homelessness, you know?
damn i wish u guys could read this fic i haven't written and this fic i haven't finished writing and this fic i'm putting off outlining and this fic i outlined but haven't started and this fic i'll never write and this other fic i haven't written and this fic that exists only in vague impressions in my head that fall apart every time i try to commit them to the page and th
Sometimes you hear a song and a fic pops into your head full formed. This is a trap. The fic may be fully formed in your brain, but you still Have to write it down. This is an important step that most people forget about.
tfw you make the terrible mistake of reading an old oneshot and remember that you planned out essentially an entire companion piece's worth of story which never shows up on-page, and man, it's such a shame that readers don't know what's going on from an alternate pov, maybe I should wri-
STOP! That is the devil talking! No companion piece! No "second oneshot"!
Especially in my case, because literally no one cares about this. The fic has a total of 21 kudos and 300 hits because it's an BNHA/MHA early 1900s ocean liner wireless operator AU
...I think I just needed to get that off my chest. Sorry to the tiny handful of tododeku fans who actually read and enjoyed it, but I already can't keep up with my wips that people will read. And while I don't write specifically for attention, I feel like I am spoilt enough for projects right now, and I may as well pick the ones which offer a measure of gratification.
(though that said, if anyone actually DOES want to know the backstory to that particular fic, I'm happy to ramble about it here. I plotted out...entirely too much lore for that AU. Especially considering it was a gift fic for an event.)
the number 1 rule of fanfic is have fun and be yourself. the number 2 rule is the average healthy adult male can lose roughly 2 liters of blood before dying.
which of these things puts you off the most from a fic you otherwise would be interested in
no paragraph separation
creator chose not to use archive warnings
tags used as stream of consciousness text rather than clear and organizational
excessive notes
self-deprecating comments in tags and/or notes
a huge block of tags
not marked as complete yet
something in the kudos/comments/hits number or ratio (clarify in tags)
grammar issues
punctuation and capitalization issues
contradicting tags
other (clarify in tags)
Voting ended onJun 11
Note: subjective reasons related to content do not apply in this scenario (such as ship preference, an au you don't like, a genre you're not into, etc.)
Aw maaaan, there's nothing quite like that flavour of suck when you go back to catch up on the latest updates to a longfic you were really enjoying, only to see that the author added a tag for one of your Nope, I'm Outta Here tropes.
It's like...on the one hand, I already have so much emotional investment, and I want to know what happens next! But on the other...if I carry on reading I'm just going to get very annoyed and have a bad time.
Sadly, I know from experience that it's better to just walk away.
The thing Digimon Adventure had over modern isekais is that modern isekais are relatively comfy. Like. When Truck-kun takes you, you can be reasonably sure you'll land in a place where a familiar kind of civilization exists, and where everything will be explained to you pretty quickly.
Digimon Adventure was basically "My Second Life Reincarnated into a Murder World That Explains Nothing and Wants Me Fucking Dead. Now I shit in a bush and need to figure out if berries off of the angry smashing tree are edible. Join me on my quest to find someplace reasonably safe to sleep for the night."
Here’s the thing: authors know when they get a rec on an older story. There’s a telltale uptick of kudos (with a 10-15% comment rate if you’re lucky) in your digest email.
The thing is, there’s no way to know where these people are coming from. In the before, when fandom was more in the corners we all knew about, you could search LJ or a message board or whatever social bookmarking site we were using. You could join the community and participate.
You could get a little dopamine hit by seeing someone tell their friends why they loved your story.
Anymore, those recs are hidden in discords, or in tiktoks or instagram slideshows that you can’t search for. They’re inaccessible, not discoverable unless you’re already there. You may never know why 27 people left kudos on an old story of yours, what they liked and found in your writing. You just get the thumbs up and a kinda lonely feeling, cause these could be your people. You could like them, maybe. You could be friends.
But you’ll never find out why they stopped by, or what people are saying about you behind your back, and that’s sad.
So thank you to the people who still do public rec lists on this webbed site. You are my sunshine, and I’m appreciative of all of you.
My brain is having a full Nope of late thanks to a whole host of Health Woes and Parenting Stress, but I was scrolling through Scrivener anyway and had a chuckle, so I figured I'd share with the class.
I guess this is also a fun insight into my writing process? One of the things I love about Scrivener is being able to have two documents side by side. Mostly I ignore the second panel, or I use it when editing so I have a place to put all my cut scenes/lines for sentimentality (also it's much easier to delete something you love if it's technically not "gone"!).
But now and then, I kinda love comparing my initial AU concept with what I actually ended up writing. So if you're interested, click the readmore to see my "how it started/how it's going" for How To Save The World in 13 Years:
(EDIT: haha that's a fukken lie, this is rapidly turning into a mini deepdive so read on if you want a sneak peak of what's to come in this AU)
(I'm really sorry that I don't have Alt text for this, but it's literally a screenshot of hundreds of words! If it's a real issue I'm happy to DM a transcript)
I kinda love how my initial concept for this AU is an absolute shitshow of typos and incoherent rambling, you know? Especially considering the actual fic is so serious and sobre. (mind you, this level of absolute tonal whiplash happens with basically everything I write!)
For this AU, I was inspired by a few crack batfam AUs where Batman and co are isolated from everyone else, and tried imagining what kind of global situation would have to be going on for that to be something I could personally consider plausible enough to stick my teeth into.
I quickly decided that the only way Bruce Wayne would actually keep his nose out of everyone's business (and the only way he'd stay off of the JL's radar) is if there was an actual, literal barrier keeping them all apart, at least to some degree.
From there, it was really only a short hop to bubble cities, and I quickly latched onto the concept that each one would have a different aesthetic/historical inspiration.
Screenshot? Screenshot.
This file also comes from pretty early on in my planning process, but I've edited it a fair bit since, so while I wouldn't say it's an entirely accurate reflection of my current plans, it's pretty close.
I also default a LOT to tables for this kind of planning nowadays. Anything where I want to be able to see info easily/at a glance gets a table.
When I first started the AU, I didn't really have a solid idea for how many cities I was going to include, or what I wanted them all to look like, but I eventually decided to reign in a LOT on this aspect of the worldbuilding, especially since I wanted to emphasise that not everyone is just casually travelling around. So all of this is canon to the AU! But it's not really something I plan to focus on.
And speaking of focus - here's an exerpt from my initial (typo-heavy from speed of writing lol) overview of the setting/story:
It's kinda fun to look back and see how it started. I mean, I'd actually forgotten the extent to which I originally wanted to gloss over even the existence of Nightwing during a failure, a fall...etc (in my notes I just call the fic 3f+1!). Also that reference to a table in the last visible line is what we call foreshadowing.
Not to mention, it was only meant to be a little fic! A silly little fun thing, playing with a fun, crack-y concept.
As such, at the start of my planning, I very much had in mind that the bulk of this story would happen during Batman's Absence/Presumed Death, with this triggering a belated intervention from the JL due to Gotham suddenly taking a level up in WTFery.
However, fairly early on I realised that although I'd initially written most of the timeline off as just a fairly dull canon retelling... it was quickly becoming Not That. Enough changes were necessary that I had to throw together another document to track them...
As you can see, even just counting the alterations before Jason comes along, while the general shape of events remains mostly As Per Canon, I'd be glossing over a LOT of stuff which would need explaining later if I just skipped ahead entirely.
There's really only so many flashbacks or "do you remember when we Expositioned" moments you can get away with before things start to get tedious. And while I initially thought that a couple of oneshots would cover the differences, the more I plotted and planned, the more I found TO plot and plan.
Around this time I made the fatal mistake of deciding to write up a "quick timeline". Please note the size of the scrollbar in the following screenshot, as well as the wordcount.
If you think I'm focusing too much on Tim in this AU...uh...no. No I'm really not, that's just a coincidence of how the early part is written out, since I was tackling each kid's backstory chronologically, and the bloat sort of happened in real time.
Currently, the two entries for Year 13 come to a total of almost 1,400 words. By this point I had more or less conceeded defeat. My handy dandy table just wasn't really cutting it.
This is the point at which I gave in and started writing separate backstories for each of the batfam. I also created an Aeon Timeline document for the AU, and spent too long faffing about with the calendar settings so that I could make it a "floating timeline" but still have multiple years. (Ahh, software limitations.)
I could drop a screenshot from this, but... I actually don't think there's a way I can do so that's actually helpful or interesting? If I knew how to make gifs, I think scrolling through it would really be the only good way. Alas. But it exists, and it covers not only the titular 13 years of the AU, but also a few years beforehand, which I have dubbed "Pre-Narrative".
Basically all of To Foster and Foment takes place Pre-Narrative, but I made the executive decision that I was only going to count time from when Dick actually becomes Robin. I was already stretching the 13 years part, so IMO the handwave is justified.
Also, while we're on the subject, you'd better believe that I spent literal *hours* trying to wrangle the fuckass canon "timeline" into an actual, locked-down chronology. And - considering that I'd had to condense everything by about a year or so in order to fit my catchy, "13 years" title limitation - I'm actually pretty satisfied with how it all came together.
I've tried to keep as faithful as makes sense, but I've also freely handwaved a lot of stuff. Basically my reasoning is thus:
"If it's crucial to the wider plot, or has significant consequences for a character's arc/personality, I'll try and keep it. If not, eh. Ah well."
This is the main reason that a couple of canonically Dead At That Point JL characters are, in fact, still very much on the scene by the time Bludhaven falls. There was an element of just wanting to have them around for funsies, but also... some of those canonical deaths happened due to events which don't make sense in the context of this AU
And...well, this has already gotten beyond long and excessive, and it's also past midnight as I'm writing this, so I'm gonna call time on this for now. If anyone reached this far and is interested in hearing me ramble more about this AU - or if you want me to do a similar behind the scenes deep dive for any of my other WIPs - just let me know!
Drop a reply or an ask and I'll happily ramble some more.
