[belladonnabedlam]

Okay. I was on my beloved AO3 and I saw something that made me do a double take. So, now I really want to know…

What is your AO3 user ID?

I’m an OG user 5 digits or less

Six figures baby!

I’m in the millions…

Remaining time: 5 days 9 hours

I’m so curious to see how long people have been on AO3! I know some people have been on there since beta/invite only, but I would love to see what the number is on tumblr!

[mybeautifulchristianjourney]

[sicknastie]

[romanyeva]

Just had to talk a friend down from a two cakes crisis. Her cakes - meaning her fic - are absolutely fine, but she felt a little down and checked out the rest of the dessert table. She got caught up in the whole comparison thing. "Oh man, this fic is way better than mine 😞."

And hoo boy, have I ever been there. When I was writing prolifically, I just wouldn't read. I couldn't because I knew I'd go into that fic measuring mindset and declare myself the loser, have to step away from the keyboard and stare out the window a while. And if I had an exchange deadline? Absolute worst timing.

Not everyone goes through that of course, but it's more common than you think, even with so-called established writers. I've seen people delete wips or even their whole account over that burden of doubt. So here are some possible tips to crawl out from under that burden:

Table it. You're done for the day. You've been staring at that cursor for too long. You have no perspective on your work anymore. Go do something else: play with your dog/cat/fish, go for a walk, eat something, go to bed if it's late.

Re-engage with the source material. Watch an episode, read a chapter, listen to that podcast, whatever it is. Find that voice in your head that sings in harmony with the source.

Read positive comments left on your previous work. Trust what they've told you. Because the liar here is your doubt, not your readers.

Hit up that friend you trust and ask them to tell you your strengths. Even if you don't believe it right now, you have strengths as a writer. Maybe it's worldbuilding, maybe it's dialogue; your friend will give you concrete examples. You don't need a beta right now, that will come later.

You're not alone. This is a community. Even if it's a rarepair or gen fic in a niche fandom - and especially then! - someone will be so happy that you brought that cake to the table.

[actualized-animal]

as much as i poke fun at “tumblr prose,” i will acknowledge that sometimes when you’re writing and you’re really in the groove, you’re really feeling yourself, you’re on your capital-a Author shit, and you write a line that makes you go, “oh yeah, this is the Good Shit. this is so Subtle and Says So Much. this is Characterization. this is Themes and Motifs. you could write a whole essay about this one line. the master of the craft strikes again!” and then a month or whatever later when you’re editing you read over it again with post-write clarity and you realize you wrote some real “people die when they’re killed” bullshit

[zestyzigzagoon]

Me, outside doing yard work and driving a mini-tractor full of rocks from back in the woods out to a flower bed to place them around the perimeter, and getting away from my computer and touching grass for a bit: I need to get back to sitting indoors for hours and writing Chasing Sunsets again soon

[adhdwannabewriter]

Writers, which software do you use?

Google docs

Microsoft word

Ellipsus

Libre office - writer

Notepad (the fuck is wrong with you lol)

Pages

Other (comment, please, esp if you recommend it)

Checking results

Voting ended onJul 20

I used to use Google docs, but the white mode only was really annoying me (tires my eyes), so I swapped to Ellipsus (which I genuinely love and recommend), but it was bothering me a bit that I need wifi in order to use it, so now I switched to LibreOffice Writer, which I do like.

It very much has a Microsoft Word feel, but is open source and you need no accounts to use it. It's local on your device, so no AI can scan it, and no wifi is needed.

I still wish it had the Google Docs cards, because, bitch, that thing is so good for easy organizing.

[howtokillavampire]

but what if i read one of your fanfics and then went to your ao3 accounts and read all of your fanfics and left a comment on every single chapter of every single one and you got spam emails from all of my kudos and comments and it made you smile, what then? what if i brighten your day with my words like you did mine, what then???

[idkhowtobenormal]

marrage

[wynnyfryd]

weddning

[steviewashere]

honmoon

[himbosandhardwear]

Babby

[simplyghosting]

Fanfic update

[arcadewizard]

in that order

[reeddraws]

It's been a while since I've worked on a sincere, longer-form landscape study. I still had to keep a time limit of one hour on this, but I still had a lot of fun focusing on this. Daily drawing 2472.

[acro-bike]

18/11/24-- requests from @vermilionknight-eclipse

[poketcg-art]

Skarmory -- Aya Kusube

[sugar-petals]

the ai takeover should've never happened and environmentally speaking we have to get rid of it basically now. yet, if there's anything positive to learn... i like how witnessing ai from afar, albeit with much horror, cured us art and writing perfectionists. because it shows us how it shouldn't be done (sterile, optimized, empty, copy-of-a-copy, inhumane 'content')

[zestyzigzagoon]

Happy WIP Wednesday! So, I won't be finishing the Johto fic by CS day after all, but it will be coming soon. I'm not going to post something unless I feel like it's good enough, and I can't get this to that standard in that timeframe. It's one thing with lower-stakes fluff like Nostalgia or The Gift of Giving- I finished both of those in less than three days, because I love them but there's really not much substance there tbh lol. But this current fic has an actual Concept™, and I want to do the best I can on it, which has been taking over a month. Right now, doing the best I can means not posting a fic with a rushed ending that won't feel worth all of the more well-polished build-up, even if I do have it mostly "done" on a technical level.

But I feel bad for pushing it back after not shutting up about it for so long lol, so here's a cute little moment for WIP Wednesday :)

[zestyzigzagoon]

ONE MORE SCENE TO FINISH!!!

[zestyzigzagoon]

through the power of repeatedly posting about it on tumblr and listening to Kiss Me Slowly by Parachute on repeat, I am GOING to finish this tonight one way or another. I mean it this time.

Edit: I won't be posting on CS day, though. Chatted with the other friends I'm writing with and we're going to push it back a bit, but I will make it up to everyone with generous WIP Wednesdays!!

[zestyzigzagoon]

ONE MORE SCENE TO FINISH!!!

[zestyzigzagoon]

Never delete anything, I'm going back to a wip I started and quickly abandoned several years ago to grab some setting descriptions that I liked so that I can put in this new fic. Recycling ♻️

[kohakhearts]

on my heart (like a tattoo)

“Is this some kind of promotion?” she asks weakly. “Buy one, get a rose free?”

“It’s for your Beautifly.” He gestures to a sign taped to the counter, which reads, Treats available for Pokémon of paying customers upon request! :)

Or, the one where May is a tattoo artist, and Drew works at the flower shop across the street.

fandom: pokemon (anime) rating: t relationship(s): may/drew word count: 10k written for: contestshipping week read it here

The first time May goes to the flower shop is on her parents’ twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. She’s in a bit of a hurry—totally not a consequence of her forgetting she and Max were planning to surprise them with a nice dinner to celebrate the occasion, which, thanks to her accepting a walk-in this evening, she has only twenty-five minutes to get to—so when she sees the sign outside that says Pokémon are permitted, she figures her best bet at finding the most suitable flowers in the quickest amount of time is by letting her Beautifly sniff them out for her.

It works like a charm, too. Beautifly guides her to a vibrant spring-coloured bouquet that looks to May like it could have been plucked straight out of a photoshoot gallery in one of her mother’s favourite home décor magazines. Even more perfectly, there’s no line at the counter at the back at all, and by the time May makes it there, she’s only down about four minutes from when she left the parlour.

Except, there’s no one there, and she wastes another minute or so craning her neck trying to spot an employee somewhere in this store. She’s never been here before, and the one time she asked Harley about it, thinking maybe they could spruce up the parlour with some flowers to balance out all the potted cacti, he waved her off completely. “I suppose it’s a nice enough place, if you like that sort of thing, but you know I have allergies, don’t you, my darling May?”

After that, she’d felt sort of bad for even entertaining the idea—she didn’t know Harley had a pollen allergy, but if he said that he’d told her so already, then he probably had and she had just unkindly not been paying attention to him—so she’d determined that even though she loved flowers herself, and wouldn’t mind spending her lunch breaks perusing the flower shop across the street and just taking it all in, she wouldn’t dare risk bringing pollen in on her clothes and causing problems for Harley.

But this time, she wouldn’t be going back to work until tomorrow anyway, so no harm, no foul. Or, that would be the case, if there were someone here to just let her pay and get going already.

Finally, after another two minutes spent impatiently tapping her foot and scripting out what excuse she’ll make to Max for being late, a voice behind her says, “If you want to pay for those, the till is actually at the front.”

She nearly jumps out of skin, whirling around to face the owner of the voice. The small smirk he’s wearing perfectly matches his amusedly aloof tone. But she doesn’t have time to be irritated about it, because he turns away from her before she can collect her thoughts well enough to be anything more than embarrassed that she was standing here wasting time at a counter that, now that she’s looking, does not even have a cash register.

read more

[zestyzigzagoon]

Happy day 1 of Contestshipping Week! ❤️ I won't be posting for every single day of the event- if I do post for it again, it'll only be for the last day, but at the very least, here's a oneshot to start things off for day one!

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works