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#fanfiction – @she5los on Tumblr
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Cupfull of cheer

@she5los / she5los.tumblr.com

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thelibrarina

Okay, buckle up buckaroos, because today I met an honest-to-goodness cryptid.

I was out running errands and I made a stop at Intimate Books (…for a friend), and on my way out I realized that the bookshop next door was open.

This bookshop has existed for more than a hundred years, and in all my life it has NEVER BEEN OPEN. I mean, I assume it has to be open sometimes, but never at any normal, reasonable hour. Everyone says it’s a front for the mob or something.

So what do you do when the weird mafia bookshop is open? You go the fuck inside.

The first thing I noticed was the smell. You know that smell when you accidentally leave your towel on the bathroom floor all day and you come back to that mildew funk? The shop smelled like that times a thousand. I expected to see stuff growing on the walls, but the books were pristine. We’re talking first editions, rare editions, weird Bibles and books inscribed to really famous dead people. Librarians would weep for the chance to accession this place. In the first two minutes I found a signed copy of The Crucible and what I think was a first edition of Blake’s Book of Thel.

Then a clerk showed up out of nowhere—honestly nowhere. He looked EXACTLY like a bookseller should look, kind of fluffy and bewildered and really, really gay.

“Are you lost?” was the first thing he said to me.

“Nope. Just browsing, thanks.”

“Browsing, I see. Erm. How do you feel about snakes?” he asked. And without waiting for me to answer, he just walked away and vanished around a shelf.

I figured it was a metaphor, or a code phrase for the mafia. Until I turned a corner like ten minutes later and found a little reading nook. It was really pretty, although I feel like that particular window should have been on an interior wall? Anyway, curled up in an armchair in a patch of sunlight was the biggest fuck-off black snake I have ever seen.

Like, I don’t mind snakes in general. But in their normal context, right? Outside. On the ground. Not six feet long and sitting on a threadbare velvet armchair like it owns the place.

I was about to turn around and leave, but I saw a gorgeous first-edition copy of Leaves of Grass on a shelf, a little too close to the snake for comfort. But I had never needed anything so badly in my life.

So I went back to the counter to buy it, but the clerk was nowhere to be found.

While I was waiting, I noticed a collection of pictures hanging on the wall behind the counter, dating back to the very dawn of photography. A couple were of this rock-star looking guy from the 70s that I should probably have recognized, but there were authors and landscapes and stuff, too. There was even an old tintype portrait of Oscar freaking Wilde, sitting in this very shop with a guy that I would ACTUALLY SWEAR was the clerk from before. Like, I know my family all has the same nose, but this guy had the same everything.

After approximately one year of waiting, the clerk came back out to the desk. By now I’ve realized that he’s too bad at his job to be anything but the owner of the shop.

“I saw your snake,” I told him.

“Did you? Was he behaving himself?”

“He was sleeping.”

“Yes, he enjoys that.”

“Does he just stay out in the open like that? What if he gets out?”

He shrugged and smiled. “He always comes home again, the dear boy.”

Right, a homing snake. That’s totally normal.

Then he cleared his throat and asked, in a weirdly reluctant voice, if I was going to buy the Whitman.

“Yes, please,” I told him. “I saw it on a shelf by the snake, and it was just too tempting.”

He sighed. “Oh, yes, I expect it was.”

When I started to hand him my card, he went all fluttery and said that they didn’t take cards.

All right, fine. I had some cash on me, but I told him that he’d sell a lot more books if he got a Square or something.

He got this scandalized look on his face and went, “Why would I want to do that?”

Oookay. I handed over the cash and he popped open the ancient till and started making change.

In shillings. Shillings! I swear to god I saw Queen Anne’s face on one of them. The silver value of the coins was probably as much as I paid for the book.

But I had to have proof that this happened—at that point, all I had was a book in a plain brown wrapper, not appreciably different from what I bought next door. So I asked him for a receipt.

He looked delighted and wrote one up for me.

By hand.

With a fountain pen.

And that’s the story of how I met a bookseller cryptid and his pet snake.

Hey, OP, I love you.

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Hey uhhhh guess who disappeared for a few months and is back at you with a fic?

"In a lot of ways, [the abandoned hallway in the Fortezza] reminded me of my old wedding gown: it was dusty, smelled like a lot of dreams had probably died in it, and had been pushed off into a dark corner somewhere in hopes that everyone would just forget the damn thing had ever happened."

Or, Juno Steel meets one of the few people he punches on sight and Peter Nureyev helps him through the ensuing breakdown.

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muja-bunny

Published erotica: terribly written, costs money

Fanfiction on ao3: Free, isn’t affaid TO JUST USE THE WORD ‘COCK’ FFS

“His genitals, his privates, his hot length, his trobing rod, his magic meat stick-”

Me, in tears: Just say cock

published erotica: the parts that aren’t purple prose about vanilla sex are occupied by dithering and made up problems

fanfiction on ao3: the parts that aren’t sharp, clear prose about scorching kinky sex are occupied by tightly plotted suspense and slam-bang action

published erotica: not interested in the 99% of the market that’s heterosexual? that’s fine, we also have tender white middle class lesbians and slutty white middle class gay men!

fanfiction on ao3: one trans partner? both partners trans? genderswaps? how about a loving long-term threesome that does heist capers? we’ve got non-gendered angels, hermaphroditic aliens – some of whom lay eggs, if you’re into that – oh, and have i mentioned the robots

published erotica: there, i put in a vampire, i’m such a genre rebel

fanfiction on ao3: i sent the avengers to hogwarts with the winchester brothers, i fear nothing on earth or heaven and only one thing in hell which is that my laptop will overheat in the fires of abaddon so i’ll have to write the sequel longhand

It’s finally happened, this post has popped up on my dash

Fanfiction for the freaking win :D

HECK

YES :D

🙌❤️🙌

Fan fiction yay!

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kedreeva

When I say “writers don’t want your unsolicited criticism” and “leaving unsolicited criticism on fanfiction hurts writers” THIS is what I mean.

This isn’t even all of them, this is just from a FEW posts on the subject. Read through these, and then look me in the eyes and say you’re ~helping writers~ by leaving that criticizing comment on someone’s fic when they didn’t ask you to.

You’re hurting or, at best, annoying us. You’re hurting fandom.

You’re not helping us.

Here is what good criticism looks like:

1) Start with something you loved!

You can even stop here, because positive feedback is still constructive criticism.

2) Ask questions that you wish the Author had asked themself

Was there anything that you wish had been explained or developed more? What direction do you wish the Author had taken? Let the author know if there were any places you got confused.

3) Ask the author if they had any specific concerns, then address them.

Maybe the Author stressed over a certain paragraph being too boring. Either offer suggestions, or put their fears to rest.

4) End with something else you liked!

If you are reviewing a hard copy of someone’s work, put lil hearts by the phrases that made you smile!

-Don’t correct spelling or grammar unless you are not able to understand a sentence/paragraph/the whole story because of it. Grammar and spelling will improve naturally as a reader/writer matures, and that is not your job. You are not the grammar police. Anyone who self-proclaims themselves as one needs to grow uo.

-Don’t say anything about who the author is as a person. Feedback should just be a product of the interaction between reader+work.

My life as a writer began when an English teacher decided to take my sappy teenage work seriously. Writing is a journey of constant improvement. The best feedback you can give is: “I’m proud of you.”

Stop this. Stop it.

You’re obviously jumping into an argument with no idea of the history of it , but this is the exact behavior I’m talking about that’s damaging.

Fandom isn’t a writing class. We are not in English 101 with you. You’re not our teacher, and we’re not students that you need to correct by giving us unsolicited criticism. You’re not even my beta reader. You’re Joe Schmoe on the internet and we don’t want your unsolicited criticism on how to improve.

Listen, I know you mean well, but please take a moment and look at what you just did. You looked at a hundred comments from a hundred people saying “please stop doing this behavior, it’s hurting us” and said “okay, but here’s how to do this behavior anyway.”

No! The point is stop doing it. YOU are the one hurting us.

My life as a writer began when an English teacher decided to take my sappy teenage work seriously. Writing is a journey of constant improvement.

I mean, listen.

I started writing fanfiction at eleven–and you can imagine how terrible that was–which my dad found and read.

Despite the fact that it was terrible, thinly veiled Mary Sue self-insert, my dad took it seriously. He told me that it was amazing and imaginative and he never would’ve thought to do the thing I did in that one story, etc, etc.

It was terrible writing, but he only ever encouraged me to write more. He only ever gave me compliments.

You’re right, writing is a journey of constant improvement, but nowhere is it written that that journey must be made on a road where random passersby throw rotten fruit at you under the guise of helping you.

I am the writer I am today not because my dad criticized my work or because of snotty, holier-than-thou comments on the internet. I’m the writer I am today because I’ve been practicing for over fifteen years.

Year after year, fic after fic, fandom after fandom, I have gotten consistently better at crafting stories and it’s not because of so-called “constructive criticisms” on fanfiction that I’m already done writing.

It’s because I got encouragement when I needed it and silence when I needed that.

I’m not saying that everyone’s story is mine or that people even grow the way I do and I’m not saying that criticism is never warranted.

I’m saying that constructive criticism is a beta’s job and that it useless after the fact, which is when the author gets your comment–after the story is posted, after it is done being written–and that are there enough writers out there that DO learn and grow just by practicing that perhaps you should be mindful of what you comment on a fic.

That is literally the entire argument.

How many screenshots of messages and tags have to be posted before people get that they’re hurting writers instead of helping them?

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The newest chapter is up!  Gladio tries to figure out how to help Noctis recover after the marilith attack, even though he’s only twelve.

The chapters are mostly stand-alone, and this one isn’t an exception, but I think it’s improved by reading the previous chapter.

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Finally got this up!  I was going to edit it Sunday evening, when I finally had a few minutes to myself... and then I got a call that my grandma was going to the emergency room, and I haven’t had any spare time since.  (She’s fine, and went home yesterday.)

Enormous shoutout to @brosura for the hc that became the premise for the first half of this chapter.

This chapter is about that Teenage Feel when you’re somewhere in between being a child and an adult.

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reblogged

If your fic is 1000 words long, you can’t tag it slow burn. It’s not slow burn. That is a matchstick. And this is my personal bias here but if those motherfuckers you’re writing experience significant forward momentum in their relationship in under 5k words, then that is just a regular old burn. Slow burn should be borderline intolerable and a mistake to start reading at 2 in the morning.

If the fic doesn’t have multiple scenes where two people almost kiss but then don’t because of a contrived interruption that they are both grateful for and angry about, until the desperate reader is forced every other paragraph to mutter, “this is fucking ridiculous, this is bullshit, I’m so fucking mad, please update sooooooooooon,” then it isn’t a slow burn. It is a romance and that is a lovely thing but. Slow burns should feel like being set on fire unto your death but the tinder is people not kissing and the spark is people who don’t admit they love each other and the whole thing is. You know. Slow.

I once read a slow burn where the main pairing didn’t even speak to each other ontil 80k words in

This is the funniest fucking thing I’ve ever read and the only true slow burn fic

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seladorie

Fic: A Royal Soulmate, Chapter 17 Update

read here on AO3! 

here’s a teaser for this chapter~

ko-fi / patreon and support by reblogging <3

Prompto’s shouts, his accusations, ring in Noctis’ ears as he walks the halls and follow him down the hall like a specter. The words sting; neither Ignis nor Gladio would ever speak to him that way. They’ve been angry at each other. They’ve all been angry. But no one has ever been so… unrestrained in their fury before. Ignis and Gladio always hold themselves back, never forgetting that their responsibilities include managing Noctis’ behavior. Which means, of course, managing themselves first and foremost.

Noctis doesn’t like to think of himself as coddled. He’s not stupid enough to think that he’s not, however. There’s a reason he can barely connect with people his age who aren’t already in his life, and the problem isn’t other people.

Just like, right now, the problem isn’t Prompto. Noctis went into the room, already gearing for a fight, and let himself explode when he found Ulric there. And then he didn’t have a leg to stand on when Prompto viciously and righteously screamed back.

Noctis’ grandfather, King Mors, was known for his habit of silencing those who opposed him. Commoners, servants, friends, family–even his soulmate, if the pointed silences were right. Mors hadn’t cared to know if he had wronged someone, and would force them into silence if the complainant made a fuss.

He doesn’t want to be like that. Noctis usually doesn’t think he has the capability of being so. It’s a comforting thought.

Less comforting than thinking how easy it would be to ignore Prompto’s accusations. To continue to blame him, rather than take any responsibility.

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