THIS IS ABOUT TO CHANGE YOUR LIFE.
So, on the AO3 “Cool Stuff” FAQ, there is a link to this document under “Posting and Managing Works.”
THIS IS THE BEST DOCUMENT IN ALL OF HISTORY. Basically, it has a script in it that has a “Post to AO3″ option and it will go in and fill in ALL the HTML you need – italics, bold, paragraph breaks, you name it!
It has directions in it for how to use it, but it’s real simple. You just always chose “Make a Copy” when you start writing to make a new document that you can then re-name. Change the language to American English (or whatever language you use) and type away. Then right before you post, click the button, get all the code in there, copy, paste, AND POST.
It is literally so, so glorious and I want to tell everyone.
(Also, the AO3 Cool FAQ page has some other cool stuff too!)
Tag: writing
#little fic writer things: the unnaturally slowly dragging minutes after you post A Thing and start mentally calculating with vague manicness how long it will take anyone to finish reading the thing before you get any feedback/comments/responses and gently panicking in the meantime because What If It Actually Sucked After All
my favorite thing in dramatic romances is when the couple that’s been separated and put through hell is reunited and instead of going for like this all-tongues makeout they hug as tightly as they can and i just love it when that happens
You’re one of the very last humans surviving amid the apocalyptic wreckage of earth; your salvation comes in the form of aliens interested in conserving endangered species.
@deadcatwithaflamethrower, @obaewankenope, @maawi, @stonefreeak, @meabhair, @lilyrose225writes, @eclipsemidnight y’all in the mood for some morbid funny?
It was a fucking accident.
That’s probably all at once the best and worst thing you could have to say about our species. We were sitting on a powder keg—global warming, loose ice shelf, a supervolcano in Yellowstone, and fuck knows what political shit-throwing competition. Russia was surfing the hacker waves and North Korea was finally building successful baby-nukes. With borrowed engines. Probably from Russia.
It was a perfect storm all its own without any additions. But it all hung in the balance, and nobody really paid it much mind except in the moment every new bit of nonsense was achieved and announced.
One thing I’ll say for my species, we’re amazingly good at archival. Literally every single blasted event was reported, overreported, reviewed, turned, twisted, viewed from one point or another or yet a third, analysed, reported again, filed away for a week and then dredged back up again for a few more kicks to the corpse. Of course, when you’re trying to keep up with the vagaries of a seventy-year-old disorganised orange mop-haired husk, you have to step up your natural talent a bit, so in the last year or so it’s been something of a necessary obsession.
All this archival is a bit pointless without the internet. The old information systems—radio transmission and all that—lived the longest after our little Big Bang.
So when I say, it was an accident, that’s from back when we still had information at our fingertips. No one had the chance to twist it up yet or anything. Or at least I think so. It’s either a mark of the human condition that we’d go out in a massive flare of irony, or it’s my personal perception—either way I find the futility of it all morbidly appealing and I’m (one of?) the last ones here to tell the story, so my version is what you’re getting.
A ship wandered out into the middle of what was supposedly contested area because they were trying to outrun a storm and some freak accident knocked out their electronics—you know, like it did with those couple of planes a year ago? Shit, was it two years now? Whatever. A hostile power viewed the situation as a threat and fired off a little nuke. What’s a couple rads between friends, anyway?
Probably shouldn’t have hit Yellowstone. Fucked up their vector in a hurry, I guess.
So. For those (whoever’s left? I guess?) who don’t know, Yellowstone National Park was sitting pretty right on top of a damn supervolcano. Which is to say, there’s this absolutely giant lake of heated molten rock under a pretty thin surface. And we’d been talking for years about how the continental shelf on the West Coast of the United States was one day gonna fucking move, and we’d lose—heck, Japan and coastal states at least? And that could spark Yellowstone anyway?
Well, about that.
A knight in shining armor outsmarts the dragon and climbs to the highest tower, only the princess locked away at the top of the tower is… a lesbian.
“Oh thank god,” Thomas says, laying his helmet down. “Because I kept thinking on the climb up here that this was going to be a really awkward first meeting, and its stupid to expect you to fall in love with me just because I saved you.”
Lucinda gives him a surprised look. “You’re rather weird. Usually I get guys that demand I fall in love with them because they ‘saved’ me. Which by the way, you didn’t actually do.” She jabs a thumb towards the direction of the dragon. “She’s trained. I tell her to keep assholes away from me, but if I tell her to let you in, she won’t do anything to you.”
“Oh.” Well now he feels a bit better. “But um, the whole lesbian thing? I uh… god this is going to sound weird, but would you consider dating my sister if I brought her to you?”
Lucinda blinks, opens her mouth, and then shuts it. She finally settles on, “Is your sister cute?”
“Um, I don’t know? I mean to me she is, because she’s my sister. But um.”
“Describe her.”
“Red hair, freckles, five foot… two, I think? Likes to make dresses and pretty headdresses out of flowers, her favorite activity is scrapbooking. She’s nineteen and looking for a nice girl to settle down with.”
Lucinda admits, she sounds tempting. “Fine, I’ll meet her. But why are you acting as the go-between for your sister’s love life, exactly?”
Thomas grimaces. “Dad wants to marry her off, and she’s… kind of a lesbian too. Except dad thinks if he throws her at the right dick, she’ll suddenly want that, so… yeah.”
Lucinda cackles. “Oh my god, you climbed a tower to wingman for your sister?”
“Um, yes?”
She stands, brushes her dress off. “I like you. Show me this cute little sister of yours. We’ll take the dragon – let’s see what that old man of yours thinks when a stolen princess shows up riding a dragon wanting to marry his daughter.”
“I think he’ll have a heart attack.”
“Even better. Now let’s move. Pudding, come!”
“You named your dragon Pudding?”
“He named himself Pudding.”
You have done a good thing
“right to the good parts” prompt list
So many prompts are about the meet-cute. So this list is meant to go straight to the good parts. Please use, prompt, share, add to, etc.
- I have you shoved against the wall but now I can’t stop looking at your mouth
- We were dancing but all of a sudden it’s a slow song and we’re standing here awkwardly staring at each other
- I just told you I liked you but now I’m shy and say “never mind, forget it” and why are you looking at me like that?
- We slept in the same bed for space reasons but now we’re just waking up and there’s something about your bleary eyes and mussed hair
- It’s time to fight the boss and if I don’t tell you now, I might not live to tell you
- Congratulations! One of your dreams has finally come true. Let me give you a big hug and wow, you’re warm…
- I’ve never seen anything like the way you handled that. I’m just so moved.
- Oh, my God, I thought you were going to die. Please don’t ever scare me like that again.
- We’re hiding from the authorities and it’s very close quarters in here, I can feel your body against mine.
- Wait, my hero’s secret identity is… you? To be honest, I’d always kind of hoped…
- You’ve said you’re going to leave, but I don’t want you to go and if I don’t say something now…
- We were pretending to be lovers but I’m not pretending anymore and I have to know if you feel the same way
- This wasn’t meant to be a date, but we’ve had such a good time and now it’s 2 a.m. and I should really go home…
THIS IS AN IMPORTANT ONE! Don’t ignore this in your writing!
As a person who writes mainly emotionally strong scenes in regards to trauma and flashbacks and such, I can’t stress this enough. All the best writing I’ve read that really make you feel follows these guidelines. I’m not perfect with writing emotions, but I have improved a great deal by following these kinds of tips.
“this fic will have only ten chapters” and other lies writers tell themselves
“this is a one shot, I swear” the infamous sequel
and the third part: “i won’t start writing this, I have to finish other things first”
“I can finish writing this” the fanfic no one asked for.
“I swear, that’s really the final chapter count.”
“i’m going to get this done and post it by tomorrow”
“they’re finally going to kiss in this chapter.”
“I don’t have another long story in me right now”
(me to @sheliesshattered when I invited her in on writing Stunsails)
unusual inheritance fic prompts:
1. “you died and left me your children, even though they’re only a few years younger then me”
2. “you died and left me a haunted house”
3. “you died and left me an obscure magical object, I’m not sure what it does, and your instruction sheet just says ‘have fun storming the castle!’”
4. “you died and left me a fanatically loyal warrior order”
5. “you died and left me a bunch of money and a pile of really weird IOUs?! why did someone owe you a free body disposal. why did someone owe you two brides and a goat. why did someone owe you an island. WHY”
6. “you died and left me to repay a bunch of really weird IOUs”
7. “you died and left me a small country”
8. “you died and left me six research labs that operate in international waters and I’m kind of scared to find out why keeping them out there was a stipulation of the will”
9. “you died and left me a menagerie of animals that are supposed to be extinct? and some that aren’t supposed to be real??? where did you get unicorns. where did you get gryphons. where did you get pegasi???”
10. “you died and left me on the hook for a hereditary marriage contract”
Tomorrow is Friday. I wanna try my hand at a few of these cause inheritance is a trope I love too much in writing.
The one fandom question I’ve never seen answered well: what is the difference between a drabble and a one-shot? I feel like it’s a personal opinion – for me, a drabble is anything under 1k words, and a one-shot is anything 1k+.
Thoughts/comments/etc?
Yeah I feel the same. Maybe 1500 words would be my cutoff point though.
Yeah, 1500 is about right, too. I’m mostly going off the “once you hit a triple digit word count, it’s a one-shot,” theory.
So like 10 years ago when I started out fandom in Harry Potter, a drabble had a restricted word count. 100 word drabbles were really common. But it could be 300 or 500 words. But the challenge was the perfect drabble word count. And then a one shot was anything that wasn’t restricted by a word count.
This was common nomenclature in fandoms about 10-15 years ago. A drabble was, specifically, a 100-word story. A 200-word story was often called a double drabble. I’m not sure when the terminology changed; I still think of a drabble as being exactly 100 words.
Ah, yes. A drabble was EXACTLY 100 words. And then suddenly one day I looked up and drabbles were 1000 words. The times, they are a’changing 😉
Gonna die on this fucking hill, but a drabble isn’t even a fandom term, and it has a meaning and a history, and it’s a hundred fucking words. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drabble#History Damn it. Double damn it for 200. Ahem. (I fucking hate Jeopardy, but my mother loves it.)
Other lengths have variable definitions, depending on who you ask. SFFWA for the Nebulas are as follows:
- Short story < 7500
- Novelette 7500 – 17,500
- Novella 17500-40,000
- Novel > 40,000
And, of course, NANO uses 50k for novels.
But unlike those, which were categories put into place for the sake of classifying existing shit, a drabble is a category designed around a word count as a challenge.
Like I said: I WILL DIE ON THIS FUCKING HILL, IT IS ONE HUNDRED FUCKING WORDS AND I FEEL VERY STRONGLY ABOUT THIS.
Obvs.
::cough::
Carry on.
I’m joining Min for the Hill To Die On:
A DRABBLE IS EXACTLY ONE-HUNDRED (100) WORDS.
A DRABBLE IS ONE HUNDRED WORDS. I remember the pain of having to delete one word here and one word there to dial something down from 103 words and then getting…98. And having to scramble to fit it into EXACTLY 100 WORDS.
One. Hundred. Words.
A drabble has 100 words, by definition, from the beginning. It’s like a haiku. The strict word count is the whole point.
Ficlet is a lovely word for very short stories, and I hope more people would use it.
This hill is getting crowded; I brought some folding chairs for us Fandom Olds.
I was about to say, drabble is a measure of length, where one-shot is a measure of…
But, no, I guess one-shot is a length, too. i always thought of it more as a content measurement–one-shot means it’s done, no sequels or anything after. One-shot makes me think “complete” more than any particular length.
I do remember drabble being under 100 words, though it also makes me think “scene” more than story.
Drabble is one hundred words drabble is one hundred words drabble is one hundred words drabble is one hundred words drabble is one hundred words drabble is one hundred words HEY GUESS HOW MANY WORDS A DRABBLE HAS IF YOU GUESSED ONE HUNDRED THEN YOU! ARE! CORRECT!
Ficlet is a lovely word, and a lovely form, and does not have a strict word count unlike a drabble which is one hundred words.
A one-shot isn’t defined by word count (unlike drabble which is defined as 100 words) but by existing whole and complete in itself, outside of a series or arc, implying but I think not necessitating a relative speed in its creation. (Flash fiction is wholly defined by speed of creation, generally in response to a deadline or challenge.)
A drabble, though? That’s one hundred words.
Oh my god, we’re fighting over drabble lengths again? Fandom, never change.
I, too, choose this hill to die on. A drabble is 100 words EXACTLY. NO MORE. NO LESS.
100 WORDS
Ah, Hill. We meet again. Drabble is 100 words. Full stop.
Wow, I’m sure I saw this exact argument in 2005. That said, 100 words.
Steel Phoenix Studios 