Thunk

I'm getting so sick of major female characters in historical media being incredibly feisty, outspoken and public defenders of women's rights with little to no realistic repercussions. Yes it feels like pandering, yes it's unrealistic and takes me out of the story, yes the dialogue almost always rings false - but beyond all that I think it does such a disservice to the women who lived during those periods. I'm not embarrassed of the women in history who didn't use every chance they had to Stick It To The Man. I'm not ashamed of women who were resigned to or enjoyed their lot in life. They weren't letting the side down by not having and representing modern gender ideals. It says a lot about how you view average ordinary women if the idea of one of your main characters behaving like one makes them seem lame and uninteresting to you.

Weather camera self portraits (2012— )

Tatu Gustafsson

eclipse

The treatment of cardiac arrest (1958) [Wellcome Library on Youtube]

I’m noticing an increase in new fic writers on AO3 who…uh…mayy not know how to format their fics correctly..so here is a quick and VERY important tip

Using a random fic of mine as example..

The left example: ✅✅✅

The right example: ❌❌❌

Idk how many times I’ve read a good fic summary and been so excited to read before clicking on it and being met with an ugly wall of text. When I see a huge text brick with zero full line breaks my eyes blur and I just siiiigh bc either I click out immediately or I grin and bear it…it’s insufferable!

If a new character speaks, you need a line break. If you notice a paragraph is becoming too large, go ahead and make a line break and/or maybe reconfigure the paragraph to flow better. I’m not a pro writer or even a huge fic writer but…please…ty…

This is a good thing to keep in mind! It is often and unfortunate that a really good fic doesn’t get love because its formatting makes it too difficult to read!

Hey pro tip if this isn't your fault, if you have typed it into a word processor, usually a mobile one, with the spaces and it stripped them, the fastest way I know of to fix it on Android is to use Gboard and paste it from here

Also you can investigate the rich text option on the AO3 interface, but I don't actually use it

It is really annoying when people don't add breaks or add breaks that are much too large, but there has been a problem for a while of people not meaning to.

If you use Google Docs, the AO3 formatting script is a lifesaver. I started using it ages ago and have not looked back since. (Linking to a Reddit post because I'm not going to send you direct to a random Google Doc. You'll get occasional warnings from Google about whether you really want to let it read your shit in GDocs, but it's safe.)

Make a copy and put it in your own GDrive. When you're ready to upload, paste all that shit into the doc and ask it to format the text for you. It handles everything I've thrown at it, including blockquotes and strikethroughs.

If for some reason you need to de-HTML your text, it will do that too!

Please note that things get particularly weird when people confuse line breaks and paragraph breaks.

In your word processor, whether google docs or anything else, if you hold shift while you hit the enter key, you get a line break. This puts you on the next line but does not put a space between the paragraphs. Useful for poetry or lyrics, LOUSY for easy formatting of text.

If you simply hit enter but don't hold the shift button at the same time, you get a paragraph break.

Now, some sites will automatically turn line breaks into paragraph breaks, and some sites will not. Sometimes you get line breaks in notes sections being converted to paragraph breaks while line breaks in the story are not.

Sometimes to compensate, people will use two line breaks in place of one paragraph break. This is a Bad Habit to get into.

AO3 naturally puts a space after every paragraph break in the body of a story. It does not do that after line breaks. This is normal and expected behavior, because there is a style convention for online materials to have space between paragraphs (AND NO INDENTED FIRST LINE) because things are easiest to read that way, and online, page real estate isn't an issue.

In print, to distinguish between paragraphs, there are NOT generally extra spaces between them in prose, just indented first lines. This saves paper and preserves readability. You DO need to indent first lines when you are laying out large blocks of text for print. But extra spacing should be preserved for scene breaks, for example.

IF you get in the habit of using paragraph breaks in your word processor, and only one per paragraph, it will help in two ways.

I set up a blank doc years ago for my own use formatted roughly the way AO3 does things, fonts, line spacing, style settings, all of it, and then set that as my google docs default. Which gets me a lot closer to 'what you see is what you get' (wysiwyg, pronounced whizzy-wig) and a lot less likely to reflexively double paragraph. Now if I hit a paragraph and it's not properly spaced, wherever I am, I go check my settings. The exception is facebook, where often hitting enter will post and using double line breaks is the only way to do multiple paragraphs reasonably, because facebook.

sorry i can't hang later i have to swallow my own spit wrongly on accident and choke for a while

in paris you gotta sleep with one eye open

+ bonus

Community – 2.02: Accounting For Lawyers