I adore analog technology like this

Bidding is now open!

Bidding for Fandom Trumps Hate 2024 is now officially open! Go to our dreamwidth offerings blog to place your bids anytime from now until March 9th.

The stickied post contains information about how to search tags on dreamwidth if you're still browsing what to bid on. Individual posts have instructions on how to bid; simply fill out the appropriate bidding form and your bid will be logged on the bidding spreadsheet automatically. If someone has more than one auction, make sure to bid on the correct one!

Bidding will be open until March 9th at 8:00 PM EST. Best of luck placing your bids!

I am offering fanfiction for some smaller fandoms, if you want to check out my listing.

Pacing your Story (Or, How to Avoid the "Suddenly...!")

Arguably *the* most important lesson all writers need to learn, even for those who don’t give a damn about themes and motifs and a moral soap box: How your story is paced, whether it’s a comic book, a children’s chapter book, a doorstopper, a mini series, a movie, or a full-length season of TV (old school style), pacing is everything.

Pacing determines how long the story *feels* regardless of how long it actually is. It can make a 2 hour movie feel like 90 mins or double the time you’re trapped in your seat.

There’s very little I can say about pacing that hasn’t been said before, but I’m here to condense all that’s out there into a less intimidating mouthful to chew.

So: What is pacing?

Pacing is how a story flows, how quickly or slowly the creator moves through and between scenes, how long they spend on setting, narration, conversation, arguments, internal monologues, fight scenes, journey scenes. It’s also how smoothly tone transitions throughout the story. A fantasy adventure jumping around sporadically between meandering boredom, high-octane combat, humor, grief, and romance is exhausting to read, no matter how much effort you put into your characters.

Anyone who says the following is wrong:

Now let me explain why in conveniently numbered points:

1. Pacing is not about consistency, it’s about giving the right amount of time to the right pieces of your story

This is not intuitive and it takes a long time to learn. So let’s look at some examples:

2. Make every scene you write do at least two things at once

This is also tricky. Making every scene pull double duty should be left to after you’ve written the first draft, otherwise you’ll never write that first draft. Pulling double duty means that if you’re giving exposition, the scene should also reveal something about the character saying it. If you absolutely must write the boring trip from A to B, give some foreshadowing, some thoughtful insight from one of your characters, a little anecdote along the way.

Develop at least two of the following:

Doing this extremely well means your readers won’t have any idea you’re doing it until they go back and read it again. If you have two characters sitting and talking exposition at a table, and then those same two characters doing some important task with filler dialogue to break up the narrative… try combining those two scenes and see what happens.

**This is going to be incredibly difficult if you struggle with making your stories longer. I do not. I constantly need to compress my stories. **

3. Not every scene needs to be crucial to the plot, but every scene must say something

I distinguish plot from story like a square vs a rectangle. Plot is just a piece of the tale you want to tell, and some scenes exist just to be funny, or romantic, or mysterious, plot be damned.

What if you’re writing a character study with very little plot? How do you make sure your story isn’t too slow if 60% of the narrative is introspection?

4. Your entire work should not be paced exactly the same

Just like a paragraph should not be filled with sentences of all the same length and syntax. Some beats deserve more or less time than others. Unfortunately, this is unique to every single story and there is no one size fits all.

General guidelines are as follows:

When transitioning between slow to faster pacing and back again, it’s also not one size fits all. Maybe it being jarring is the point – it’s as sudden for the characters as it is for the reader. With that said, try to keep the “suddenly”s to a minimum.

5. Pacing and tone go hand in hand

This means that, generally speaking, the tone of your scene changes with the speed of the narrative. As stated above, a jarring tonal shift usually brings with it a jarring pacing shift.

A character might get in a car crash while speeding away from an abusive relationship. A character who thinks they’re safe from a pursuer might be rudely and terrifyingly proven wrong. An exhausting chase might finally relent when sanctuary is found. A quiet dinner might quickly turn romantic with a look, or confession. Someone casually cleaning up might discover evidence of a lie, a theft, an intruder and begin to panic.

--

Whatever the case may be, a narrative that is all action all the time suffers from lack of meaningful character moments. A narrative that meanders through the character drama often forgets there is a plot they’re supposed to be following.

Update on "No Fandom" tags

AO3 Tag Wranglers recently began testing processes for updating canonical tags (tags that appear in the auto-complete and the filters) that don’t belong to any particular fandom (commonly known as No Fandom tags). We have already begun implementing some of the decisions made during the earliest discussions. By the time this post is published, you may have already noticed some changes we have made.  Several canonical tags are slated to be created or renamed, and we will also be adjusting the subtag and metatag relationships between some tags to better aid Archive users in filtering.  Please keep in mind that many of these changes are large and require a lot of work to identify and attach relevant tags, so it will likely take some time to complete. We ask that you please be patient with us while we work! While we will not be detailing every change we make under the new process, we will be making periodic posts with updates on those changes we believe are most likely to prove helpful for users looking to tag or filter works with the new or revised tags and to avoid confusion as to why changes are being made. 

Just checked mine

Oh wow! They have more than one copy! That's unusual for a self-pub book. Gosh, you lot must really keep pestering your libraries for it 😅

The Queer Liberation Library has 3 copies with 106 total waiting for the Flirting with Fangs edition.

They also have the Fluff & Fangs one with the same numbers blackbrry shows.

A few of the libraries I'm connected to have the book (with more modest wait times than six months for the Flirting one), but QLL is the only one with the fluff version in ebook form, so I'm very grateful to them for that. :)

@queerliblib coming through!

PSA to my fellow Californians, the San Francisco Public Library system has both versions, 2 copies of each, both currently available, and if you have proof of CA residency anywhere in the state you can get a card with the SF library. (Sharing useful info I found out and used to my advantage when my local library refused to buy a copy.)

School of White Necromancy | Just because you're a necromancer, doesn't mean you want an army of the dead!

PDFs of this and more can be found over on at my Patreon here! My Kickstarter is live! Support it and get rad new lycanthropes!

It's time for my theme subversion post. And today it's a necromancy wizard without the whole undead thing. Not an original concept, but I can't say I found the implementations ran into while researching this concept compelling. So I made my own. This did end up similar to my old school of medicine wizard I did a bit ago, but I guess without cure wounds.

Necromancy Savant

My version of the school savant, as explored in my enchantment revision, but necromancy this time.

Necrocratic Oath

The third feature (even though it's listed second) seems fair since it's a buff and debuff. Since this subclass opposes undead specifically, it doesn't make sense for it to be able to use animate dead, create undead, finger of death, etc… But you do get to at least raise the dead and you still get to specialise in the school's damage type while fighting undead too.

Turn Undead

As per the cleric. It's expensive spell level cost for the recharge on a 2nd level feature is because a) you also get it back on a short rest and b) it's functionally the fear spell.

Disrupt the Undying

A variation of controlling the undead which was admittedly the necromancy capstone, but this is just damage ala 1D&D destroy undead or frenzying controlled undead, with the idea that the undead just destroy each other.

Bolster the Living

This just seemed like the thesis statement of the subclass, reversing evil necromancy to aid the living. Only as useful as the strength of the necrotic damage, but this will definitely turn a fight around.

Death to Life

As will just resurrecting someone for free, but it does require the person to actually die. Fun for the whole family!

And now to plug my stuff. I release homebrews weekly over on my Patreon. Anyone who pledges $1 or more per post don't have to wait a month to see them, and also help fund my being alive habit.

At the moment, they have exclusive access to the following:

I also have three classes, and a splatbook over on DriveThrueRPG to check out:

actually i think i might have to hang this on my wall holy shit

real question. how do other writers manage story pacing. is it intuitive or do you have a system

I want to write a book called “your character dies in the woods” that details all the pitfalls and dangers of being out on the road & in the wild for people without outdoors/wilderness experience bc I cannot keep reading narratives brush over life threatening conditions like nothing is happening.

I just read a book by one of my favorite authors whose plots are essentially airtight, but the MC was walking on a country road on a cold winter night and she was knocked down and fell into a drainage ditch covered in ice, broke through and got covered in icy mud and water.

Then she had a “miserable” 3 more miles to walk to the inn.

Babes she would not MAKE it to that inn.

Are there any other particularly egregious examples?

This book already exists, sort of! Or at least, it’s a biology textbook but I bought it for writing purposes:

It starts with a chapter about freezing to death, and it is without a doubt the scariest thing I’ve read in years (and I read a lot of horror fiction).

It's less textbooky and more popular writing, but also of interest may be this book: Last Breath by Peter Stark (the original subtitle was "Cautionary Tales from the Limits of Human Endurance," which I think is far more descriptive than "The Limits of Adventure").

Along with factual information, each chapter features an imaginary character who is facing the hazard in question—hypothermia, heatstroke, drowning, dehydration, etc—to illustrate what it's like to experience it. And some of these characters survive! But more of them Do Not.

The first chapter (also about freezing to death! though the character manages to get found, get warmed back up, and survive) was originally published as a piece in Outdoor magazine, so you can read it to get an idea of whether you would like the book:

vote yes if you have finished the entire book.

vote no if you have not finished the entire book.

(faq · submit a book)

Antique Georgian mourning rings (1714-1830s).

I love you dead punctuation marks.

The Spanish language would like to ask a rhetorical question.

vote yes if you have finished the entire book.

vote no if you have not finished the entire book.

(faq · submit a book)

"Fiction is not a 1:1 reflection of reality" and "the U.S. military doesn't support and finance American action movies and video games for fun" are concepts that can and should coexist

This is 100% The Thing and also why I maintain that fighting social problems from the "media portrayals" end is, at best, a pretty inefficient use of your energy. We don't need to make sure teenagers never see a questionable sex scene, we need to make sure they're getting comprehensive sex ed that includes thorough discussions of consent, so that when they see a questionable sex scene they already have good information to counter it.

And on the flip side, I'd also add that for most people who aren't employed by the government or otherwise in some position of authority, trying deliberately to write fiction with a specific message or to educate readers on a specific issue is typically a fool's errand. This is because goverments, churches etc. know more than you do about how to produce effective propaganda. For most average works of fiction, the effects (when there are any at all) can be weird and unexpected: Jaws tried to talk about capitalism and just got people killing sharks. The Jungle tried to talk about worker's rights and accidentally got the FDA made. Rosemary's Baby accidentally started the fucking Satanic Panic lmao.

If you deliberately set out saying "I'm going to write a book about Socialism Good / Queer Good / Government Bad" etc, you need to be prepared for the fact that audiences are just going to straight up miss the point, because babe you are not as skilled a manipulator as the CIA.

This. It's not "don't see the movie with the cool soldiers," it's "now that you're home, can I tell you about some bad things soldiers have done? You know, not to harsh your squee but just to balance it out?"

[A screenshot of tumblr tags reading, "#the way that fiction influences reality is a lot more subtle than 'don't read Bad Thing or you'll become the Bad Man' #propaganda DOES work. absolutely #but it isnt like. you read a fanfic where siblings kiss and now you think incest is ok in real life #its more like. you take these things as true because youve never heard or seen otherwise #its easy to accept that the us military is good and heroic when they are never depicted as anything other than good and heroic #and you havent sought out opposing views because it hasnt even occurred to you that maybe you should #but it's a lot harder to be tricked into thinking Bad Things are Good Actually when you already know they're bad #if i watch a porn where. idk. stepsister gets stuck in the dryer. i already am very confident that thats not a good situation irl #i have never seen it depicted positively outside of this very specific situation (porn) #so im not gonna get brainwashed like that"]

Finished the video! I cover a lot more things in it - measuring & marking, decorative false buttonholes, half open ones, and a couple of 18th century methods for lining them. (Accompanying blog post here.)

At 22 minutes it's shorter than I expected, there are a lot fewer gaps in between the talking than there were in my previous video.

Listen to your elders

So last week I posted abut the importance of downloading your fic. And then three days later AO3 went down for 24 hours. No one was more weirded out by this than I was. But while y’all were acting like the library at Alexandria was on fire I was reading my download fic and editing chapter eight of Buck, Rogers, and the 21st Century. And also thinking about what I could do to be helpful when the crisis was actually over.

So first off, I’m going to repeat that if you’re going to bookmark a fic, you really need to also download the fic and back it up in a safe place. I just do it automatically now and it’s a good habit to get into.

But let’s talk about some other scenarios. Last October I lost power for over a week after hurricane Ian. Apart from not having internet or A/C I did find plenty to do, I collect books so I had plenty to read, but maybe, unlike me, your favorite comfort reads aren’t sitting on a bookshelf. So let’s do something about that, shall we?

In olden times many long years ago around 1995 we printed off a lot of fic. It was mostly SOP to print a fic you planned to reread and stick it in a three ring binder. And that’s totally valid today too, but you can also make a very nice paperback with a minimum amount of skill and materials.

Let’s start with the download; Go to Ao3 and select your fic, we’ll be working with one of mine. This method works best with one shots, long fic tends to need a more complicated approach. Get yourself an HTML download

Open up the HTML download and select all then copy paste into any word processor. Set the page to landscape and two columns, then change the font to something you find easy to read, this is your book, no judgement. This is all you have to do for layout but I like to play a little bit. I move all the meta, summary, notes to the end and pick out a fun font for the title: 

No time like the present to do a quick proofread. Congratulations, you’ve just created your first typeset. On to the fun part.

Now you’re going to need some materials:  8.5x11in paper ruler one sheet of 12x12 medium card stock (60-80lb) scissors pencil pen or fine tip marker sheet of wax paper white glue two binder clips 2 heavy books or 1 brick butter knife

You’ll also need a printer, if you’re in the US there is almost a 100% chance your local library has a printer you can use if you don’t have your own. None of these materials are expensive and you can literally use cheap copy paper and Elmers glue.

Print your text block, one page per side. Fold the first page in half so that the blank side is inside and the printed side out:

use the butter knife to crease the edge. Repeat on all the sheets. When you’ve finished, stack them up with the raw edge on the left and the folded edge on the right. I used standard copy paper, because you’re only printing on one side there’s no bleed to worry about. Take the text block and line everything up. Use the binder clips to hold the raw edge in place.

Wrap the text block in the wax paper so that the raw edge and binder clips are facing out. I’m going to use my home built book press but you don’t need one, a brick or a couple of books or anything else heavy will work fine.

Once the text block is anchored down, take off he binder clips and get out the glue.

You can use a brush but you don’t need one, smear some glue on that raw edge.

Go make a margarita, watch The Mandalorian, call your mother. Don’t come back for at least an hour

In an hour smear some more glue on there and shift your brick forward so that the whole book is covered. This keeps the paper from warping. While glue part 2 is drying we’ll do the cover. Get out your 12x12 cardstock

Mark the cardstock off at 8.5 inches and cut it. Measure in 5.5 inches from the left and put in a score line with the butter knife (the back edge not the sharp edge)

Carefully fold the score line, this is your front cover. You have some options for the cover title, you can use a cutting machine like a cricut if you have one, you can print out a title on the computer and use carbon paper to transfer the text to the cardstock. I was in a mood so I just freehanded that beoch. Pencil first then in pen.

Take your text block out from under your brick. Line it up against the score mark and mark the second score on the other side of the spine

Fold the score and glue the textblock into the cover at the spine. Once the glue dries up mark the back cover with the pencil and then trim the back cover to fit with your scissors.

Voila:

I’m going to put this baby on the shelf next to the Silmarillion.

The whole process, not counting drying time, took less than an hour.

If you want to make a book of a longer fic, I recommend Renegade Publishing, they have a ton of resources for fan-binders.