The world of whataboutmyfries

I love it when people take fic writing seriously. I love when it's not 'Here's this dumb thing I wrote' and instead it's 'Here's this thing I put blood, sweat and tears into. Here's this thing I slaved away at, trying new writing techniques and editing over and over. Here's this dialogue that kept me awake at night. Here's this beautiful turn of phrase I thought up. Here's this thing that I wrote with vulnerability and heart, and I am proud to share it with you.'

AHHHHH I’m so normal about this 🫠

Posted with permission by waxingrunes on IG

Love that fic, but having trouble expressing that love in a comment? Worried that you're leaving the same comments over and over?

Here are 40 comment ideas!

1. Keyboard Smash. Bonus points for a mix of uppercase and lowercase. End with a brief compliment: "Love it!" "So good!" "Amazing!" "This is my everything!"
2. Emoji string. Go as long as you feel appropriate. Throw in some 🔥 for good measure.
3. Quote a phrase, sentence, or passage that resonated with you, and explain why. "I love this description." "This is such beautiful language." "This metaphor is so brilliant." "This is the perfect way to describe [character/thing]."
4. Ask the author what inspired them to write such an incredible story. (Most authors dream of these types of comments.)
5. Share how the fic made you feel as you read it. Were you scared for a character? Were you cheering on your favorite? Did that smut make you all hot and bothered?
6. Thank the author. Bonus if you can thank them for something specific: Sharing this amazing work, introducing this awesome character, creating this cool AU, etc.
7. Identify your favorite character in the fic, and explain why they're your favorite.
8. Any indication that you're so in love with a work you literally want to eat it. My personal favorite that I've received is "I want to shove this in my mouth like an entire oreo," but "I want to print this out and stuff it in my face" and "This fic is like an amazing five-course meal, every bite is delicious!" are also winners.
9. For a multi-chapter fic, any version of "Wow, this keeps getting better and better!" This can really help keep an author motivated, especially if they've been focused on one longfic for a while. Longfics tend to have diminishing engagement over time, so commenting on later chapters is especially meaningful.
10. Tell the author that something in their fic is your "emotional support [thing]." Bob is my emotional support character, this is my emotional support fic, etc.

Keep reading

so embarrassing when i forget im checking someone's blog and i start scrolling through and liking and reblogging shit as if it's just my dash. it feels like wandering into someone else's apartment and not noticing and making myself lunch

reblog if i can wander into your apartment (blog) and make myself lunch (like and reblog as if it's my dash)

here’s weirder asks

1. who is/are your comfort character(s)?
2. lighter or matches?
3. do you leave the window open at night?
4. which cryptyd being do you believe in?
5. what color are your eyes?
6. why did you do that?
7. hair-ties or scrunchies?
8. how many water bottles are in your room right now?
9. which do you prefer, hot coffee or cold coffee?
10. would you slaughter the rich?
11. favorite extracurricular activity?
12. what kind of day is it?
13. when was the last time you ate?
14. do you love the smell of earth after it rains?
15. are you a parent? (all answers qualify)
16. can you drive?
17. are you farsighted or nearsighted?
18. what hair products do you use?
19. imagine we’re at a sleepover, would you paint my nails?
20. do you say soda or pop?
21. something you’ve kept since childhood?
22. what type of person are you?
23. how do you feel about chilly weather?
24. if we were together on a rooftop, what would we be doing?
25. perfume/body spray or lotion?
26. a scenario that you’ve replayed multiple times?
27. about how many hours of sleep did you get?
28. do you wear a mask?
29. how do you like your shower water?
30. is there dishes in your room?
31. what type of music keeps you grounded?
32. do you have a favorite towel?
33. the last adventure you’ve been on?
34. is there a song you know every word to by heart?
35. what’s your timezone?
36. how many times have you changed your url?
37. someone in your life, other than a relative, you’ve known for 10+ years?
38. a soap bar that smells good?
39. do you use lip balm?
40. did you have any snacks today?
41. how do you take your coffee?
42. an app you frequently use besides this godforsaken site?
43. what’s your take on spicy foods?
44. you get a free pass to kill anyone, who is it?
45. can you remember what happened yesterday?
46. favorite holiday film?
47. what was the last message you sent?
48. when did you first try an alcohol beverage?
49. can you skip rocks?
50. can i tag you in random stuff?

please !!

Got me almost pissing my pants everytime🧍‍♀️

Scruffy prof harry! + tiny Draco in the corner LMAO

When the author deletes your favorite fanfic:

Gather around, children. I’m about to tell you a story of ye olde fandom. (Real life fandom friends, I’m sorry. You’ve heard this story a thousand times, I know.)

Long before Disney bought Star Wars, long before the new trilogy, before even the prequels, and themselves predating the “remastered” versions of the original trilogy, Star Wars experienced it’s second renaissance in novel form. And comic book form. Skim the pages of the dozens upon dozens of Expanded Universe (”EU”) novels and you’ll find lots of foundations for the things you see on screen these days. Ben Solo, for sure, has his origins there. 

But it was also a different era for the fandom. The 90′s saw the transition from fanzine culture to online fan fiction archives. The programming ability and computing power you needed to make a fan fiction archive that the authors could edit themselves did not yet exist in an accessible way. Series based archives popped up, mostly hand curated by webmasters posting .txt files of chapters and stories that they’d received from authors via email. Or usenet. Or mailinglists. I spent many of my teen years on Gossamer, the X-Files archive, and Fanfix.com, my favorite Star Wars archive. I remember haunting a Babylon 5 archive at the time, too, but it’s lost to history. 

I read everything. Everything. But, by far my favorite fan fiction of all time was, and I will always remember this, “As Simple and as Complicated as All That” by Xia Sang Li. It was epic. Four novels. NOVELS. Dozens of chapters. Hundreds and hundreds of pages. It follows Luke Skywalker’s decision to finally throw caution to the wind and fall into bed, and in love, with Mara Jade. Written in the sweet spot after her character was introduced and explored, but before permission was given to the licensed authors to marry Luke off, it was an amazing indulgence. And, it was epic in scale and scope. The great plot twist in book one was that, spoiler alert, when Gaeriel Captison died, leaving Luke to look after her orphaned daughter, she didn’t tell the whole story. You see, Luke and Mara had indulged each other before, had a secret love child, and this brief period of time was erased or minimized in their memories. Slowly, the two come to realize, through their haze of lust and passion, that something is conspiring to keep them apart, and that this little girl isn’t who she seemed. Themes of family, and duty, and passion, and trauma. Force visions, original characters, and sex sex sex. It was amazing. 

Epic right??? Right?? Wanna read it?? 

Originally posted by gothamfox

It’s impossible. The Fanfix.com archive zipped the textfiles, so the Wayback Machine hasn’t archived them. The Geocities page went down before the Geocities archive was published after its closure. And, the original author’s blog, not updated in a decade, features only a few chapters of a rewrite, an AU of her original epic. 

But it’s not dead.

Starting in 1998, my teenage self printed the whole fucking epic. I did one chapter at a time. It took more than a year. I had it all saved, too, on a 3 ½ inch floppy that got destroyed. Beyond the author’s own hard drive somewhere on this green earth, I think this might be the only copy. 

Every few years, when nostalgia overtakes me, I reread it, from front to back. The gender politics are very different. The interpretation of Luke, too, vastly different from modern fandom’s take. Sometimes I wish I could find the author, buy her dinner, and tell her how important her work was to me. But, that’s probably impossible. Sometimes I think about re-digitizing it and, like a different kind of pirate, putting it back into circulation. But, that’s just a wish. A whimsical dream. The notebook is at least 3 inches thick, with front to back printed pages of text. It would take… years. Certainly it took years to write. But, it was part of the floating world of fandom. And, it faded away. Stuff like this should never fade away. 

Fan fic authors… I implore you. Never delete your work. 

You can’t know the impact you make. You might think it not good, embarrassing, or irrelevant. It’s not. Not to someone. Not to me. 

Seriously. You have no idea how many fanfics I had wanted to print and bind just so that I can keep it in my personal library to read. Some fics are so damn GOOD that they deserve to exist binded as a physical copy. Save them please!!! All fics matter to someone

PUT THAT BOOK IN A SAFE BOX OR A MUSEUM (is there a fandom museum? we should make one)

It’s not quite a museum, but there is the Fan Culture Preservation Project, which is a join venture between the OTW and the Special Collections department at the University of Iowa Libraries. It’s a place to preserve hard copies of fanworks and fandom memorabilia. 

(Though it seems likely that @mizunocaitlin would like to keep a beloved fanfic.)

Dear fic readers: Save it before you lose it!

authors have pleanty of reason to delete their shit, sad as it is, but you can still have it!! do what that person did, use https://www.lulu.com/ like i did for my faves stuff (tho already archived on gdrive by someone else), but find a way to PRINT IT OUT if you love it so much. dont just rely on digital copies because shit happens.

This is my current printed library of fanfics. This way works best for fanfics up to 20000 words, but I’m learning basic bookbinding for the longer ones (an experiment of that can be seen in the right side of the picture - “This, You Protect” by Owlet), because I LOVE HOLDING THEM WHEN I READ THEM and also, what will I read if the power goes down? Exactly.

@jambonsama thought you would like that

Thanks, I do !

If someone could tag that person who did the gorgeous binding of @senlinyu‘s magnificent Manacled… I mean the book is awesome, and the book binding ? Gives it justice. Also I think that the person who did the binding  has made / is making other bindings? Maybe? I can’t quite remember?

@armoredsuperheavy might be an interesting read for you

I feel so vindicated in seeing this post, and knowing I’m not the only one who has “probably-the-only-extant-copy” fanfics from the late 90s in binders.

I took probably the most ridiculous and difficult route, hand bookbinding. Here’s an example of an earlier-era fic I’ve bound for archival purposes.

And some Bookbinding resources if anyone wants to join in the efforts!  Rock on, fanfic hamsters!

as an archivist (a real one!) and a fanfic author, this post speaks so hard to me. SAVE YOUR STUFF, AUTHORS

In high school my best friend and I were known as the book printers. At the time neither of us had access to the internet beyond school so we did the only thing that made sense, printed everything. We would spend as much time as we could after school, usually on fridays, huddled around the library computers printing fics we wanted to read. The librarians didn’t mind, one of them actually thought it was charming and christened us her book printers.

I owe so much to authors, the early ones who showed me that it was ok to think up grand worlds and fill them with my favorite characters as well as characters of my own creation, and especially the new authors who quickly became my found family and have taught me that finding yourself through your writing is perfectly acceptable, and losing yourself to an indulgent plot line is fine too.

If I’ve learned anything in the decades since I offered to pay the school for the gross amount of paper we used, it’s that you should never forget your roots, and always remember you might just be the one creating fertile grounds for others to put down roots of their own.

If you ever have the chance, do it, print the pages and bind them. The story already holds a special place in your heart, isn’t it only fair that you hold it close as well?

i’ve been contacted a few times by people who have bound my fanfic into print: it never stops being a delight and an honor to see that some stuff i wrote for online consumption meant enough to someone that they wanted to keep it in their actual home, on their actual bookshelf.

Hey, if you guys are trying to digitize fics from printouts, don’t type them by hand! Use a program like FreeOCR, it can read the pages if you scan them and make them into PDFs. All you have to do is lightly edit it for typos. It’s free and safe!

I had two copies of my J2 AU fic The Doors of Time printed through lulu.com. One is on my shelf, the other I sent to my artist and best fandom friend, winchestergirl, in Australia. Unfortunately it got lost on the way. 😕 It would be fun to do this to a few of my other longer fic, like Gunpoint.

Hi loves! To add some (pumpkin) spice to this year’s Fic-O-Ween, one lucky participant will win this fabulous prize—an enamel pin that shares a name with our favorite hockey au!

The fest runs from October 19-31. After the fest is over, a winner will be randomly drawn (must be 18 or older and be comfortable DMing me a mailing address for the prize. You do not have to live in the US!).

All you have to do is create something for at least one day of the fest and tag @noots-fic-fests to be entered. Drawing will take place sometime in November. Happy Fic-O-Ween, y’all! 👻

PRIZE!!! 🏆

Harry Yes

Also Draco gifted Harry the little chain for his glasses and Harry loves it you cannot convince me otherwise its definitely warded and charmed and when he moves it chimes softly just like Draco's magic.

It’s like this

Reversed version so you and your mutuals can bonk back and forth.

wait, hold on

I mean, it probably goes without saying, but the Found Family trope is so popular because so very many people are so terribly, terribly lonely

I adore the friends I do have immensely but god it would be nice to have like five people living nearby who I could call on for help or to hang out at any given moment

it’s also a very hopeful narrative. Found Family imparts this idea that you don’t have to start out life with a family, or with roots that go all the way down a family tree. That you’re not destined to be alone and without love simply because who you were born to didn’t make the cut. Found family resolutely insists that there is always a future, always a possibility for more, and that no matter how much time it takes to find them, they could always still be out there.

It’s about resolving loneliness, but it’s also about promising that you can find that relief later. It doesn’t have to be now, it doesn’t have to be when you’re little, it can be whenever it’s time.

For those of us without families in the traditional sense, or with families that had to be abandoned for any number of reasons, or even families that had to separate for long amounts of time, found family is proof that we didn’t miss out on love.

And I think when the world seems the darkest, it makes sense that a narrative about hope for the future and always having love on the horizon is popular. <3

It is also not insignificant to the found family trope that it isn’t just you looking for a family. They’re looking for you back, they want a family too (or sometimes they don’t want it until they have it and then they won’t give it up for anything and that’s good too). They are lonely and want what you want. There’s just something nice about the thought that you’re not alone even when you haven’t found them, that you’re not the only one looking, the responsibility does not fall squarely on your shoulders alone, and that maybe it will find you instead.

How to make characters that start a story off dead feel real.

• Name them- this is the bare minimum
• Happy memories- what did this person mean to those they had relationships with? These little details contextualize your living characters and who they are as people.
• Identity- who was this person outside of these relationships?
• Agency- give them a last action related, but more personal simply dying. For example, taking a bullet, giving one last piece of advise, leaving a scar on their killer's face, telling a joke, or even just figuring out a plot to kill them and doing something about.

In conclusion, characters who start a story off dead should mean something besides making a reader's feel sympathy for another character. Death is a big deal, and neglecting this reality can mess with a reader's suspension of disbelief, even for characters the reader will never truly meet. Having bits and pieces of a dead character feels more real because it mimics that experience of getting to know a person through their family and friends or reading a diary of a person long dead.