I had to make a Wattpad account to read something and decided to try out posting something, because I needed a distraction(*). It's a site for posting fiction, with a lot of teenagers writing self insert RPF romances. I settled on Wedding Is Destiny since Pride and Prejudice femslash never goes out of style and it can just sit there to be stumbled upon whenever someone happens to want some.

You can post original stories and charge money for them, and there's also some kinda cute features for adding character notes and stuff to help with the writing process. It's very clean and brightly coloured, posting stories feels easy and light which I can see people finding encouraging.

It's moderately easy to use, certainly compared to fanfiction.net, though there didn't seem to be a html option so I cut and pasted the Rich Text from the AO3. It also has WAY less info on each story than Fanfiction.net or AO3, making finding stories nearly as opaque as searching tumblr tags. There's probably tricks to it I'm missing, though.

If you're curious, here's the three versions: Ao3, Fanfiction.net, Wattpad.

I have had ZERO VIEWS so far lol. Everyone seems to do covers there so I chucked one together haphazardly. As you can see, graphic design really isn't my passion, but eh, noone's going to read it anyway.

I don't know if I'll bother cross posting anything else. My main motivation is to help anyone thinking "I wish someone had written X" and am not sure what I write is what people there are likely to be looking for. I've written a few tropey romances but not for fandoms anyone's much into these days, especially not young people. I was curious to know what it was like to post to, and now I know!

(*)From my toilet breaking and me needing to wrangle a plumber. Yes, great timing, amiright? It's all fixed now, but it was good to have something mindless to do like cutting and pasting chapters.

DeviantArt have changed their setup and I can't find the preview images, if they're even still a thing. I'm too lazy to make my own, so it's just text links today!

One fic for Interviews with Monster Girls, original art, and fanart for Labyrinth, Heaven Official's Blessing and Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation
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I wrote a fic!

Internal Controls and Cost Analysis (3086 words) by sqbr
Fandom: XOXO Droplets (Video Game)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Jeremy King/Main Character | JB (XOXO Droplets)
Characters: Jeremy King
Summary: Post-canon fluff about being miserable and hating everything.

This is theoretically the first chapter in a longer Pran/Jeremy/JB fic, but I don't know if I'll end up writing the rest of it, and I think it works ok as a little stand alone character piece.

Normally I don't post WIPs unless I'm sure they're as done as they're going to be, but I wanted to talk about something new I did in this one: using a work skin! I followed this tutorial on replicating iOS style messages, if you're not interested in reading the fic just scroll down until you hit blocks of colour to see how it looks.

It was pretty straightforward html, so now that I have Tasted The Joy Of CSS I may experiment with some of the other fun looking styles they have tutorials for.

Or maybe I'll redo all my fanart as CSS, at least that way it would be guaranteed not to go down...

My fics just keep getting longer and longer and it takes SO LONG TO FINISH THEM. The one I'm working on right now is currently at 72K and 18 chapters, with the next chapter basically written and 6K long, and at least another two chapters to come after that. I've been working on it since DECEMBER LAST YEAR.

And in some ways it's good! I'm able to explore more complex character dynamics and narrative arcs! (Though remind me to never write an ot6 again, it's like solving a multidimensional algebra problem) I like reading 50K+ fic quite a lot, and it's nice to have my own to go back to. And I like this fic and what it's doing!

But GOD I also want it to be DONE so I can WRITE ABOUT SOMETHING OTHER THAN THIS ONE GROUP OF TEENAGERS ANGSTING ABOUT THEIR LOVE LIVES. I mean noone's stopping me from writing something else but I am a very one-foot-in-front-of-the-other sort of writer and this is the path I'm on right now.

Hmm, I think I already made a post about this. Probably because I've been feeling this way for SEVEN MONTHS. And God knows how long the next fic will be. I feel like drawing a graph. Like, I don't choose how long my stories will be, I just start them and keep going until they're done, and that length just keeps growing and I don't know when it's going to stop.

You know what, I AM drawing a graph. Look at this! It's ridiculous! NINE YEARS of mostly writing 300-2000 word stories with the odd 15K, and suddenly from the end of 2017 it's 30K, 50K, 80K. WHERE WILL IT END.



(Disclaimer: I removed a 50K outlier from 2016 since it was a combination of multiple existing stories, and took me 8 years to write)

And yes, moonvoice, I know your fics are like A MILLION WORDS LONG, but you write faster than me :P Wait, we started dating at the end of 2017. IT'S CONTAGIOUS.

It was interesting looking back on my old fics. While I've been writing the odd 10K+ fic since like 2010, I used to write a lot of much shorter fic, and anything over 1000 words felt substantial. But I haven't written anything under 1000 words since the middle of 2016. I kind of miss writing little drabble-y fic! Maybe I should force myself to get back in the habit.

Also this fic is pretty niche, so I'd complain about it limiting how much feedback I get, except (a) I've still managed to be behind on replying to my comments as it is, and (b) The other ideas I've been getting have been like a femslash crossover ship based on two different 19th century novels(*), so I'm not sure it'd make much difference.

Ahh, I'll feel better when remixrevival opens in a week and a bit. My art host has been being flaky so I'm a bit worried it'll fall over, but don't really have a better option so I'm just biting my nails. Plus of course my brain is convinced EVERYONE WILL HATE IT even though my art's always at least moderately well received. Once that's crossed off I'll feel more free to sketch silly little ideas. Though the way things are going, I'll be inspired to draw a multi-page comic epic...

...huuh via a misaimed spellcheck I just realised that 'relieved' and 'received' swap their i and e. Nice work, English.

(*)Lucy from Dracula and Daisy from Daisy Miller. THEY'D BE SO GOOD TOGETHER. AND SMOOCH CUTE DUDES AND EACH OTHER AND NOT DIE.

Just got the following incredibly dodgy message on Fanfiction.net
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So I wrote an honest to goodness EIGHTY FIVE THOUSAND WORD novel-length fic over a period of *checks* a month and a half? Maybe two months, I think I waited a little after I'd written the first two chapters before posting. It was like this intense fever dream, I was just SO INSPIRED, and then today I finished it and now I want to just be DONE and NOT THINK ABOUT IT ANY MORE.

A Braid of Bamboo and Steel (85772 words) by sqbr
Chapters: 15/15
Fandom: Hakuouki
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply, Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Nagumo Kaoru & Yukimura Chizuru, Nagumo Kaoru/Sanan Keisuke, Toudou Heisuke/Yukimura Chizuru
Additional Tags: Fanfiction, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Trans, Canon-Typical Violence, Canon-Typical Disturbing Themes, casual transphobia, Getting Together, Sibling Bonding, Happy Ending, Drama & Romance
Summary:

Nagumo Chizuru escapes her demon captors, and Yukimura Kaoru finds himself the prisoner of the Shinsengumi. They're both determined to be reunited, but the reunion isn't quite what they expected.

An AU where Kaoru and Chizuru have swapped bodies and backstories but not genders.

I even made a cover image! (using other people's art) See, it's an AU because Chizuru is an INCH TALLER rather than an INCH SHORTER.

And naturally I got this inspired about TRANS FIC FOR A TEN YEAR OLD OTOME GAME. With an age gap and lots of violence, just to scare off anyone who's looking for ~wholesome Issue Fic. But one commenter left really lovely heartfelt comments on almost every chapter, and a couple of other people said nice things, so I'm going to hug those comments and all fifteen kudos to my heart and feel happy regardless.

And now to ramble about it a bit. Especially since I imagine some of you are looking at the tags going "Wait...you wrote trans shipfic about the serial-killing baby-eater and the cross-dressing evil twin?".

YES. YES I DID.

AND I REGRET NOTHING.
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I feel like I've mostly gotten it out of my system, but we'll see.

( Comics, fanart, fanfic, all full of blood and sexy vampire samurai )

Having experienced the main story relatively free of outside influence, I decided to look at the wider world of the Greater Hakuoki Franchise and Fandom.

And... you know the general expectation is that canonical sequels will tend to be pretty much in character, following the story logically etc, while fanfic will be a bunch of ridiculous tropey bullshit, full of out of character fluff and highschool AUs?

Imagine the exact opposite of that.
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Tagged by anghraine, copying her in just doing the top ten by kudos.
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So I am finally getting around to fixing the NINETY OR SO broken images on my AO3 account. (THANKS PHOTOBUCKET) I settled on Nickpic as a new image host, rather arbitrarily. I've been getting random inconsistent upload errors so I'm not sure I'd rec them, they better not cause me to have to upload everything again.

To make it all feel less like yak shaving(*) I decided to go through from the start and fix up all my old works, since there's a growing list of minor issues like broken formatting I've been meaning to poke at. I am currently one and a half pages in, of nine (eg at about 30 works of 180 /o\)

It's interesting going through everything in chronological order. Right now I'm at April 2010 and past!me still hasn't learned how to format dialogue, but has sort of gotten the hang of chins. Figuring out how long legs are is still a ways in the future. (THEY'RE SO LONG)

A lot of this stuff is not relevant to modern fannish interests (and also...not very good) but I'm going to intermittently post old stuff to tumblr if I think people might enjoy it. I'm still pretty happy with Mafdet Slayer of Serpents, a Stargate comic I did about a Gu'ald cat. Though it's definitely from my pre-understanding-chins period.

(*)A software term I learned from Cam, referring to a large, frustrating and ultimately pointless task. It's easier to spell than sisyphean :)