Tabula Rasa

i was working at a little cafe where I could deny service over bad behavior, harassment etc. & mask mandates had just ended a week before & already people were being weird about me still wearing mine—an N95, the kind shaped kinda like a duckbill.

so this man walked in, looked at me sooo scathingly, laughed at me, and said “damn. never known a woman to choose…practicality over looks.”

And I just said, “oh. you can go, you’re not getting a drink.” And he said, “what???”

I said, “sir, you just walked in at 6 am & called women impractical and me ugly in one sentence.”

Marjane Satrapi, cartoonist and film director, best known for Persepolis

And sometimes fanfiction is, ‘Watch me do a fucking KICK FLIP off this cool sentence!! Also here's some sex'

2) any vegetable is better than no vegetable

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

AO3’s banning AI generated works would mean their volunteers would have to read each of those reported fics and determine based on vibes if they were AI or not.

Do you think AO3 has enough resources and volunteers to do that? Do you genuinely believe genuine writers won’t get falsely reported and have their hard works wrongly marked as AI and taken down?

Tell us about your current project(s)  – what’s it about, how’s progress, what do you love most about it?

Tell us about what you’re most looking forward to writing – in your current project, or a future project

What is that one scene that you’ve always wanted to write but can’t be arsed to write all of the set-up and context it would need? (consider this permission to write it and/or share it anyway)

Share a sentence or paragraph from your writing that you’re really proud of (explain why, if you like)

What character that you’re writing do you most identify with?

What character do you have the most fun writing?

What do you think are the characteristics of your personal writing style? Would others agree?

Is what you like to write the same as what you like to read?

Are you more of a drabble or a longfic kind of writer? Pantser or plotter? Do you wish you were the other?

How would you describe your writing process?

What do you envy in other writers?

Do you want your writing to be famous?

Do you share your writing online? (Drop a link!) Do you have projects you’ve kept just for yourself?

At what point in writing do you come up with a title?

Which is harder: titles or summaries (or tags)?

Tried anything new with your writing lately? (style, POV, genre, fandom?)

Do you think readers perceive your work - or you - differently to you? What do you think would surprise your readers about your writing or your motivations?

Do any of your stories have alternative versions? (plotlines that you abandoned, AUs of your own work, different characterisations?) Tell us about them.

Is there something you always find yourself repeating in your writing? (favourite verb, something you describe ‘too often’, trope you can’t get enough of?)

Tell us the meta about your writing that you really want to ramble to people about (symbolism you’ve included, character or relationship development that you love, hidden references, callbacks or clues for future scenes?)

What other medium do you think your story would work well as? (film, webcomic, animated series?)

Do you reread your old works? How do you feel about them?

What’s the story idea you’ve had in your head for the longest?

Would you say your writing has changed over time?