Pretty sure I'm too old for this shit.

Last year I broke a tooth. It's in the front and I really don't want to just get it pulled (which is all my insurance will pay for). But to get a crown and all the stuff that goes with it is a bigger expense than I can cover. Now usually I'd try to save up for it, but that broken tooth is now hurting me as infection sets in. I gotta get this squared away quickly.

I'm having trouble with bills already, plus paying for someone to keep my daughter when her regular respite worker is unable to but I still need to keep appointments for myself or my mother. (mom is 81 and has afib, kidney disease, and congestive heart failure. she's going to the doctor a lot)

Anyway, long story short,

I started a GoFundMe for the dental bills.

I also could use some money for the other stuff but that's not as urgent. My cashapp is finally set up: $beingagreenmother and there's still my ko-fi

Oh, how quickly the past is forgotten. 

They are part of the reason A03 is a thing now. Not the whole reason, but part of it. 

The Great Purges of 2002 and 2012 are when ff.net got a wild hair up their ass about THINK OF THE CHILDREN and nuked any fic posted on there that was explicit. Thousands upon thousands of nc-17 smutfics were lost.

Is there any way to spread this info? 

THE OTW WAS CREATED BY FANS SO WE’D HAVE AN ARCHIVE THAT WASN’T SUBJECT TO CORPORATE REVIEW. 

Nonprofit, so that nobody could ever say, “this isn’t making enough money; it’s getting shut down.” (See: Geocities, Quizilla, Figment, G+.) With lawyers involved and a firm awareness of the legalities of fanfic, so nobody would decide “we’ve gotten a nasty letter from a megacorporation with lawyers, so we’re hiding because we can’t afford to face a lawsuit. (Jedi Hurtaholics, Trevizo’s Millennium site.) With teams, so that an argument between co-mods didn’t result in the destruction of a whole archive. (Gryffindor Tower, Detention.)

AO3 IS OUR SITE.

It is by fans, for fans. Fans do all the coding. All the legal paperwork. All the abuse/tos violation complaints. Fans make all the choices about policies. Fans decide how to run the fundraisers. Fans write the blog posts. All the volunteer staff are fans; all the people who train them are fans. Fans wrangle all the tags. 

(And the other OTW projects, too. Fans manage the entries at Fanlore. Fans run the Open Doors project. Fans publish Transformative Works and Cultures.)

EVERYONE WORKING FOR THE OTW LOVES FANDOM. Wants it to survive. Wants it to be awesome for everyone.

(Knows that it can’t be awesome for everyone; some approaches to fandom just clash hard. But they strive to minimize those clashes as much as possible, because they love fandom.) 

AO3 is not some company that decided, “we’ll make a site for fanfic and then…” I don’t know what people are thinking is the reason. Money? Data harvesting? Tax shelter? Amusement and pity?

Nope; AO3 was fans saying, “Livejournal sucks; we’re tired of this fucked-up ‘rebuild every three years’ garbage; WE NEED TO OWN THE DAMN SERVERS.”

You. You get it.

I then realized she had said Yaoi.

Only in Australia does this make sense. Even then only a subset of people in Australia. Everyone else is just going to be really puzzled why I laughed.

DW: Not gonna lie, my brain went here first: 

Then it went to the actual creatures... and I honestly don’t know which one is worse in a two-dicks-in-its-hand scenario???? 

Then I got to the rest of your ask and I was like, “Oh! Yaoi!” 

Oh yeah, that’s totally different! 

Recently, I’ve had a few people ask me about cowriting, and how it works when you share the process of turning an idea into a book. And the obvious answer is that firstly, it’s different for everyone. I know that some authors take a character each and write chapters in alternate points of view, and I have done this in the past. It’s a great system! But the most enduring system (thanks, potential ADHD) for me, is the one that to most people seems the most chaotic.

There are no rules. 

“Hey,” one of us will say. “I have an idea. Want to write it with me?” 

And that’s how it starts. 

I wrote the first scene of The Amazing Alpha Tau Boyfriend Project. Then, because I had a bunch of other projects on the go (thanks, potential ADHD) I put it aside and ignored it for months. Then I rediscovered it, and contacted Sarah and said, “Want to write the rest with me?”

And we dived in and did it. 

We don’t have separate chapters or characters. Hell, we don’t even have separate paragraphs. With both Sarah and JA, sometimes we’re adding to the document at different times, and sometimes we’re both in there writing at the same time. Which sounds like chaos, and it probably is, but it works for us. 

Can’t finish a sentence? You’ll try a few times, then suddenly your coauthor’s cursor is right there, and they’re saying it better than you could! 

Have a visitor drop in unexpectedly? Take a break, then come back to find the story is two pages longer.  

Don’t know what happens next? Don’t worry about it—your coauthor does! 

That’s not to say we’re totally directionless. With both Sarah and JA, we might run a few ideas past one another, like “Okay, where does this chapter need to take us?” But it’s rarely more in-depth than that. We’re all pantsers—this system wouldn’t work otherwise!—but when it comes to cowriting, the secret, as well as I can work it out, is that we are all open to negotiation. 

What if I wanted Character A to have a meet cute in a coffee shop? What if that was the way I’d pictured it from the start? And then what if my coauthor said, “You know what? I think this would work better if it was set in a mechanic’s garage.” 

Um, excuse me, what? It was supposed to be a coffee shop! 

But the trick with cowriting is to actually be open to the idea of the mechanic’s garage. Your cowriter has equal ownership of these characters and this story, and, now that you think about it, there’s no reason the scene wouldn’t work just as well, or even better, in a mechanic’s garage. 

There are no hills worth dying on in cowriting, or at least none that I’ve discovered yet. And every day there’s negotiation. If I let them have the mechanic’s garage today, then tomorrow they’ll let me give the character the dog, or the particular job, or the tragic backstory I want them to have. You get the picture! 

It goes without saying that your cowriter has to be the right person for you. It’s all about the vibe! I consider myself incredibly lucky that I gel so well with both JA and Sarah, because writing is fun, but it can also be incredibly frustrating at times, so you need to find the right person (or people!) to do it with. 

You have to trust your cowriter and their ideas. You have to be open to taking the story in directions you hadn’t considered. And, most importantly, you have to enjoy both the process and the end result. And if you can manage all of those things with a cowriter (or two!) then you’ve stuck gold!

Happy reading and writing! 

Looking for more writing tips? Check out the free Patreon I share with Sarah Honey (aka @bunnywest) and J.A. Rock. We can't promise our advice will work for you, but at least it's worth what you pay for it!

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