Adventures in life and fandoms (but mostly fandoms)

1. It’s okay if you lose interest in your story. It doesn’t mean you wasted your time; it means you’re growing in your hobby.

2. It’s okay not to want to publish your work; that doesn’t mean your writing isn’t worth reading. It means you have different goals than some other writers.

3. It’s okay if you need a break sometimes. It’s frankly unrealistic to think you never will.

4. It’s okay to write fanfiction; that doesn’t make you any less of a writer but makes you that much more of a fan.

5. It’s okay to sometimes have self-doubt. After all, you are human and sometimes as humans it’s easy to fall into that trap. Sometimes the feeling doesn’t even have anything to do with the writing but has everything to do with being overwhelmed, mentally exhausted and ready to give up. Don’t give up.

6. It’s okay to feel relief and happy upon reading this. Give a like if you did and spread it to your writer followers and maybe make their day a little.

What on earth is creepy about bookmarking a fic you like? That’s what the bookmark feature is for. 

Reading fics on AO3 has zero price of admission. You don’t have to kudos. You don’t have to comment. You don’t even need to have an account. You can read fic on AO3 without even knowing what AO3 is if you stumbled into a fic from a google search. Fics posted on AO3 are there to be archived and there to be shared. It’s that simple. 

I love to see names I recognize in my kudos. It’s like having a tumblr mutual you never talk to but you like their posts all the time and you think they’re probably pretty great. There’s that spark of recognition and then a feeling of pride that, “Hey look! [username] liked this one! Awesome!”

There’s nothing creepy about bookmarking. At all. It’s a feature entirely separate from kudos and comments and has its own purpose. As an author, I’m flattered when people choose to bookmark my fic ( except when they add rude comments to it but w/e) and as a reader, I use that function liberally.

[Image Description: Tag reading “no fluff we read angst and cry like men”]

Yeah, that’s the Goal – but it’s not what it’s about

NaNoWriMo is about sitting down, starting a project, and learning to manage that project and keep going even when it gets hard

it’s about building skills and forming habits and developing discipline and learning more about yourself as a creator so you can get a sense for what writing methods do/don’t work for you

its about trying things – about making discoveries and making mistakes, and about making progress without getting mired in the minutia so you end the month with more words than you had when you started

It’s framed like a contest ‘cause goals and prizes make things fun, but you’re only really playing against yourself

Writing is a lonely business. Ninety percent of your time is spent in front of your computer or at your notebook, dragging words out of your head and forcing them onto paper. If you don’t have people in your life who are encouraging and supportive and understanding, it’s ten times harder.

NaNoWriMo gives you access to a worldwide community of writers just like you.

Engaging with the NaNoWriMo community is how I met some of my closest friends and critique partners. It’s how I joined fandom. It’s one of the reasons I volunteer for NaNoWriMo every year now: because I want to give other people the encouragement to follow their dreams to write a novel.

Maybe it gets published. Maybe it doesn’t. But for many of the people I’ve seen, publication isn’t necessarily the end goal. It’s about finally starting the project that you always said you would, and finding a group of like-minded people who are in the same boat.