abstinence is not immortality

First mistake: James Moriarty isn’t a man at all. He’s a spider. A spider at the center of a web—a criminal web—with a thousand threads, and he knows precisely how each and every single one of them dances. 

For the fourth year in a row now, it's time for Small Fandom Summer! Join me for Small Fandom Summer! It's real easy to play:

Make a fanwork for something that has fewer than 1000 English-language works on AO3

Post it to AO3

And then you've done it! You've made a thing and you've diversified the fandom ecosystem! You're basically a hero.

Q: The fandom I want to create for has more than 1000 English-language works on AO3, but the specific pairing I want to write for has fewer than that. Does that count? A: Yes! Q: What if it has more than 1000 English-language works on AO3, but, like, just barely? A: Okay! Q: What if it actually has a lot more than 1000 English-language works on AO3, but it still feels small? A: Sure! Q: What if I don't want to post it to AO3? What if I don't even have an AO3 account? Can I post it somewhere else? A: Wherever! Q: What if-- A: Just do a thing, friend. Make a thing. Share the thing. This is not meant to be restrictive; this is meant to be inspirational. Create the fanworks you want to see in the world. Make a stranger happy by appealing to their niche interests. Bring joy.

And if you want to give yourself some silly little Steam-like achievement badges to commemorate your accomplishments, well, you're in luck! I've made a bunch of them right here! You can grab the ones that apply to your work and paste them wherever you like and feel good about what you've done. Here's a few of my favorites:

So you see? This is meant to be silly and fun.

There's nowhere to sign up. There's nothing to commit to. There's zero pressure. You just do it if you do it, and don't if you don't. But if you do want to play (yay!), tag your stuff with #small fandom summer so we can all swoop in and appreciate everyone else's efforts.

And since some other people have asked: There's no start date for this, nor is this an end date. "Summer" in this context is an extremely arbitrary unit of measurement. I'm starting now because my personal summer runs from about mid-May to mid-August. Yours may vary.

Lol I think it's hilarious that after eight freaking years of this post circulating the hellsite in fits and starts, it finally makes it to 50,000 notes shortly after a redesign that makes it much much harder to even tell how many notes a post has. Whatever! We're here!

I originally made this post in response to a thread that was going around shaming fanfic writers for "porn without plot", basically. A bunch of ficcers were all agreeing that sex scenes should only exist if they moved a plot forward, or revealed something important about the characters that couldn't be demonstrated any other way...

And I just thought, nah. fuck all that. I mean, if that's what you want to write or read, that's great. But that's not the only thing we're allowed to do. Write the smut! Read the smut! Let it have no redeeming social importance at all! If it gives you pleasure, that's purpose enough.