tarny boi

One person says that Steinbeck is one of their favourite authors for prose, and then they share an example of what they would consider purple prose. It is so violetly awful that I think the poster must have written it themselves as a kind of parody of purple prose. Other people assumed the same.

But as it turns out, they are quoting from a book written by a YouTuber whose channel ia dedicated to talking about writing (namely, their own writing, which is genius, but often not comprehensible to the drooling plebs).

Naturally, I read the free sample of their book in awe and horror, and I'd like to share some screenshots with you. If you also have trouble defining or understanding what purple prose is, it's this.

'Noctilucent orbs'. Even fanfic written by a 14-year-old wouldn't dare.

currently I have about 8.6k words in unfinished chapter 10 and 2.4k in unfinished chapter 11, but there isn't really a lot left to happen in chapter 11

but Also the good splitting point would be where the especially starscreamy part starts, but there is a bit that has to go after there chronologically that is better grouped in with the previous bit

1.) Don't actually delete content from your WIP unless it is minor editing - instead cut it and put it in a secondary document. If you're omitting paragraphs of content, dialog, a whole scene you might find a better place for it later and having it readily available can really save time. Sometimes your idea was fantastic, but it just wasn't in the right spot.

2.) Stuck with wording the action? Just write the dialog then revisit it later.

3.) Stuck on the whole scene? Skip it and write the next one.

4.) Write on literally any other color than a white background. It just works. (I use black)

5.) If you have a beta, while they are beta-ing have them read your fic out loud. Yes, I know a lot of betas/writers do not have the luxury of face-timing or have the opportunity to do this due to time constraints etc but reading your fic out loud can catch some very awkward phrasing that otherwise might be missed. If you don't have a beta, you read it out loud to yourself. Throw some passion into your dialog, you might find a better way to word it if it sounds stuffy or weird.

6.) The moment you have an idea, write it down. If you don't have paper or a pen, EMAIL it to yourself or put it in a draft etc etc. I have sent myself dozens of ideas while laying down before sleep that I 10/10 forgot the next morning but had emailed them to myself and got to implement them.

7.) Remember - hits/likes/kudos/comments are not reflective of the quality of your fic or your ability to write. Most people just don't comment - even if they say they do, they don't, even if they preach all day about commenting, they don't, even if they are a very popular blog that passionately reminds people to comment - they don't comment (I know this personally). Even if your fic brought tears to their eyes and it haunted them for weeks and they printed it out and sent it to their friends they just don't comment. You just have to accept it. That being said - comment on the fic you're reading now, just do it, if you're 'shy' and that's why you don't comment the more you comment the better you'll get at it. Just do it.

8.) Remove unrealistic daily word count goals from your routine. I've seen people stress 1500 - 2000 words a day and if they don't reach that they feel like a failure and they get discouraged. This is ridiculous. Write when you can, but remove absurd goals. My average is 500 words a day in combination with a 40 hour a week job and I have written over 200k words from 2022-2023.

9.) There are dozens of ways to do an outline from precise analytical deconstruction that goes scene by scene to the minimalist bullet point list - it doesn't matter which one you use just have some sort of direction. A partial outline is better than no outline.

It is possible to skip the copypasting from/to your WIP document by using an editor that allows you to “outcomment” whole sections, even chapters of text in the output, while the outcommented portions of text remain in your document, ready to go for when you need them. Or, if you never need them again, then at least saved for posterity.

For everyone who hasn’t come across this yet, outcommenting works primarily in systems Markdown and LaTeX and looks like this in Markdown:

In the image, what you see on the left side is the text as I have written it, with several paragraphs of text marked in various ways as a comment, none of which is shown on the right side, where the preview only shows how the text will be exported once I’m done writing it. This is done either by

a) enclosing the text to be outcommented in square brackets [], putting a colon : right after the closing bracket and then adding space and a hash # after the colon; or

b) using <!-- plus space before the first word and double-dash -- plus > after the last word to be outcommented – note that this works for several paragraphs of text, while the others only work for one paragraph; or

c) putting the text to be outcommented in parentheses () and putting square brackets [], empty or with a random character like a slash, followed by a colon : plus space, before the parentheses with the outcommented text.

The editor used for that image is called Ghostwriter, it’s free and open source software and also runs on Windows. But there are other editors as well, so here’s the obligatory link to the post where I have linked all of the different editors.

Note for die-hard MS Office users: Hiding text works in MS Word. If you ask me, it’s much more cumbersome and annoying than Markdown, but I’m very biased, so hey, each to their own.

Note for LibreOffice users: It also works in Writer.

Hello hello! Some of you have probably seen the info about the Claude-detecting AO3 skin. I find it useful, but the way it was shared didn't suit my needs, so I tied it in with the standard Reversi site skin to make a version that works better for me. I'm sharing it if you want to use it too!

As always, this is an optional tool. You don't have to use it if you don't like it. This is a site skin, so all it does is affect what AO3 looks like on your own account - it doesn't change what your readers see.

This skin looks like Reversi by default. On any fic where it detects a 100% clear snippet of Claude AI generated text, it will light the fic up bright red. Still readable if you wanna keep going, but now you know that fic contains bits of Claude AI.

It does NOT:

Detect other AI, only Claude!

Change anything for other people - just you.

Flag EVERY Claude-generated fic. If the poster took the time to clean up the writing even a little, it will not flag with this tool even if it was written entirely by Claude.

Have false positives. There is no reason for this to light up a fic unless some or all of it was copied and pasted directly from Claude.

Give you a reason to harass people, even if they made a shitty choice to use AI in their fic.

I did not write this CSS myself! The person who discovered/shared this provided a small snippet of code to use to do this, and I just stuck it onto Reversi so I could have a skin that still looks nice. I am choosing not to link directly to the creator's document because that document seems to double as a callout post for various writers, and I'm not big on that. If you really wanna see it, you'll find it with an easy Google search.

Skystar Week Day 1: Mirror