Digital Bookshelf

I present to you: the floating ao3 comment box!

From what I've seen, a big problem for many people is that once you reach the comments at the bottom of a fic, your memory of it miraculously disappears. Anything you wanted to say is stuck ten paragraphs ago, and you barely remember what you thought while reading. This fixes that!

I'll give a little explanation on the features and how it works, but if you want to skip all that, here's the link.

Edit: Yes, this also works on mobile!

The extension is visible as a small blue box in the upper left corner.

(Side note: The green colouring is not from the extension, that's me.)

If you click on it, you open a comment box window at the bottom of your screen but not at the bottom of the fic. I opened my own fic for demonstrative purposes.

The website also gives explanations on how exactly it functions, but I'll summarize regardless.

insert selection -> if you highlight a sentence in the fic it will be added in italics to the comment box

add to comment box -> once you're done writing your comment, you click this button and the entire thing will automatically copied to the ao3 comment box

delete -> self explanatory

on mulitchapter fics, you will be given the option to either add the comment to just the current chapter or the entire fic

The best part? You can simply close the window the same way you opened it and your progress will automatically be saved. So you can open it, comment on a paragraph, and then close it and keep reading without having the box in your face.

a healer in a plague-stricken city discovers their apprentice is immune to the symptoms, but also a silent carrier that is actively spreading the disease

two friends running a small criminal operation are offered immunity if one testifies against the other, but both begin separately planning to take the fall to protect the other’s future

a successful warlord meets their former apprentice, who has become a pacifist negotiator

after growing up in an extremely toxic environment, one sibling wants to leave and the other doesn’t understand why

when one of the kids of a supernatural hunter family is turned into a werewolf, their sibling needs to dismantle their belief system to help keep them safe

finding out that they only got their job because a friend pulled some strings without telling them causes someone to reevaluate their skill and success

former roommates at an academy for muscle-for-hire meet again. one has become a bodyguard, the other an assassin, and both now have the same mark

after finding out their best friend betrayed them years ago, they chose to get revenge now, as the pain is fresh

a spirit becomes accidentally attached to a random disaster of a person and helps them tackle everyday life

(this came out of a conversation in the comments on a previous post about an author threatening to stop updating a fic because of lack of engagement)

So there’s this idea that fic writers should write for themselves and not care too much about stats or engagement,

and i totally get the sentiment behind that. if writing becomes entirely about stats and external validation, something important does get lost - creative freedom and joy, conviction in your own writing

but i also think:

“i write for myself, but i post for others.”

because posting fic is not only self-expression. it’s social. ao3 is called an archive, but emotionally it often functions as a community space.

people post for connection, for participation, for others to bear witness to their pain and trauma and grief,

and i don’t think most people are asking to be admired so much as acknowledged. there’s something deeply human about wanting another person to encounter something that mattered to you and go:

“ok, yeah, I see what you were trying to say. I see you.”

especially because fanfic is often people processing very real feelings through fictional characters at a safe distance, one step removed,

and then uploading that deeply personal thing into a shared archive and hoping somebody else might connect with it.

And i think that’s why it hurts so much when you summon up the courage and post a fic into the void and you get nothing back,

and then it’s like,

The first, by nor-man-nor-mythical, reads, "[freeze frame] yeah, that's not me. I don't know who that is. [unpause]".

this used to be a common knowledge

This confirms that there is a civilization older than the Sumerians that we have yet to find

Some people get existential dread from this

Source (non Aboriginal)

And a quote I picked out from a longer interview with an Aboriginal local elder about the area where he touched on the history

short form writers look at people writing 100k+ fics as though this is some sort of talent given as part of a fae bargain, that the commitment required shows some sort of ungodly mental fortitude.

Tldr: they've decided to do the following

charge an activation fee of $20. Yes, just for making an account to sell your books.

Charge you $12 if you don't sell $100 worth of books every year

This on top of the fee they already take on every sale.

This kills going wide as a strategy for indie authors imo. It definitely does for me!

I'm going to think about this a while longer. I might keep Runaways on Draft2Digital so it can stay accessible on international storefronts and Bookshop.org but I'm also going to be writing some STRONGLY WORDED EMAILS about this change.

I did not realise it was over 700 pages long 😂