Trying to Write

the usa, with the black slave trade, had no strong national identity in its beginnings - it was a bunch of people from everywhere that had to find a common link (whiteness); while europe, with long-standing nations, had to find other excuses for pillaging and opression that couldnt be rooted in skin colour.

TikTok user unravel.me.now has just launch an app (lore.fm) she is calling “Audible for AO3”. It’s an app that uses AI voices to read out fics.

🚨She is requiring any authors who do not want their fics to be on this app to OPT OUT by emailing [email protected] 🚨 🚨She has not given an actual template or how you’re supposed to prove you’re the author or said how her team will process this or how she will keep these requests secure🚨

I do not have this app. I haven’t seen anyone use it yet. According to Reddit users, unravel.me.now’s earlier TikToks stated she envisions the app being able to create libraries stored on that app and to have version of “Spotify wrapped”. That implies that eventually data collection must happen, if it’s not happening currently.

I don’t know the actual capabilities of this app. I don’t know the legalities. I do know that it personally feels like this app is trying to turn AO3 into a content generation source and I haven’t heard of the app allowing you to leave a comment or kudos or interact with the original work.

Wonderful.

So yeah, my stories are staying locked down.

And it seems the only way to protect your fics (= your intelectual property) from these vultures is to archive-lock them.

Here's how:

Go to the 'Edit' page of your work and check this box:

If you have multiple works you can edit them all at once by using the 'Edit Works' button on your dashboard.

A successfully archive-locked fic has a blue lock behind its title:

Alexithymia sucks. This chart helps!

How are you feeling? You don’t know? Me neither! So I look at this chart several times a day (got reminders set on my phone) to check in on how I’m feeling throughout the day. I’ve been doing it for a few months, and it’s actually getting a lot easier to identify how I’m feeling.

Pro tip: some people have to rely more on how their body feels to tell them what they’re feeling emotionally. Work on trying to identify how certain emotions feel in your body. Work in broad strokes at first, before working on identifying more specific emotions. For example, try to notice how sad, happy, angry, and afraid feel. Where in your body do you feel them? What physical sensations go along with the emotions? It’s different for everyone!

(a realization about dialogue formatting, from a comic artist turned novelist.)

One of the first things a novice writer learns about speech tags is that they’re part of the “scaffolding” of prose. They should be largely invisible to the reader: use them when necessary, omit them when not, and be sparing in the application of verbs other than “said”. They serve only the function of clarifying who is speaking when it is necessary to do so.

Except:

Sometimes you might want to use a speech tag in spite of the redundancy. The fact that the reader’s eyes slide right over them is an exploitable property. By slicing a line of dialogue in half with a speech tag, you can force the reader to perceive a meaningful pause between two utterances—and the effect is much stronger than you might get out of an ellipsis or an em dash. Developing an intuition for when and how to do this is a huge part of learning to write dialogue, I think.

In comics, you get to play with the visuals, like having two people talk over each other with the connected word bubbles woven across the page.

Kabosu and Maru and Tardar Sauce had no idea they were superstars. Miette is unaware that people all over the world know her name.

Brave Little Hunter doesn't know that thousands of humans are rooting for her. 52 Blue has no idea that they have inspired films, books, poetry, and music. Porphyrios didn't know he nearly bankrupted an emperor or that we'd still be talking about him 1400 years later.

Kipekee doesn't know how excited we were to find a second like her.

Lonesome George didn't know people came from all over to see him, and will continue to pay tribute to his taxidemied shell. I wept looking at him in the AMNH, and for Martha and for Benjamin and Celia and all other, nameless endlings. I looked at him and wondered if the last Neanderthal knew they were the last.

Eclipse never knew he was a champion. Dolly didn't know she was a breakthrough. Balto didn't know he was a hero. Laika never knew what she died for or that we regretted her death or that we still speak her name.