Ocean's Typewriter

read this thread. this is by far the most concise explanation of a lot of different issues that i’ve seen in fandom spaces in a while. cosigning both the linked thread and the thread about aus/uk/can law that’s linked in-thread.

If someone has never taken a class that includes copyright law, they may not know this stuff, so I don’t necessarily blame random people for not knowing what copyright is, but like… maybe just maybe it’s something that should be taught????

Just another reminder, because this always drives me crazy, but even if monetizing your fic was 100% unambiguously legal and protected, AO3 would still not let you do it because AO3 was founded and is supported by people like me who want a fandom community that is completely divested from making money off of fic.

If you want to make money off your fics, you can instead post them somewhere like royal Road. “Oh, but Royal Road’s culture is so much more negative and stressful and lacks the supportive norms of AO3!” Yeah, because people are trying to make money there. Half the userbase is treating it as a storefront and hustling is the natural social consequence of that. AO3’s culture can only exist because it’s not commercial.

Writers have two modes and they are "i haven't written in three weeks and i am rotting from the inside and everything feels wrong and i don't know who i am anymore" and "i wrote for four hours straight and forgot to eat and it's dark outside and when did that happen and i feel like a god" and there is nothing in between. no chill. no medium setting. just famine or feast and a very confused nervous system.

A non-writer asked me "but where do you get your ideas" and i genuinely did not know how to explain that it's not a place. it's not a website. it's not a folder. it's that i was on the bus and a woman was holding a paper bag very carefully and something about the way she held it made me need to know what was inside and then i needed to know why she was sad about it and then there was a whole person and then there was a whole story and the bus had already stopped and i missed my stop. that's where.

the best fanfiction you've ever read was written by a woman in her 40s before she made dinner for her kids. it was written by a teenager after school when they should've been studying for a history test. and a barista came up with the idea while they cleaned the espresso machine and busser fact-checked it on their break and the post-doc edited between writing grant proposals and the nurse apologized for typos in the notes after a long shift and behind every drabble and one-shot and multi-chapter fic there is a person with a wonderful and interesting and chaotic life and it is such a privilege that we get to be apart of it because they decided to do this thing we all share, for fun.

Just spent 45 minutes researching what a specific street in a city smells like in october so i could write the word "damp." the word is in the final draft. it is doing its job. it cost me 45 minutes and a mild obsession with historical weather records. worth it. the word is perfect. you would not believe how hard i worked on that word.

generally you shouldn't write run-on sentences because they get confusing and it doesn't give the reader a break. that doesn't apply to me though my run-on sentences are fun and understandable and they have a rhythm to it that makes you want to keep reading