Hmmm...

[malymin]

I have an Ao3 account but am genuinely a little uncertain of what's considered... good protocol? For various elements of fanfic publication on there, so a lot of my backlog of fanfic writing has not made it over there. Even the stuff I have published, I'm worried I'm doing it wrong.

Heh... it's weird. In elementary through high school I got praised for my original fiction by adults, but I felt so nervous and neurotic about my writing being intrinsically bad (projecting a lot of the 00's "sporking" I read of both fanfic and published fiction onto my own work) that I eventually clammed up entirely... it was only around the end of my 20's that I started bothering to write anything again... and did so through fanfiction. Character studies, story rewrites and AUs, 'missing' scenes. Most or all of the earliest stuff from getting back on the saddle will continue to go unpublished - not so much because I'm ashamed of it, as for personal reasons.

Much like my drawings, I don't really have any illusions of making a career off of such things, so it's fine if my hobbies are unmonetizable. But also if I ever move from having a part-time job to a full-time job, I might not have time for hobbies. That scares and worries me, because making "art" (in a general sense) is one of the few pleasures I have that feels "productive" instead of "wasteful."

In addition, I've really wanted to make ambitious longfic. But I don't even know how to begin to plan such things... I make scenes but struggle with plots. A friend of mine has been struggling to find time to write chapters for their ongoing post-canon Deca-Dence fanfiction, to the point of it having been years since they found time to update it... but also they're still working on the next chapter. It intimidates me... but if I don't do it, I don't know who will? Most postcanon stories for my current "focus" fandom (Princess Tutu) are interested in entirely different things than the ideas and concepts that I want to explore.

I don't know what to do, really.

Comments

[stepnix]

I'm almost a total outsider to Ao3 so feel free to reject this immediately but I couldn't tell that there was any kind of "good fics do this" or "if you do this it's a bad fic" protocol. a lot of it was super experimental and (again, outsider, I don't think I even checked comments) i was just kinda nodding along like "sure yeah I guess that's how this one works."
so, that's at least one section of the audience that won't care about protocol

[stardust_rifle]

I've been using Ao3 for about ten years now at this point- if you have a question about posting on Ao3 I'd be happy to answer!

[malymin]

So this is my account:

https://archiveofourown.org/users/Malymin

I'm wondering if my summaries are bad (too short, too verbose, too off-topic, etc) and if my tagging is sufficient or insufficient, or if anything else strikes you as clumsy/off.

[stardust_rifle]

For the kind of fic you’re writing? I’d say everything’s normal.

[malymin]

What do you mean by "for the kind of fic I'm writing"? ^_^;

(Not worried or offended, just curious!)

[stardust_rifle]

Short gen that’s not super tropey- the minimal tags are pretty normal for that sort of thing, if that was what you were worried about.

[malymin]

Ah, good. ^_^

Do you have any advice for how to write summaries? I notice that one of my fics has twice as many hits as two others that were posted at the same time, and I don't know if it's because of the lengthier summary or if it's because it's just a more popular character.

[stardust_rifle]

Not really, sorry! I mostly just grab quotes or do short descriptions of the plot and rely on tags to get people interested (i write mostly shipfic/porn).