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Just as a heads-up for all our members and guests, we’ve been getting a number of dubious posts lately on the forum. We’re removing the posts, of course, but we don’t always get to them instantly. PLEASE exercise caution, and don’t click on any links you see in these posts. Trust me, there’s nothing good waiting for you at the other end. Practice safe surfing, okay?

We’re also banning the spam IPs, as fast as we can

The Monster Under The Bed x My Sleep Paralysis Demon (Those fucking squelching noises, I swear, it’s grim folks, grim).

More broadly speaking, I’m definitely tired of the “AI slop” on YouTube. It particularly bugs me when the video is supposed to be about something factual, because you don’t know whether the AI is using actual facts or just making stuff up.

Ok, I actually made some progress on The Lake House today before having to leave for work. Let’s see how far I get in a week.

And they’re rude enough to only get it on when you’re in the bed right above them. *shakes head* No class at all… As for me, depending on what you consider “wrong,” I may have never written a right pairing. 😅 My established pairings have an extreme age difference, to put it mildly (18-20 year old man and immortal women centuries to eons old), and I’m working on a brother/sister incest pairing. As for why, it’s a bit difficult to explain. When it comes to the extreme age differences between human/nonhuman characters, there are published authors who write stuff like that (see the popular A Court of Thorns and Roses series), but to get down to why it appeals to me, I think it’s a fantasy I have as a man who’s always been unsure of himself, especially with women, and there is a fantasy of a shy, nervous young man being introduced to sex by a knowledgeable older woman. Kevin/Luzurial doesn’t exactly fit that mold since they’re both inexperienced regardless of age, but the other examples do, including the incest story (older sister/younger brother). The “why” on the incest pairings is somewhat more complex; I’ll return to that when I have time.

Agreed. Where you REALLY see AI is in some of those visual books on Youtube. Hubs likes to listen to them. Mind you, I’ve read countless sci-fi books, so when he’s listening, I can usually tell him which book and/or author they’re stealing from 🤣

Well, due to work, I haven’t gotten any work done, and we’re down to five days counting today. But if what Invidia and George said is true, and you all are ok with this even if it’s a week late or something, let’s see what I can get done quickly! *opens word processor*

Well that’s the curious point. Would a thruple qualify as a pairing? The same story I have Dawn/Buffy/Faith. A few other types of pairings too but they’re not out yet. In the Riverdale fandom, I have a pairing coming up involving Cheryl/Betty. Although they aren’t exclusive.

Oh, my. Can you still call it a pairing when there are 4+ people involved? Because if you can, than my Star Vs. the Forces of Evil pairing is Marco/Star/Jackie/Janna/Princess Arms/Kelly/Hekapoo/Brittney/Higgs/Starfan13. No, seriously, I wrote that one.

I don’t know that historically I’ve done much in the wrong pairing. However, I have a couple stories, one of which is posted here. My “wrong pairing” has been in the Buffy fandom I wrote a story that includes Dawn/Buffy/Faith/Joyce. Not necessarily a pairing but I have done gangbang stories obviously which could theoretically be a “wrong pairing”. There are a couple stories in which things got seriously dark but they aren’t really anywhere for people to read at the moment.

My take is that brilliant non-linear stories you here talk about get their fame from being good despite not being linear. A possible comparison is the Westworld tv-show season 1 that had a big reveal when you realized what you had been watching. In season 2 they wanted to repeat the trick and made things just as non-linear and in the end it was barely watchable. I have avoided the later seasons like plague. My point is that for every successful non-linear storytelling there are many more trainwreck attempts. Doing non-linear storytelling that manage to capture the reader is seriously difficult.

Simple, have a quick conversation chapter one of the sequel. “Where’s Joe?” “Six years in prison, because when they say NO PARKING, the really mean NO PARKING.” or “Got transferred to far, far, away.” or “He learned why there’s safety bars on woodchippers. Coroner estimated they recovered 60% of the remains.” And if you want the villain to be a surprise, have his whereabouts accounted/dismissed for in this conversation too.

It doesn't sound like a problem to me. In my experience, people care about the consistency of characters, more than anything else. As long as you retain the consistency of your characters, there should be few, if any, objections about the path they follow and it's outcome. Of course, people would have a problem with a path or ending, that seems out of line with what is considered reasonable for the world in which your story takes place. But that really goes without saying, usually. So, if the ending is one that you believe your characters would naturally arrive at, then that ending should be fine.

Apotheosis One women decides to go all in on Christmas Eve. Ascension is an all or nothing game. Succeed and the godhood is thine… Fail and being utterly erased from existence Tags: Pending

Everyone is welcome to the winter festivies

Ay Yo! Beat me to it lol.

Quotation marks and parentheses will stay disabled in those for the time being due to site security. Colon and semicolon I'll try to enable this weekend. Also you can minic " with '' if need be.

@GeorgeGlass could you check if you can edit other fields? It will help narrow down wherr to look for the bug.

The Shortest Day is the Longest Night. The Year’s Nadir Approaches. Steady in step. The Unseelie Court’s doors open wide to Fall’s Aplenty. It is comforting to remember that though the fallow cold and sterile ice peer down from their cyros thrones. That which is loosened for but for a brief time. From the Abyssal Depths that gives up her brood. To the very foundations of the world stewed by the nameless hungering things. No night may yet last forever. Illimitable Dominion over all though the Red Death may hold. Tis but fragile stewardship it remains. Not even Jadis herself could hold Winter but never Christmas. The Ages of Ice are but brief idle sleep. Ponder then that evergreen promise of spring. Inevitable bequeathing the darkness reluctantly compelled. No matter how iron clad the toothsome and fierce the dark may grow. The things that uprose unhindered within their gruesome nadir. Shudder at light’s glow! Flee at first kiss of day! Toothless then they shrouded by death’s decay. Terrifying then must be inexorable, insistent renewal aquiet in its cradle bed. Cruel yet marching till tender spring bears again the crown. What fear then must fester abreast in that of darkness and stillness that winter doeth inspire? For what fierce dominion can they claim? That will not in time be taken by light and spring! Life my dear, Always finds a way. Always. What winter’s bark whine with agonied bite the kiss of spring long a fated. For even in Winter’s Apex does not Spring await insistent yet patient at the gates? Force fully marshalled? For what honor? What glory lay in preening bargains yet made. Be worth the enmity the coming of tomorrow’s day? What use could be worth the barbed trap the fine print surely dwells? Reject the ill gotten gain In favor of the labor of honest day. For yesteryears guest is tomorrow's brow crowned alighted! Eat. Drink. Be Merry! For Faust benighted a prince pauper. The Snowmen pall against the door allergic to the taste of hearth kindled warmth. The Sugar Plum Fairy with faerie treats a many. The game of hospitality is afoot! Enchanted! Does not Krampus scamper at yule father’s behest? Short Will Be His Prime. Great will be his Abeyance. The rules are thus in art regal procession! Tags at the top of the story Holiday theme Original Fiction 50k word limitation!

Happy Halloween Everybody!

IMHO, for this site (and similarly for AO3), what most people are against is the AI slop. (Feed a prompt to Chat GPT, get a “novel” from it. TBH, quite sophisticated and impressed it’s gotten as well as it has; basically a million typewriter monkeys that have some pattern recognition grasp at what the humans are seeking.) I don’t think folks would be against you using something like grammarly, or similar spell/grammar checker with some AI backing to it. I don’t think they’d be really against you using an AI created image as a writing prompt/aid to help visualize the scene you’re about to write/describe. I don’t think that’s at a level of needing disclosure. But then we get closer to the gray line with something like an AI character profile, backstory, or it helping you finish/write a scene. Right now, if AI is forming a substantial chunk of the writing process, disclosure is likely the best policy, and let the reader decide if they want to continue or not. (Just remember, you’re still on the hook for whatever you post.)

And that is alright it happens! If you’re not too busy. Leave a Review <3

As much as I would love to see people use something that would correct formatting and spelling, the onus for that is on the author and not the site. My inner editor may be reduced to tears frequently, but site policy is to let the attempted murder of written English stand around with its flies undone and its complete inability to comprehend homonyms on full display.

You can always post it regardless. Yours is always worth the wait.

My poem is ready. Can you provide a link to the story in the archive?

Oof – poor Neville. Umbridge and one of the centaurs I could get behind. Very much NC, of course.

Yeah, I miss forums. (Glad to still have this one.) Much of that stuff has migrated to Discord, where it’s hard to have a discussion about anything unless it’s in real time.

I was part of a cooperative writing project there for a bit (I swear, my life is a wild sequence of “this is going to take a while to explain,” events), so I peeked back in from time to time. It’s been a few months, so I don’t remember precisely, but I believe what happened was that the lease on the site/server/what have you ran out, and the person funding it simply decided not to renew it.

Ack! Run, hide, Halloween is nearly here! (Whoever’s eating the calendar, please stop, time goes by fast enough as it is.)

I think the most messed up one I found was Umbridge X Neville.

Those ranks… take a while. AFAICT, a post is 5, a like/reaction is 1.

Hello, sorry, it’s still me, I have a problem: I posted my fic but although i select S through Z ‘YOU’ it appears in ‘1 through F’ why??? I already tried to fix it twice.. should I delete it? I don’t want it to appear in the wrong section, sorry! edit: it seems the problem is fixed now, sorry for annoying you!

If the author has a forum account as well as an archive account, you could PM them. Otherwise, unless they've put an email address or something in their profile, a review might be your only recourse. If it were me, I'd be glad for someone to point out a problem like that, even in a review. Remember, the author can always delete the review if they take offense -- or after they have fixed the problem you pointed out.

For the most part, yes. There are a few places where things transition from one room to another or other things. So in theory it works as a transition point.

As far as I know there is not a limit, at least not a low or mid range one. However, if you do have transition points as you mentioned, I expect those would make good chapter breaks.

On the practical side, I’d suggest against super long chapters too. I’ve tried that on my potter fanfic years ago, reorganized/rewrote thinking it was a “good thing” with my highest being like 107k… nope! Not only did I lose some details in that consolidation, I also lost focus to the chapter too. Small details/scenes were now one/two sentences in basically a wall of text. (Which it became as FFN.net somehow seemingly lost all my carriage returns, so it was one big “blob”; and a fast re-insert of them is how I uncovered FFN’s new 65k max per chapter limit.) I’m still pulling that 107k old chapter apart right now with my “rewrite” … though I’ve now got at least 121 in its place, which is probably close to 1M words itself as I now hover around the 6-7k words per chapter average, and if the chapter nears the 10kword mark, I seek to break it up. Even in my Jefferey episodic story, I’ll effectively do “part 1” and “part 2”.

Fanfiction *is* a spot to experiment with writing, so try it out, and see if it works!

Another idea, maybe this is what you’re going for. First chapter is a scene of that party (or whatever it is), with your last lines being “This is their stories.” And your next chapter be like “A year before that party, the awkward Name was sitting in the library.” Making it abundantly clear to the (typical) reader what you’re up to here, because as you noted, readers generally expect chronological (or near chronological) order.

It’s still backstory if it’s “for context.” Maybe better done as separate oneshots, or an episodic serial? Out-of-order is going to confuse the reader IMO, (and in my case, myself too.) This is especially true if there’s something where a character dies, and now you’re talking if they’re alive. Another slight exception here is when I’m doing multiple POVs, so I want to cover character “A” in a dedicated chapter, and “B” in the next (but, the events should be sufficiently disassociated/separate for that to make sense). To me, the strong “out-of-order” means there’s a structural issue to the story, maybe you’re starting in the wrong spot/incident? Hope I’m making sense here.

I think a lot depends on the relationship status of everyone involved.

Just so I understand the question: By “tag team,” are you talking about a three-person sex session in which only two of the three are having sex at any given moment?

As it is New Year’s Eve, I’ll get a review for one of the holiday party stories up tonight. Unfortunately, I’ll have to delay reviewing InvidiaRed’s story, because as it’s part of the Holiday Canon, I need to go back and look at last year’s Christmas story before I can read this one. It may not be required reading exactly, but it can be kind of hard to read these things out of order.

@InvidiaRed, I left a comment on your story.

And, it’s up! A Fairy Merry Christmas: When the Tooth Fairy retires, the Fairy Council decides against passing the torch to her hard-drinking slacker daughter, Beagan. But they have to give Beagan SOME kind of job, so now she will learn what being a “maturation fairy” is all about. Tags: NoSex, TF, Holiday

I think I messed up; I now dimly recall that you’re not supposed to put the story in the archive until there’s at least 1 actual story to put in it. So @Deadman, if your piece will work at all as a standalone story, I say go for it.

Ok, did some more edits if anyone can run another test, Thanks.

I’ve put in some changes, please give it some more testing to see if there is improvement. Thanks some things don’t show as bugs due to my user perms, so user testing is very appreciated.

@GeorgeGlass what sort of punctuation? The filter code is pretty strict in order to stop malicious stuff.

Yeah, I just had 3 different things happen at the same time and it was extremely frustrating. There are a couple weird things in the past few weeks. If I could post under my own profile, I would have posted that way. But for whatever reason I don’t have that here. But I’m not necessarily as upset about that. I just needed a place to say it where I wouldn’t get problems.