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Yeah, so everyone pretty much covered everything about how much a review means to authors so I’ll just second that. It takes courage to put your words out there, and even after all this time, I still apologize for every chapter I post. Like just the fact that it’s out there is a crime and I’m sorry someone wasted their time reading it which means it’s always surprising when someone takes the time to actually review. But one thing on negative reviews, even the – this sucks variety. It’s taken me a long time to realize that no matter how hard you try, no story will be universally loved by all, so you have to have thick skin and be able to take the bad with the good if you are going to take that step and let other people read your story. I’m not saying that the people who leave those sorts of reviews aren’t Shitgibbons (that’s the term we’re using now, right?) just that they have an opinion and are free to express it. The nice thing about AFF is you can always rant in a reply thread in response to those sorts of things which I’ve heard is frowned upon when it’s done by published authors. At the end of the day, you either decide that you are writing for reviews (in which case you are going to end up disappointed in most cases) or you’re writing because it’s something you enjoy doing even without people singing your praises. That being said, I love reviews just like anyone else because I’m a writer and nothing makes a writer’s day like hearing that someone likes their story. CL

My bad—I misunderstood. The up side to writing erotica about characters who are never portrayed in sexual situations is that you have a lot of latitude. Bossy characters might also be bossy in bed—or the bedroom might be the one place where they’d rather relax and let their partner take control. The dark, gloomy character might secretly be a romantic. You just have to find a rationale for the character to behave the way you think they should.

You know, I kinda like the ocean wildlife, I’m not in the mood to poison those helpless creatures.

Good luck with that. I don’t have access to Word. I will note that repagination when you have autosaves in LibreOffice tends to slow or gum things up when your file gets bigger than 50k words. Inserted art hurts too. I turn off autospellcheck while I’m working on my draft and slow saves to 10 minutes and it stopped crashing. Repagination and spelling take too many resources I think. I turn spelling back on for editing.

I couldn’t get on with libreoffice. It seemed to freeze up on trying to select words for spell check, luckily I found my old Microsoft office cd today and have just re-installed. Haven’t had time to write for a while again, but fingers crossed soon!

I do not like winter storms, at all. I most certainly didn’t ask for 8 to 12 inches of snow, with strong winds and gusts up to forty miles an hour. For our metric users, which is most of the world, this is 20 to 30 cm of snow, and wind gusts of 64 kph.

I’m agreeing wholeheartedly with your entire post as I stare at my own self-indulgent worlds of creation. I don’t even try to convince myself otherwise, I just keep devouring the words. At least this isn’t a whole world of chocolate…

Yes! Yes! It happens to me! *throws a comradely arm around Noumena* Come with me, friend! We shall be the founding members of the “Watch Out” forum group.You’re quite safe with me, I promise… ignore what I said on the other topic. Really… More seriously, I am guessing that some odd entry in a table somewhere that describes our profile is slightly corrupted. The solution works. I haven’t noticed any other words doing this, and I’ve had this trouble for months. It’s not worth the hassle of finding the bug out. We’re obviously special, lol. ETA: You will also find it happens in PMs and status updates.

Yep. Welcome to fanfiction *g* It’s as natural as breathing. Really. Someone who has been through shit with you is an even more eligible candidate. Harsh situations create bonding. The same way it happens in life. Have you ever had a workplace romance? If you haven’t, were you ever tempted? What about friends… have you ever just got it together with a friend to see what would happen? Did you carry it on into a FWB situation? Sorry – I know these are personal questions, I don’t expect you to answer them except to yourself. The point is, do you ever look back on some affair or other and wonder what possessed you? Regardles of whether alcohol was involved, the answer is almost always proximity – that’s what possessed you. If you leave two people alone together for long enough… it’s inevitable. The same is true of characters. They’re people, just like us. And especially with friends, if you tend to be quite tactile with them, sometimes sex doesn’t have lots of rings around it and warning bells, it just happens.

That technique works for me too, and it is such a clever solution. It’s like using the problem against itself. It may take more of that clever thinking to imagine an explanation for this issue. It’s good to know that this isn’t happening only to me, and at least now I can type watch, even if it is a bit awkward.

This is exactly why erotic fan fiction is so exciting and generic porn is so boring. Generic porn excludes everything that makes sex interesting by using flat and undeveloped characters, while erotic fan fiction exploits characters that you already know to create fascinating sexual situations. If we can just stay true to the characters in our fanfics then we’ve already won because any sex they have will automatically be interesting. It is sex between characters that we know, so it can’t fail to be interesting. The hard part is finding a good excuse to make the sex happen. Sometimes you can spend hours studying canon looking for an opening. If two characters have never shown a hint of attraction for each other, then convincing yourself that your fanfic about them having sex is true to their characters can be challenging. It can be especially disheartening when you see a particularly somber episode and start to wonder if the characters having sex would be disrespectful to all that they have been through together. Is flirting even an option with someone who has fought hard-won battles at your side? How does someone transition from a long-time companion into a sexual partner?

I felt the same way, CL. I could not stop reading that story, and I hated seeing it end. It certainly wasn’t anything resembling a happy ending, but it worked for the characters, and it worked for me. I’m so buying that when it’s released.

*crosses fingers* *crosses toes* *eventually ties self in knots and fall off of chair* … thud!

I’m a writer, and so wasting time comes with the hobby, but the time I’ve spent reading your stories was never wasted. For the record, for me Backdoor Politics, the whole Kamal/Zijad thing was one of those perfect things… I’ll remember it forever. I’m only sorry it had to end.

And now I’m staying logged in in-between sessions.^_^

Donald Trump… Get in the effing sea!

Hey, just so everyone knows I’m still alive, just been occupied with real world problems, sorry for the delay but writing again so hopefully it won’t be too long. And wow, ok I’ll try and answer what I can 1) the timeline is a bit screwy and vague because I meant to insinuate he went around the horn. Yep and thats why they flew, again probably need to address that but I just kind of left it to the reader O2 generation wasn't the main problem, it was CO2 removal which is done with scrubbers, it was the scrubbers that failed. one way to combat that is to add pure O2 to try and normalize the ratio. The sub has tracks, kind of like a large tank so it gets as close to shore as it can then creeps in on tracks true water expansion is faster than sound waves under water but thats for water under pressure. This would be an explosion at the bottom of the ice shelf with him well below the explosion. The wave propagation will slow as it travels into denser water. And remember Legion is an avatar so wherever there is a large enough collection of nannies, say some Max brought with him, he can download himself and group the nannies as a body. Also the reason he didn’t just kill everyone with nannies is that Max wanted to find out who was behind the attacks before he started killing people. it takes the nannies time to infiltrate, time they didn’t quite have And finally its a sic fi so because LOL

I do believe one of our moderators was having the same issue. I use Chrome, and haven’t had that issue, so far. But she solved it by typing the word twice in quick succession: watchwatch. One would disappear, leaving her with watch.

Pippy, Everything you said was so friggin apt. Every single word. If I tried to add to this discussion I’d probably just be repeating your points lol. So I’ll just say ‘Shitgibbon’, because that’s a word that needs repeating. Thank you for that btw BW.

Oh, I agree, reviews are wonderful! When I stop to think about it, I enjoy the process of writing so much and so often that reviews reassure me I’m not being merely self-indulgent. Even though, truth be told, I’d be quite happy to be self-indulgent. But when someone wants to know what happens next, or discusses the story with others, it’s a great feeling. But, I think I’ve said before my favourite reviews are those where I get to see the reader’s reaction, and they tell me how reading made them feel. Maybe it’s silly, but especially the darker fiction I’ve written seems to have a life of its own away from my keyboard. I’ve had reviews (and private emails) for some of my work that make me realise I’ve left an impression on someone forever, and that feels better than good. It feels like the creative process really worked in that instance, for that one person, and it’s bigger than me. Those reviews aren’t left for me, they’re left for the story. If I ever made you frightened, or made you cry. If I broke your heart, or healed it. If I made you laugh, or even take yourself off in private… these are things that have no price. They mean that my stories will probably outlive me, obscure as they are. What happened once will happen again and again. I couldn’t ask for more than that. In these times, creative writing seems more important than ever, especially in a community like this one, where it isn’t done for monetary gain. Maybe it’s just that I’m getting on, but more and more people seem to delight in showing others how ugly their soul is these days. Everyone seems determined not to care about anything or anyone. I don’t need to point at those people. You all know who they are. Even the darkest things you write are never ugly. They might be frightening, monstrous, brutal, violent and painful, but they aren’t ugly like that. They are all part of the same thing, after all. If you can make someone feel something, anything, you’re a success. No matter how many (or how few) reviews you recieve. Like others have said, I’m quite introverted too. I don’t know if that means anything. Certainly, it makes us more inclined to reflection, and I think that is quite important if you want to write well.

Oh, surely not…*g* Erotic fiction is a challenge in its own right, fanfiction or original. I’ve seen too many professional authors stumble over their erotic scenes to doubt it. You can almost see the cringe they had while they were writing. Erotica demands a lot from a writer, and you can’t be afraid of exposure. I think you have to put a lot of yourself into it for the characters’ sake, and draw on all of your experience (sexual or otherwise), without being self-conscious in the slightest. As if you were taking your experience and lending it to them without conditions. If there is embarrassment, self-consciousness or giggling, then that had better be coming from the characters, not yourself. You don’t even need to be vastly experienced to do this, since any gaps can be bridged via deductive leaps, but you must do it. Character and sexual writing are all tied up together. If you want to write good erotica, as opposed to generic porn, you need to make the characters drives and motivations as much a part of the sex as the physical act itself. Why do they want it? How long have they wanted it for? How much (or how little) does it mean to them? The easiest way to describe what I mean is to think in terms of RL. Say, if we have a sexual encounter, we don’t draw solid lines around it and section it off from the rest of our life forever. Nor can we, because depending on the circumstances, there may be consequences to face. The same is true of fictional characters. Sometimes, sex just happens. It’s natural. It happens to you, just the same as it will happen to them. To be brutally honest here, I often find the lack of sex drive in characters off-putting in a show. The lines around what is acceptable sexual tension and what they refuse to write/produce/show often makes the characters and their world seem stilted and grey to me.The world is not sterile. If the whole human race danced around each other endlessly like that, we’d never reproduce. As much as I still resent RT Davies for killing my best man off (sniffles), at least he’s never shied away as a writer from creating fully formed characters, complete with normal sex lives/drives. Hell, that he does create such great characters is one of the reasons I’m so annoyed at their sudden death. Once you’ve thought about all those things, then you can consider the technicalities of writing sexually (tension, pacing, rhythm, word choice and so forth). And, if you’re a woman writing m/m slash, that’s a whole other can of worms to pick through and research to be done. Although I do think that if you’ve done the earlier groundwork, as above, then you can still be very convincing, even if you don’t know exactly how the male orgasm feels.

I didn’t mean to say that at all. Quite the contrary, I think making the characters believable is the only serious challenge of writing a erotic fanfic. Writing an erotic fanfic is easier in other ways, but characterization is one area where being erotic does not help and so it is foremost in my mind. I am binge watching to try to find a good way to get the characters to do the things I want them to do, and it is all because it is so important to be faithful to the characters. In an ordinary fanfic you’re putting the characters through an adventure, and that invites direct comparison with the source material. It raises the question: if my fanfic were an episode of the show, would it be one of the better episodes, or one of the worse episodes? For an ordinary fanfic that is a huge challenge to overcome on top of making the characters believable. For an erotic fanfic there is no comparison with the source material because your fanfic could never be an episode of the show. Instead of trying to do what the show does and replicate what makes the show great, we’re trying to do something the show could never do and so we don’t have to try to replicate any greatness. We still have the challenge of bringing the characters to life, but that seems tame by comparison. There are other ways to make fanfic writing easier. Instead of writing an erotic adventure for characters of a show or movie that you like, you could write a fanfic for a video game. Even excellent video games are traditionally quite weak in their stories, so even if you don’t have any great ideas for your fanfic’s story you can still often improve upon the source material. A long time ago I once wrote a fanfic for a card game; the game had practically no story at all so it had to be mostly my own ideas, but I knew that no matter how mediocre my ideas might be they were still going to be worth writing because they were a better story than the game had to offer.