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I’m in the middle of writing something and I noticed that I have been very unstructured in how I refer to a particular character. They’re the mayor of a town and in canon we know their full name. But when I write about them I often use just a piece of their name. For instance: “Mayor John Smith says” “Mayor Smith declares” “Mayor John suggests” “says John Smith” Part of me worries that while I have established their full name within the context, if I’m constantly switching like that, I might confuse the audience. How do you go about figuring out this problem? Or do you not worry about it?

I think it largely depends on whether or not referring back to the one-shot chapter would be sufficient to bring readers up to speed. There’s also the question of new readers, who might not have read your Scooby Gang Time story.

Apologies for not noticing this sooner. I’d suggest keeping it consistent and in context. If you’ve got a (real) friend of the mayor, they go fishing, might be like… > “That’s a beauty.” John pointed at the large striped bass beneath the water. Or in the speech, especially if it’s multiparagraph, you might not need to overly annotate either. > Mayor John Smith spoke. » I’m not a man prone to superstition, therefore, we’ll go ahead with paving over the Indian burial grounds for a Walmart. » This strikes way for progress! Though, suppose in slander, could be “The Mayor’s office has gone to the John”

I’ve moved this post to a more appropriate thread. Now to the question. The first thing is to identify the best websites for your content. For example, certain sites have content restrictions. Here on AFF, our Terms of Service and Content Guidelines are pretty clear, and spell out what we do and don’t allow. But if a site doesn’t allow, for example, fiction based on actual persons or celebrities, posting a story about a real person or celebrity isn’t going to go over well. Once you’ve figured out what site or sites best suit your content, you need to make sure your story is going to attract readers and hold their attention. If you are able to post a summary, make it catchy. Spend a bit of time reading book summaries and blurbs to see what the professionals do. PROOFREAD AND FORMAT your story. Nothing is a bigger turn-off than typos, misused words, missing punctuation, poor grammar (unless it’s required for a piece of dialogue), and walls of text. I’ve put down published books that I paid for, and refused to finish reading them because of poor editing. You might be posting something online for free, but I truly think you still need to polish your story. Some sites, like AFF, have forums or community boards where you can promote your story. If that’s available, use it. Include the catchy blurb, story tags, and all the other things that might catch a reader’s attention. AFF does not support cover images in the archive, and we don’t allow images in the forum that are NSFW, but some sites do allow cover images. We use our forums to allow readers to engage with authors, while other sites let you reply to reviews directly. That’s what comes to mind for now.