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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?

For October, I’ve been quietly rolling out small bug fixes, most are just performance based. Two user side ones -Site based e-mails are now fixed (turns out this was not a code based bug, fixed as of this post) - Bold text has returned to stories. DG is going to be doing some proofreading and squishing typo gremlins.

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

Story info editing has been fixed.

Not exactly a fandom but a book. I won’t read it. I live on my own these days and nobody makes the long trip up the hill to visit anymore so I have a pretty good idea what I’ve got in the house, and I know for a fact I did not buy that book. I certainly didn’t borrow it from the library. (They are good people there, the librarians, dedicated, and they have standards even in these days when their power and their glory is unknowingly ignored by so many). Sometimes it’s on the shelf. Sometimes it’s on the table. I’ve seen it in the kitchen cupboard and I found it in the attic when I went to investigate the noise (a swallow had got in, and driven to panic by the tome wished to get out. I helped it. Of course I did. I’m no monster no matter what the villagers said). The cover has a nice blue, though the face that gazes from it is not appealing and speaks of an unhealthy appetite, of wealth gained too young. The pages rifle pleasingly in the breeze, even in a still room. I don’t care. Offer me what you may. Tempt me, taunt me. I can’t be bought, or broken. The line is drawn, underlined, surrounded by unevenly doodled pentagrams, in both black, and in red. I’m never gonna fucking read "May I Have Your Attention Please?" the autobiography of James Corden. This I swear by the old gods, the new, and those yet to come.

I’m a dedicated depantser 🤪

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.

Whatever it is, it's really gnawing at my obsessive side. >.> It seems that the problem only happens to things that are edited. But whatever is added in the very first instance, seems to work properly. Anyone who wants to have a clean description or tags, be sure to make the first post count.

Honestly, I think we’re WAY beyond that point by now… I think they’re in the fucking software… they’re in the fucking closet, trying on our heels, sparkly dresses and our favourite lipstick at this point.

Guessing that’s what caused the issues in the first place!

You know the old adage: “Do not invoke that which you cannot banish.”

Don’t we have a whole bunch of writers who are obsessed with gremlins and other magical creatures that cause chaos? Maybe they have some kind of magic spell?

I am so in accordance with this. All of this. (Except the living on my own, which is something I aspire to with all my heart.)

Hi, Deadman and all. Generally, you should use the name of a character to clarify identities where they might otherwise be confused. Remember, unlike a [visual production of any kind,] your reader only has your writing to help them picture the scene. As for how you address the character’s identity “outside of quotation marks,” you should generally stick to a single unambiguous name for the character in third-person perfect or unidentified third-person imperfect. In identified third person imperfect or first person, your labeling of a particular character is that supplied by your “viewpoint” character. As a rule, you must be consistent in third-person perfect, and you should be consistent in other tenses. However, deliberate changes can indicate changes in opinion by the viewpoint character or observer. Inside of quotation marks, the character themselves will govern how the particular character is identified or addressed. Cheers!

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.

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”.

The technical limit would be a @manta2g or @DemonGoddess type of question, and it’d be in bytes, not words. I know we’ve had some of the annual halloween/holiday round-robin submissions where it’s 50k max for the rules, but that’s more of a reader tolerance limit IMO. In comparison, AO3 limits it to 500k characters, and FFN limits your documents to 5MB (and will stop adding to the word count at 65k words).

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’m not exactly a master author myself, but that said my advice is that to get everything across you need depth. For that, you need more than just 1 chapter. Which, unfortunately for you, means more work.

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

Feeling jolly? No? Well let’s fix that, shall we? Welcome to AFF’s 2024 Winter Holiday party! Contributions to this festive anthology must be: A complete oneshot (less than 45k words) Original fiction Holiday themed (any December-ish holiday: Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Festivus, you name it) Tagged with all applicable warnings at the top of the story So grab a hot beverage and anything with a keyboard, and let’s story-party! https://original.adult-fanfiction.org/story.php?no=600110499

Ah, okay. Well, I’m glad you’re using the medium of fanfic to take the story in a direction that the show probably won’t.

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.

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

Since I doofishly posted the story in the archives before anyone had an actual story to put in it, I just added the URLs of the last few Winter Holidays to it.

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.

Hmm, I almost want to post my story here even though it’s not totally finished just for the heck of it. Mainly because it has Santa in it. I am on Chapter 6 of an 11 part and the first part does focus on Christmas.

44469 Woo, finally I got me some 69!

Apostrophe… it’s ASCII number is 39.

That’s exactly right, BW. You can only be logged in on ONE device at a time.

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.

Thank you.

Chapter 1 of “The Business of Pleasure” is posted! The Business of Pleasure After the fall of the Soviet Union, a Lithuanian photographer is struggling to make ends meet—until he is visited by a single mother and her daughter. Located : Erotica > Het - Male/Female Content Tags : 3Plus Anal Bi Exhib FF Fingering Inc MF Minor1 Minor2 Oral Violence I’m also pleased to note that ngo465’s ripoff of “Enter the Sandboy” is no longer up on FFN.

Like I said, I sometimes use it for emphasis, mainly when the text is already italicized (eg, because it’s a character’s thoughts). Also, chapter titles.

Right. Since bolding doesn’t show up on AFF, what I’m looking for is a macro that can turn bolded text (which I sometimes use for emphasis) into ALL-CAPS TEXT throughout a document. I’ve written macros that can make lots of other kinds of systematic formatting changes, but changing the case of letters is a bit beyond me.

Should we be worried that the Gremlins might get into the wires and eats the connections?

I wish there was a workaround. Unfortunately, no one’s found one yet, so we have to wait for whatever coding gremlins have infested the archive to be properly banished (which is impossible when a corgi decides we’re supposed to give her all our supper).

Eww… yeah, that’s not the right name for those parents! IIRC, it was “Linda” and “Charles” in mine, the origin eludes me ATM. Though, I did make use of Radcliffe, Watson, & Grint names in a scene where Harry, Ron, & Hermione were getting piles upon piles of hate mail, so some of that was misaddressed to the actors too

Hi, all. I’m a bit late to this, but I decided to add my thoughts. I would generally have to agree with you on bringing “real life people” into a fictional story. B is right out. For “C,” I might bring a “personality trait” into the mix. But while I’ve seen the trait or behavior in real life, neither you nor even the person themselves will realize that I “copied” the trait, and only that trait, from them. There lies the way to lawsuits. My “A” is only slightly more expansive than yours. Since I’m using a real-life set of locations, I also need to be very careful with people holding real-life positions. In fact, my disclaimer explicitly disclaims non-historic actions by historic or public figures. I have one celebrity help the main protagonists in one story. That celebrity’s actions were entirely consistent with how he would have behaved in real life under the same circumstances, and were entirely favorable without any potential slight. That celebrity might be joined by one or two more under the exact same circumstances. None of the “celebrities” know anything about the more “interesting” details of the protagonists’ lives. I’ve also named two different famous local politicians as “background” characters. Their indirectly mentioned conduct is entirely consistent with the “non-criticized” portions of their publicly reported actions and behavior during the time-frames mentioned. In the case of one of the politicians, I invented entirely fictitious additional members of their family who did not exist in real life. I’ve also replaced scores of real-life people with entirely fictitious counterparts even when the behavior of the “replaced” persons appearing in my story were entirely honest, honorable, skillful, consistent with real-life, and beyond any reproach. It’s just easier to do things that way then it is to try (and almost certainly fail) to describe an “almost famous” person I never met from forty years ago without getting sued. I do “reference” the occasional real life villain here and there. In those cases, their real-life villainy was well-known, as in front-page headlines, and followed up by felony convictions. Any non-historical villainy they get up to is entirely consistent with their real-life behavior at the times and places where it takes place. That will also hold true for my Harry Potter fanfiction. Since I’m using a real time-frame for the stories, and since I’m using real-life locations, using historical people (gently) is nearly unavoidable, as well as using real-life positions filled with fictional replacements. The most annoying “reference” I see in HP fanfiction, and I see it all the time, is using the first names of Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson as the first names for Hermione Granger’s parents. JKR never even named those two characters, much less had them appear directly; so I get that you have to call them something. But using the names of the actors who play Harry and Hermione in the movies to (not so subtly) claim that Harry and Hermione were only right to date or marry each other is just too heavy-handed for me. Plenty of great fanfiction authors do this in great stories. Plenty of not so great fanfiction authors do this, too. In the case where I had to give the Grangers names, I used the first names of the actors who played them in the movies, and there were actors who played the Granger parents to a sufficient degree that they had to be named and credited. Ian Kelly and Michelle Fairley played the Grangers in Deathly Hallows Part One. Tom Knight and Heather Bleasdale from CoS would also work. Cheers!

I’m a dedicated pantser. I do have an idea of the basic story, but characters tend to get away from time to time.

As I understand it, the one-shot is a single chapter in the multi-chapter Scooby Gang Time story. If that’s the case, I’m going to say that the site rules wouldn’t prohibit taking that single chapter and using it to start the spinoff story. I would just ask that you stick a little note somewhere, even as a footnote author’s note to the chapter, that this was originally a one-shot in Scooby Gang Time, and it took on a life of its own. You can add a link to the original story as well.

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”

Maybe the chips could be stacked into a dildo. The more you win, the longer it is.