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So, as I’m sure many have noticed, I’ve been busy trying to work myself to death for the past five years or so. So, in that time, I’ve worked ridiculous hours with very little time off, and often multiple shifts in a day. As a result, I was more than a little unproductive here. I retired the end of March, and spent the first fourish months doing nothing but sleep. Have one final test from my doctor on November 22nd, so should be done with all that shit for a bit as well by then. In the meantime, I am now checking all the email addresses I always did before, as I now have the time. Am easing back into the archive repair, minor hunting, and other things I did as well. Sorry for the absence, but, glad to be back

No prostate cancer for me! So that’s pretty good news to get just before Christmas.

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?

Y’all, my husband needs a warning label. I’m sitting here, sucking on a peppermint and minding my business with headphones on—the better to block out his party chat trash-talk—and I hear THIS: “You ain’t had pussy since you came out a pussy.” I don’t know who was laughing louder, the recipient of the burn, Cold, or me, but I very nearly had a Star-Brite lodged in my throat. This guy kills me.

So, with having BP issues, and having to get an echo cardiogram late November, I’ve been monitoring my food intake and what I eat, when I eat. I’ve also started exercising regularly. So instead of losing weight, I gained twelve pounds in the last 2 weeks. What the hell??😡

So I’ve been away for months now, and it was for what might honestly have been a stupid reason. Last Christmas, I’d wanted to submit a story called Meaningful Gifts, and I didn’t finish it on time. I took two weeks off in January, and actually managed to make a lot of progress on it, but I still didn’t finish. If I’d taken three weeks I probably would have finished it, but that didn’t happen. I was so deeply ashamed of not having anything to contribute that I felt like I couldn’t show my face around here, so I just disappeared. Recently, I’ve realized that maybe not successfully submitting a story, even if it’s a story people are waiting on, isn’t as bad as I thought, so if it’s ok, I think I’ll be coming by here more often. I’ll finish Meaningful Gifts eventually, but hopefully the fact that I didn’t manage it last year isn’t as bad as I feared. In the meantime, I’ll work on reviews for a few other people’s stories and just try to be more active here in general.

If you’re using it 2-3 times a day on lips, a month or so. If you’re writing critiques of your neighbor’s parking on the windshield, less than a week.

Kids these days will never experience many of the rites of passage my generation valued more than gold. For instance: saving up your allowance for three weeks during the summer so you can buy one of those giant plastic Pixie Stix at the public pool’s canteen and downing the whole thing in one go to use it as a snorkel and spending the rest of the month with a burning feeling in the back of your throat that tastes like cherries, chlorine, and stale pee. …those lucky saps.

This day 6 years ago, I landed in New York, my first time in the US. Hard to believe it was that long ago. That trip was when I saw snow for the first time. That was very exciting. Although I soon realised what a pain in the arse it is.

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.

Love this… (from a FB post I saw).

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 🤪

And now all I can picture is John Malkovich penning a letter while resting the paper on Uma Thuman’s back…

Would really like a portkey out of here. Or a timeturner?

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.

anyone have any advice on how to break a HORRIBLE, long standing writer’s block? 🙃

Just now, I saw something absolutely smoking hot on the internet. I mean, she was a seriously sexy beast—the kind of beauty I see in my dreams and drool over in centerfolds, regardless of whether I’m in public. If I encountered her on the street, I would absolutely embarrass myself, stare like a loon, and profess my undying adoration to her. A wolf-whistle, three muttered “damns,” and a couple of impressed tongue-clicks later, my husband gave in. Cold sighed, rolled his eyes, and grumbled, “just show me the car.” He knows me so well. 😆 It was, in fact, a classic muscle car—a ‘67 Oldsmobile Tornado. In my defense the lines on this bad girl are what wet dreams are made of, and I pity Cold for his lack of taste. It’s a sad way to live.

My phone doesn't always err on the side of salaciousness. Today, when I dictated the words “her deep cleavage,” it heard “her deep Cleveland.” Although admittedly, if America had cleavage, that's probably where it would be.

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.)

Happy FOURTH of July for those that celebrate it! 🎆 🎇 🧨

I was texting “Take your time" to a female coworker yesterday, and autocomplete tried to make it “Take your top off." This is why I don’t embrace AI.

When I was young, I didn’t appreciate just how much of adult life would be taken up with trying to answer the eternal question of “Is this shirt still damp or just cold?”. I can’t pretend to not be disappointed.

Wishing the very happiest of birthdays to @WillowDarkling All the best to my Neko-baby! Love you!

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.

It’s never an easy decision to make, but I’ve had to make it: all my active stories are now officially on hiatus. Nothing (very) bad’s happened – at least, this time around, nobody is dead, dying, or terminally ill. Life’s just thrown us a curveball and Cold and I are even busier than usual. Most days, I barely have the energy to handle day-to-day work, let alone time and energy to write. Heck, I haven’t even gotten anything written on my most recent chapter of my novel in a few months now; that’s how crazy it’s been lately. Since my fanfiction may not be updated anytime soon, I decided to head it off at the pass before readers start deciding I’m dead. ...yes. That’s always a possibility, considering how infrequently I can update. It sucks, but better to give myself permission to not write than continue to bludgeon the desktop with my head when my brain is too stress-fried to write. On FFN and AO3, I put notes in my current stories, and updated the summaries of the stories that have fallen by the wayside. AFF frowns on author’s notes as chapters, so I’m not sure where to go beyond adding something to the summaries. I hope the fanfiction writer’s curse has missed more of y’all than it’s hit, that spring is treating you well, and that this doesn’t last too many months. Now if any of y’all need me, I’ll be in my burrito-blanket muttering there’s no place like home and fuck-this-shit-I’m-out.

As it happens, I’ve been writing a story involving poker. In that story, the cards are marked with ink that can only be seen under a blacklight. This is done to prevent people cheating by having a literal ace up their sleeve. But you could do something else with the invisible ink. Maybe, at a random point during the came, the lights go out and the black light comes on, revealing that certain cards have something written on them. Maybe its a sexual act they have to perform, or a person they have to perform it with. Or maybe it’s the chips that are marked.

Maybe getting one character getting the other’s name slightly wrong? Something that’s eerily similar to another’s name?

Maybe she rubs an ice cube over her lover's lips before they kiss, and afterward says, "Mmm, I love them cold." This would be especially pause-worthy if she works in a morgue or a funeral home.

Hi, all. … would spreading your newspaper across her shoulder-blades to read while engaging in the act be a bit too much? Or perhaps using her breasts to prop up your smartphone but not using it for the camera? Cheers!

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.

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.

Hi, Deadman. GeorgeGlass would have no choice but to switch bold to ALL CAPS text. Using an “all-caps font” would see the font stripped and substituted for whatever font is actually used. Capital A is unicode 0041. Lowercase a is unicode 0061. So, the “lower case a that is a capital A in font x” will go back to a lowercase a. Thanks.

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?

So, the corgi who owns me, She Who Is an Agent of Chaos, decided to scare the life out of me this weekend with a marathon of vomiting followed by some bloody stool. She decided to do this at the lake, and only because the daft one was called into work, and left with the car. Cue Elderspawn who rode to the rescue on Sunday morning, drove up to collect me, the ailing corgi, and Youngerspawn, so we could camp out at the 24-hour emergency vet for three hours only to be told the vet had to leave, and wouldn’t be able to see us. I am, at this point, in tears. We realize our regular vet is now open, because the gods are kind, and so we head there, manage to get seen without an appointment, and head home with meds to await the results of tests today. Of course, we are told not to feed the corgi, which is apparently an Unforgiveable Sin and results in nonstop side-eye and much deep sighing. Your kids grow up and are able to do things like drive to your rescue. Your furbabies will be toddlers forever. This morning, I was able to feed the corgi. The bottomless pit cleverly disguised as an adorable fluffbutt picked at her breakfast, a meal normally devoured in 3.7 seconds. I’m going to be making chicken and rice for her this afternoon. I know my place.

Nice. I wrote a story called “Dil-Drones” about...well, you can probably guess.

Hi, all. … perhaps even more so if her name is Ethyl? Cheers!