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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.

I’m juggling a lot of stuff in my life right now, from watching shows people want me to watch (Frieren most recently) to trying to overcome fears about my appearance to sign up for a dating site, but I hope there are still some people around here. I feel bad that I don’t post things as often as I did when I showed up here...six and half years ago now. I may not be one of the OGs, but I’ve been here a while, haven’t I? 😄 The good news is that I actually have a new story in the works! I’ve finished the first chapter, and will keep working on it. I don’t really want to start posting it until I’m done, but it’s a sci-fi/adventure fanfic and I had a lot of fun with that first chapter. In broader terms, I hope people here are doing as well as they can. I know I don’t show up as often as I’d like, but I think about you guys a lot! 🙂

The saddest little face in the world…

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.

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.

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.

Love this… (from a FB post I saw).

I know it is a first world problem, my life is not in danger and no one is trying to kidnap me off the street, but dealing with FAFSA under this regime is beyond frustrating! Are we great yet?

Earlier tonight, I fed one of my non-fanfiction short stories through Pro Writing Aid’s “chapter critique” to see how it measures up against my fanfiction. I never thought I’d see the day when AI would smut-shame me. Yep. Seriously. “…some might find the level of detail in the sex scenes excessive.” What if I don’t wanna associate with that sort of person, huh? Fade to black is for wishy-washy people and FFN, not my filthy shapeshifter plowfest. Stay in your lane or bend over.

Happy Birthday!

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

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.

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.

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.

Awhile back, someone on a random Reddit post suggested I might be neurodivergent. I’d only heard the term used for people with autism – yes, I live under a rock – so my initial response was disgruntlement. My husband, after all, is autistic, and I had a mental image of the time he met my prudish religious neighbor for the first time and made a joke about his dick; if we were both that awkward outwardly instead of just on the inside, we’d be a right mess. There was also a sidenote of, “shit, I’m even more fucked up than Cold, how dare this person compare him to me? He doesn’t deserve that insult!” indignance. Come to find out “neurodivergent” applies to several diagnoses and disabilities; it applies to most (any?) condition resulting from deviations in how the brain is wired...including mine. Apparently, I am neurodivergent. So is Cold. So many things make sense now. That Redditor was right and I had no idea. That said...I’ve been editing a chapter of my novel with Boney M.’s “Rasputin” playing on repeat for...uh...an hour? ...or three? Because it’s stuck in my head? Okay, so maybe there were signs. Maybe.

This is more of an issue for me on the reader side of things. There was a story I was curious about which I kinda wanted to read but the formatting of the first couple chapters is off. I looked at some of the later chapters and they seem to fix it later but I’m a little put off by the first several chapters. Would it be considered bad of me to point this out to the author? I feel it’s probably better to do one on one but I’m not sure how to go about doing that. Rather than get a moderator or admin involved in it directly. I could write a review but that feels too public and somewhat mean.

Try setting your theme (option in footer) to AFF NEW, which is the redone theme, if you don’t mind dark themes Bravo 6.

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.

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.

Adding a WIP tag is personal choice. I’m happy to do it for you, of course, but we aren’t sticklers about WIP or COMPLETE. I do know some readers like those tags, though.

May the fourth be with you all!

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.

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).

2k words today

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.

Did anyone else want to do Winter 2024? If not I’ll post it ere when I get back from my shift lol.

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.

44469 Woo, finally I got me some 69!

Apostrophe… it’s ASCII number is 39.

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

Thank you.

Anybody know why modern book covers tend to be well… Bland and boring? Like we had these amazing sword and sandal covers and now its well bluh.

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.