Desiderius Price

In some fandoms, tagging the relationship’s crucial too. So, maybe add that new warning in (quietly) for the entire story? Hopefully the readers forgot about it until the scene/chapter?

On this archive (or AO3), always, always list trigger tags. While yes it’s technically a spoiler, you don’t want to surprise your readers with a “surprise” rape scene or something.

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Aw, was assuming a single story. Summaries for oneshots is appropriate, obviously don’t spoil the entire oneshot in the summary. Nothing irks me more than youtube demanding to spoil a show’s season I’ve yet to watch

It varies on how I write… but it’s more adhoc than Harry joining a nudist club. Jeff (original) is closer. I’d presume it’s reflect regular society… some shave below, some prefer it short on top, some do both, and some leave it natural.

TBH… I usually don’t do much for chapter descriptions. There’s the story summary… and maybe a good cliffhanger.

Not sure, haven’t really taken a comprehensive survey. A quick google search… lots of “data points” to “sift” through Nah, it’s more about having a tendency to mention the pubic hair as it’s a fast reminder that the character is, indeed, naked without dropping the word. Though now that we’re talking about it, going to have to make sure I describe pubic hair in the next paragraph I write in my story

I refrain from spoilers… let the readers discover it as they read. Now, you can lay down a hint for the more clever folks, but I’d be annoyed if the author “spoiled” the plot TBH.

A number of my characters are nudists, so it comes up more frequently.

Hmm… I might be describing pubic hair more than the stuff on top of my character’s heads. Anyways, searching for the word “hair”, I seem to have 4-6 paragraphs per chapter describing hair (not counting paragraphs with “chair” or “pubic” in their words) in the last hundred chapters or so of my potter fanfic.

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For potter fanfic, there’s plenty of online things for Hogsmeade, Diagon Alley & Hogwarts… outside of that, I do the same thing I do with originals. Select a real place, permute the name so it’s fictional, and that typically gives me close enough so I can add things as necessary. (Also, on the odd chance my story hits success with TV/films, keeps fans from flooding a real person’s house/business). Of course, originals and the potter basically take place in modern society, so that’s why my trick works. If it’s fictional-fictional, like game of thrones, well, all bets are off, but that’s not what I’m typically writing outside of dream-like sequences (or inside fictional video games).

Google maps has me beat for details. And in the originals, I now tend to cruise for online blueprints of something close to what I want, make a couple of “alterations” notes wise, and use that. (That’s what I did for my demon story.) Still, having a rough idea of the house/building helps me keep the details consistent, so a bit of time sketching is usually a good investment. That’s my chaotic process.

I try to never delete anything, and write things down...even if it’s 100 chapters in the future in terms of plot. A half scene, even if I know I’ll rewrite later, is nirvana in terms of having goal posts to write toward. I’d hand sketch out maps/blueprints, still good years later, notes, etc in spiral notebooks. I’ve still got the spreadsheet I started two decades ago, and that really helps. Having a naming system for the files helps too, thus I typically use something like YYMMDD-description.txt for the various snippets, which is, again, really useful in the rewrite many years later. It is funny to think that I’ve been working on this story for decades, and will likely still be working on it for decades to come… however, it’s nice that it’s being reworked into a much better story IMO.

Even if you don’t post, I find writing background snippets helps immensely. Especially if you put the project on hiatus, come back to it years later. With my Harry Potter fanfic, I did that with key meetings even if they weren’t part of the actual narrative. I’d write up a minutes to the “Death Eaters” meetups, breakdown of what everybody knew, how they wanted to adapt their strategy. Funny enough, that’s a bit OOC compared to canon where the DEs seem to have an inflexible plan that Harry always fell into anyways. After a couple of comments from readers a bit perplexed, I had leveraged those minutes to create “Seeker/Keeper” scenes, short snippets that showed a touch of the conspiracy w/o revealing too much of it.

One idea… write up that first seduction as a oneshot short story, and make it a prequel. If it’s original and you can center it around Halloween or the Winter holidays, it’d be a great addition to the annual round robin. (Alternatively, you can *start* a similar round robin in your particular fandom.)

Dawson Springs, KY. 42408

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What? That’s limiting… More seriously, I learned by doing it wrong in my first original story (now deleted). I crammed it with so much backstory/flashback that I confused my readers and myself. On reflection, I realized I basically had multiple stories in one. So, I spun one backstory off as a regular chaptered story (complete), and the other off as an episodic serial (still WIP). And working on a second episodic to explain where the main protagonist’s swimming instructor came from, so yeah, gotta cut backstory off at a point or it’ll explode with plot bunnies and you’ll never get back around to writing the story you intended to write in the first place.

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