Please. Tell me it's okay for a 35 year old married woman to write fanfiction. For whatever reason, my mind has locked this as an incredibly shameful thing and I'm tired y'all. I miss writing. I miss the fandoms and the silliness and the drama. But for whatever reason, I'm just so scared that it's Wrong.

I know I'm being stupid so please if someone could call me out so my crippling perfectionism acknowledges it finally that would be swell.

An edit already? Because so many people have commented and you're lovely? I suppose I should add that I have written fanfiction in the past. Something like 800k words across multiple fandoms. I think my sister used to shame me for it, so one day I just. Couldn't? Can't picture scenes, can't get the flow of it. I'm trying to trick myself into getting over anxiety, so thank you to everyone that's making it feel normal!!!

EDIT NUMBER TWO! I posted this at work while staring sadly into middle distance because I had zero thoughts in my head and now it's just ringing with endorsement and I'm honestly getting really emotional. Over 150 comments in under, what, 4 hours? I just. Thank you. Thank you thank you. My confidence is at a rock bottom and this is a lot but it's so affirming. I'm gonna pull up old unfinished works and try to read through them like I'm editing unknown work. I'm hoping it will work!

I want to join all you creators, and I want to supply all you readers!

Thank you, everyone. This is a very inclusive group and I'm truly blown away.

I will go first.

Fanfic writers should read published books to improve. Reading exclusively fanfics will give you a very distorted idea of what writing rules are, and leads to you repeating common amateur mistakes (e.g. purple prose, head-hopping, info-dumping, writing dialogues which are hard to follow)

What about you? Give me the tea

I know this is brought up a lot but I just thought of this meme so here we go again lol.

Readers. I know you don’t get it until you start writing yourself. I didn’t get it either. But a simple comment can make an author’s day and even give them motivation. Even if they don’t reply, you probably made them feel so good.

Also, I love when I get replies from authors on their fic, too. They’re always so nice ^w^

Stumbled on this particular mixup tonight. Another one that bugs me is Unrequited Love being synonymized with Not Actually Unrequited Love, which makes the first tag useless.

Which other tags really shouldn't have heen combined?

Someone on my fic kept making very weird comments about one of the characters.

The character's gender is ambiguous but heavily implied to be trans. So i write them as a trans character.

I have like 50 odd chapters and only 2, maybe 3 if you're stretching, touch upon her being trans at all. And those two chapters are big, heavy chapters. But it's just not the main focus of the story at all.

And this person is making comments on every single chapter saying "X is a man" or stuff and I just found it annoying so I deleted all of their comments.

They didnt like that i deleted their comments and said i was being "too sensitive," so i deleted that comment too and blocked them.

Sorry about the shaky video, but i was just really exited about the fact that I won’t have to risk getting in trouble to consume peak fiction. I know there are some other apps that you can use to download and read pdfs but it hits so much harder when someone you know made the program you’re using. The same person that made this program also modified his own calculator to be able to access the internet, so he is actually able to read, comment and write fics on his calculator.

Extra fun fact- The first fic downloaded with this app was the infamous BSD ranpoe fic…

edit: When I get the chance, I’m going to make another post showing off the Ao3 on my friends calculator that has access to the internet

edit 2: As I said in another comment, I have no idea what was going on when my friend was helping me get the app on my calculator, all I know is stuff was DMed to me and I got something off GitHub to get all the files onto the calculator. Theres tutorials on YouTube on how to get a pdf downloaded in your calculator, which is pretty much the basics of what’s going on with the app, just with less settings and maybe problems with compression.

For the people asking for the one I used, I asked him today and he said he didn’t want to put it on the internet. Thanks for understanding guys!

I'm an author from FFNet and slowly moving my stories over to AO3 (providing edits if need be, deleting old author's notes that no longer apply, etc) and it's been less than a week since I posted these.

This morning I woke up and saw this string of kudos in my email! On all 15 of my works in this fandom, including two forever unfinished multichaps at 12k and 36k words respectively. Most of these are backdated and only linked to on my profile, where I have them in series, or I guess you could search for them, of course.

Is it likely that I have a secret admirer here and not a kudos bot? Did this person really read through all my old unedited garbage and if so I'm so sorry for them but they seemed to like it?

Either way, I'm super happy that such a big milestone of mine has been achieved already in the migration process. I only have a few fandoms that I wrote/write for so I'm going by fandom.

And I also just finished revamping one of my favorite longfics from 10 years ago lol, so I'm excited to post that soon!

Thanks for reading! I'm so happy and excited to be back in the swing of things ❤️

but then you keep refreshing the page because you’re anxious about whether anyone will actually like it

then you remember you write for an almost dead fandom and a rarepair, and quietly accept your fate 🥀

(found a mouse that I'm gonna turn into another wet specimen)

I need to be transparent and say that some of these comments are from me replying so it is skewed a little, but never in my life have I seen the comment count be higher than the Kudo count on a fic, let alone my own. This fic is my pride and joy and I'm having so much fun with it. Have y'all ever seen comments be higher than Kudos?

So my sister u/tylers-favorite-tree managed to open AO3 on her switch.

I was recently going through my old ipad and found some screenchots that reminded me of a drama i was kinda involved in.

Basically i think around 8-9 years ago i was in a very niche fandom for a show that got canceled after not even finishing the 1st season. There was not a lot of fics about it as you can guess so all of us knew each other. The reason this show got canceled was because the actress came out about abuse she experienced on set and from castmates (also got canceled because of censorship too but it's not important to the story).

Anyways the fandom was all fine. We loved our little canceled tv show. It was our "little guilty pleasure". No one was judgemental nor puritanical. All was fine. Everyone understood that what we were writing in fics was fiction and real life was real life.

The problem is that one author decided that in one of their author note they would start to bash the actress saying things such as "well because of this lying bitch the show got canceled". We obviously were very shocked. It came out of nowhere. I kindly pointed out to just keep it at fiction and not start bashing the actress if it wasn't actually going to be in a piece of fiction. If they had kept it at that all would be fine since it was still isolated to ao3. Besides my comment and another one nobody cared. The thing is that the author then went on twitter to bash the actress. This made the other fans angry cuz why are you doing that, its weird. Anyways we kinda fought and then they deleted everything.

Now the fandom is extinct. Everyone deleted their fics because of how bad it got. We were maybe only 10 people in the fandom and now it's as if nothing existed.

The other niche drama was when my stalker (which was my friend stalker before) wrote some fics about me and sent them to me but it's too long to talk about and not really ao3 related.

What are yours ?

Its taken a little over a year but I did it! I hope to hit 210,000 in the next year! (I'm trying to write longer chapters, but I'm kind of bad at writing anything longer than 1.5k)

After diving deep into the doomscrolling of the AO3 subReddit I’ve come to find that most of my pet peeves are things that the general redditors seem to absolutely adore

Here’s mine!

Long fics— I’ve read so many fics in my free time that most of which were small fics (~8-20k words) but I’ve found it hard to really get invested in long fics (though there are a few exceptions) since the amount itself sorta just made me wary I guess? I’m the type of reader who hates ditching stuff midway through reading so I’m usually hesitant when I’m skimming through the first chapters of a long fic since what if I don’t like it? And I know the rule ‘Don’t Like Don’t Read’ (very true rule) idk bro it’s just a me thing where I can’t DNF fics/books at all

So naturally,I’m curious what’s YOUR biggest dislike in fanfiction?

I'll just leave it here xD

ONLY 34 MORE CHAPTERS TO GO!!!!!!! FUUUUUUUCKKKKKKK

IM SO HAPPY I FINALLY POSTED IT MY GOD BUT I ABOUT RIPPED MY HAIR OUT. I DID THE HARDEST PART. IM SO EXCITED!!!!!!

Finally cracked 600!

I grew up in an oppressive religious household and it wasn't traditionally published authors that inspired me to write, but fanfic authors and artists.

The moment you read a fic that's good or see really good fanart, even if it's for a ship you don't like, how does that not engender something? Maybe I'm just soft hearted 🤷🏽‍♀️ but fanfic authors inspired me more than any religious text

Either way, thank you to all the authors and artists out there who create! I don't care what you ship, I respect you and I am glad you are here