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calypsid · 15 days

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Ideas: Gotta Catch 'Em All!

(look, I know one whole Pokemon reference and I'm gonna use it.)

I was tossing around ideas with @calypsid about writing events and coming up with ideas and how to write for big events - in fandom, for the monthlong ones especially, but also if you're someone looking at submitting original fiction to a themed anthology or to a zine, or when you just want to WRITE dammit but the ideas won't come. When the idea hutch is empty and the plotbuns won't come, when the creative spring is trickling or you're at the bottom of the well of inspiration, hope is not lost. We put our heads together and came up with a baker's dozen ways to get ideas and look at prompts to get new inspiration when you need it. So if you want 'em, jump below the cut!

Stop looking at words.

Look at art! Listen to music! Maybe what you need is some song lyrics to get your brain going, or art. Play Sudoku. Go to a coffee shop and watch people. Change your mental or physical environment and see what happens.

Prompt lists

Don’t limit yourself to whatever event you’re writing for! If it’s for a fandom ship week, hit up a themed month prompt list (such as Fluffuary, AUgust, or Whumptober). If you’re trying to think of ideas for a zine pitch, trawl prompt lists from fandom or creative writing websites. Mash the TVTropes random trope button until something clicks.

Tarot spreads

Even if you don’t read tarot on your own, you can find websites where you can do tarot readings. Treat it as a story prompt generator: pick three cards, one that is your protagonist, one that is their goal, one that is their obstacle. Look up the meanings. Go wild! You can use the cards for protagonists, antagonists, story arcs…

Lists

Not prompt lists - but every idea you can think of adjacent to a prompt. Tropes, colors, sayings, characters, types (e.g. species of apple, types of wildflowers, names of cocktails)...

An alphabetical list with an idea for each letter of the alphabet.

A list of 20 ideas, as close or as absolutely wild as you want.

A timed list (write ideas for 5/10/15 minutes). The first chunk may be easy, the last few minutes impossibly hard, but right in the middle where your mind is starting to stretch? That may be perfect.

Once you have a list of any flavor, start looking for patterns: that’s a sign your brain is interested in SOMETHING. What ideas/symbols keep showing up?

Look for unexpected intersections

Ideas or prompts may have unexpected links. Randomize your list! Consider resonances between different prompts; they may seem different in a different order. Pick a not obvious combination of two prompts and follow it to the end - what if you put together “pirate” and “arranged marriage”? Use a wheel spinning picker and see what two things the computer matches up.

You can also take a pair of commonly-associated opposites, pick out their most common stereotypical traits. Now swap them.

Play with other media

Take characters from one piece of media, the setting from a second (hey look, a fusion/AU!). What resonates between them? Grab a non-fiction book about a topic you’re interested in and read that. Ideas might percolate from a number of unrelated sources into one Super Cool Idea.

Change the setting

Turn a sci-fi show into a fantasy setting, or vice-versa. Add monsters. Add gods; add gods with reality-bending dice; add gods with reality-bending dice who are malicious. Flip your characters' genders. Remove the concept of gender entirely. Send your characters to the dimension next door, where only one thing has changed. Or many things. Or everything. Take the characters out of the plot of your fandom, or replace them with side characters; what changes?

Change your mind

Take the prompt at face value. Or, treat it sarcastically. Subvert the trope - or don't subvert the trope. Write the thing you've always wanted to see, even if you think it won't work. Turn everything about the prompt on its head and look underneath for spare ideas. Come at it from every angle you can think of.

Other people

Talk to people about the prompt. Read Reddit or Tumblr conversations, even ones only vaguely associated with the prompt. Let your mind go in new and interesting directions.

Cool words

Have you run across an awesome word you wish you could use in a story, or a turn of phrase? Write a story around that. Or if you have a list of cool words you keep anyway, flip back to it, see if there are any that might come together in a story.

Titles

If you have a title you've always wanted to use, let the title inspire the fic instead of the other way around.

First Sentences

Just start writing first sentences, whatever ones come to mind. Don’t be precious about them; the goal isn’t perfect sentences, the goal is something to get your brain moving. Don’t worry about continuing the story yet! Try and get a bunch down without writing any more of the story. If one speaks to you and demands to be written, go back to it after you’ve got your list down.

Deconstruct a story you love and then rebuild it!

Retell a favorite story (or a hated story you thought you could do better). How did they do X? Why did you love (or hate) something so much? Can you do that with some of your ideas? Take out the main character and their sidekick; how does the story read with just the secondary characters? What if you add someone new? How would the story look different as a documentary, a chatfic, an epistolary collection?

Some Links:

The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (https://sf-encyclopedia.com/) - includes almost 15,000 entries for words associated with sci-fi. Scroll through, pick (3, 5, 7…) and shove them into a story. Or learn about new tropes/concepts/ideas.

Deep Water Prompts (https://deepwaterwritingprompts.tumblr.com/) - some Weird Prompts (several hundred) you can twist and interpret to your heart’s desire.

Kathleen Jennings’ short story “Some Ways to Retell a Fairy Tale” (https://www.tor.com/2023/11/08/some-ways-to-retell-a-fairy-tale-kathleen-jennings) is also a great list of ideas for ways to, well, retell any story.

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calypsid · 5 months

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my personal writing-to-AO3 workflow

this is really long so here is a friendly cut

I write in Scrivener, so I am starting with rich text that is not in the Windows environment. any writing program that is not Microsoft Word is on the same level. why does this matter? because Windows pasting to browsers is deficient in that it does not preserve rich text formatting unless it comes from Word. why? I have no fucking clue. but it's good to know. so I start with this:

Destiny! I love to hate it. you will note two instances of italicized text. now, as I'm the laziest bastard who rolled over the earth, I don't want to hand-code those to drop in AO3's HTML editor. (I don't use the rich text editor because on preview, it runs through the text and applies HTML codes for you, and in certain circumstances that can break formatting, such as if you're using a texting workskin or other custom formatting. if that's not a problem for you, you probably don't need this post.)

so, it gets copy-pasted into Microsoft Word:

(I am aware that this could be the same screenshot. I promise it's not. I just write in Calibri.)

then I open the Find/Replace dialogue:

make sure your cursor is in the Find What: box. click the Format button on the bottom left:

select Font...

under Font Style, select Italic and hit "OK".

now I'm going to work the actual magic. the HTML code for italics is <i> or <em> (they're the same thing). that means that when a browser sees that code, it treats any text wrapped in that code as italicized.

I just have to tell Word to find the italicized text and wrap it in my HTML.

in the Replace With: field, paste this:

"^&" is the regex code for "the same text". so you're telling Word to find this text and replace it with itself and also the HTML.

looks like this. then hit "replace all". you're done.

copy the text from the word document and put it in the HTML posting box in AO3. that's all you have to do.

I've used a lot of words and probably made this sound like an ordeal, but I have the code memorized and I can do this in less than eight seconds. I'm not exaggerating.

you can do this with anything you can search for in that Font box: bold, strikethrough, etc. you can also do this with other formatting, but the codes for those are Word regex and it's not documented as well as regular regex. I'm willing to help! but those are the provisos.

hope this helps someone!

#calypsid #ao3

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calypsid · 1 year

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do people still do exchange letters? god, I hope so.

dear spec-recs author:

hi! thank you so much for writing for me. I really, really appreciate it. :) I have a few vague things I like that work for all three requests, and then I'll go into some more detailed ideas intended to help if you can't think of something to write. they're completely optional, I promise! and last, at the end of the post I'll talk about NSFW stuff.

(please don't worry about NSFW stuff if you don't want to write it; I'm just being thorough.)

so in general I like: cute people being cute, egregious fluff, slice of life, angst with a happy ending, angst with a hopeful ending*, smart and strong women and their men who know they lucked out, smart mysteries, action, pining, falling in love, banter, AUs of any flavor but especially making scifi fantasy and vice versa, magic.

(*seriously, hurt me as much as you want as long as you fix it in the end.)

I prefer female Shep if Shep shows up.

specific ideas for each pairing:

Feron/Liara: I like the idea of them having feelings before the SB stole Feron, because then the way that Liara pushes so hard during LotSB makes so much more sense; reunion and healing and bittersweet love confessions after Shep leaves? or, the AU where they're assassins/archaeologist and guide-slash-local-thief/the witch that lives in the woods and the man who needs a cure for a curse? (for this pairing, previous F!Shep/Liara is fine if you want it)

Kal/Tali: I'd really rather they were close in age, which is probably not something I have to mention, but I do anyway because Baldwin comes off as old to my ears. I don't know why. anyway I feel like the whole "high-school" sweethearts thing could be fun here? like they were the same age, went off on pilgrimage at the same time, but Tali got mixed up with the SB and Shepard and Kal was more traditional and did his rumspringa and went home, and he's simultaneously sad and misses her and so proud of her. or fix-it for 3, of course - maybe Tali rescues him, maybe even without knowing (sends fighters to his area/geth data/something with her Admiral duties) and he owes her a life debt of some sort?

Solana/James: I feel like after the games makes the most sense with these two. I don't mind whatever ending you end up using. maybe James comes home with Garrus afterward on leave? or Sol takes the first opportunity she can to see the universe after taking care of her mom for so long? whatever you do, I'd love Garrus sputtering in the background/over email or comm/etc because I think it'd be hilarious. (for this, I'd prefer either background Garrus/F!Shep or both of them alone if Shep's still around.)

(I have now copied the above into the signup. I'm not used to ao3 exchanges yet.)

porn preferences: seriously, stop here if you're not interested, which is fine.

I like femdom or equal give and take, gentle to medium rough sex, size kink, consensual sex pollen or at least the dubcon version (feroncough), cunnilingus, scifi sex toys and stim programs, the kind of exhibitionism where no one knows it's happening but the risk is there, and specifically for Kal/Tali the quarian process of becoming fluid-bonded (maybe STD testing over time, progressive suit exposures over the same period of time, all the while with dirty talk/letters/stim programs).

I do not like: male dom, noncon, gore/guro, bestiality, bodily fluids except comeplay which is fine, pain play, cheating, pregnancy.

If you get down here, thank you so much, you're amazing. <3

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