insanitysilver

[insanitysilver]

LE JARDIN DES SUPPLICES by Octave Mirbeau. Art binding by Samuel Feinstein.

source

#bookbinding

[insanitysilver]

never think fanfiction is of lower quality than published fiction. i literally read one of my store’s recommended books and realized, nearly 200 pages in, that it was a tweaked charles xavier/erik lensherr fanfic i read years ago. fanfic writers walk among us as gods who once tread the earth as mortals.

[insanitysilver]

femslash challenge meme

6 wlw rare-pair ships

5 wlw sexuality headcanons

4 soft wlw aesthetic ships

3 canon wlw ships

2 wlw music artists 

1 sappho quote

[insanitysilver]

On the subject of tagging, what unique tags are your fannish peers using? To find this, go to the ao3 header bar > search > tag search. Add fandom, tag type is freeform, wrangling status canonical*, sort by uses, sort direction descending

*small & newborn fandoms might have better luck with 'any status'

And, voilà!

A list of frequently-used tags that may apply to your fic

AO3 Tagging Inspiration.

Mainly a reference for me bc I always blank when it comes to tags. Sharing in case it helps anyone else, but not intended to be prescriptive. Further references:

Ao3’s Rating System Explanation

Difference Between "A/B" and "A&B"

Fanwork Ao3 Accepts Beyond Fanfic

How tagging a pairing in the “Relationship” field vs in “Additional Tags” changes search results

List of Writing Genres

Trope Examples

Most Popular Tags on Ao3

My humble plea for people to cross-post their meta & other fannish nonfiction to ao3, and tag it with “meta analysis” so I can find it and adore it

#ao3 tips

[insanitysilver]

May Writing Challenge

This May I want to get back into writing. I’m not at all consistent. I’m at a point where I don’t feel like I can work on bigger things, because I can’t guarantee myself to keep working on it in a week from now. So I will take this month as a training month to get back into the habit of writing. I will do this by writing (or trying to write) 200 words every day. Topic is irrelevant. How great my writing is that day is irrelevant. Just 200 words written down. A habit taking 21 days to form was debunked, it does take a lot longer, but 31 days are a start I would say. These are already 140 words, so 200 words every day are hopefully manageable. You're more than welcome to join me if you like 😊

#this is really clever bc that is an attainable goal for most ppl #and more than likely most ppl will surpass that daily wordcount #if not? 6k ain't bad

[insanitysilver]

I've been seeing that you answer asks and I'm sorry if there's an ask-ettiquette I'm not following rn or if you recently closed asks

I know I'm not supposed to tie my work's worth by the numbers it does and I can usually bury that need for validation (and my saltiness when I see a joke fic of mine getting popular). But, there's one fic I haven't gotten over. I worked on it for months and months and it was my baby. But in the end I rushed it and fumbled my summary and presentation. I recently re-edited it, but no ones really seeing it. I know I'm not supposed to be all mirror mirror on the wall about this but I can't help but feel upset, like I failed my fic. And now it's buried and I don't know if anyone will. ever find it again. My words lost to the tide. What do I do? Accept it and move on?

Just to address the top of this ask in case anyone else is worried - I have no ask etiquette you need to worry about. If the ask box is open, drop one in there. Unfortunately, it's closed most of the time because I tend to get overwhelmed when I have too many asks in there, and I want to be able to answer as many as I can instead of getting frozen by a big number.

It sounds like you have some guilt tied to that work - it was your baby and you feel like you've failed it. Getting attention for it now might make that guilt sting a bit less, but what might help a bit more is learning to forgive yourself for what you think you did wrong.

It's completely understandable to get excited for a story and to get so eager to share it that you forget some key tags or don't write a good summary. It's definitely happened to me, and I'm sure it's happened to others. Doing that can indeed lead to fewer people seeing your work which means fewer people read and react to it, and when you've worked hard on something for months and months, fumbling it (as you say) can feel absolutely horrible.

Now that you've got your work in the format that you want it, give yourself permission to talk about it on your social media. Create a banner or even work with a fan artist to make something that will catch people's attention. Post about your work on Spotlight Saturday or Fanfic Friday and let people know it exists. Don't feel like people need to find your fic "naturally" or else it "doesn't count." Lots of people would be glad to be handed something without the need to go on a hunt.

Have any of you been in a situation like anon? What did you do to manage it?

#writing positivity

[insanitysilver]

AO3 Etiquette

Please don’t put 𝓢𝓹𝓮𝓬𝓲𝓪𝓵 𝓒𝓱𝓪𝓻𝓪𝓬𝓽𝓮𝓻𝓼 (special characters) in your AO3 titles. Typically done by using a generator to replace the characters with nonstandard unicode characters. They may look fancy and give your title flair. You may be looking for a way to make your fic stick out.

BUT

These characters aren’t readable by screen readers.

It bypasses work skins and such so people using accessible fonts for dyslexia, etc, or just their own comfort or preference get screwed over by you using it.

Also your works won’t show up in the AO3 search engine based on keywords in the title.

Compare:

[image id: Recent works page with two fics titled “Test Fic Please Ignore”. The first fic has the title written in nonstandard unicode characters to give it the appearance of a fancy cursive font.]

vs.

[Image id: AO3 fic search result searching for title “Test Fic Please Ignore” There is only one result: The “Test Fic Please Ignore” fic whose title was written using standard characters.]

Also as a matter of personal taste it’s just plain in bad taste. Like tagging characters that have all of 1 line of dialogue and 2 sentences mentioning them in the entire fic, no-one’s gonna arrest you for it, but it just makes people’s experience on the site worse, not better.

This is a trend that needs to stop.

#ao3 tips

[insanitysilver]

i love having ocs because i'm a cruel and uncaring god to them. i can be like "what if your name was sylvester" and there's nothing they can do about it.

[insanitysilver]

About the AO3 "No Guest Comments for a while" warning

If you're not following any of AO3's social media accounts you might be in the dark as to what kind of "spam comments" have engendered this banner at the top of the site:

These spam comments have been posted about a great deal on the AO3 subreddit for the past couple of days. Initially they comprised a bunch of guest (logged out users) bot comments that insulted authors by suggesting they were using AI and not writing their own fics. Some examples, from the subreddit:

But it then escalated to outright graphic porn images and gifs being posted in comments, again by logged out 'Guest' accounts. Obviously, I'm not going to give examples of those, but between these two bot infestations, AO3 has clearly decided to act and has temporarily closed the ability to post comments for users who are not logged in with an AO3 account.

Unfortunately, this means that genuine readers who don't have an AO3 account won't be able to leave comments on fics that they enjoy.

If you are a genuine reader who doesn't yet have an AO3 account, I strongly suggest getting yourself on the waiting list for one. More and more AO3 authors are now locking their fics down to registered users only - either due to these bot comments or concerns about AI scraping their work - which means you're probably missing out on a lot of great stuff.

Hopefully guest commenting will be enabled again at some point soon, but I suggest not waiting until then. Get yourself on that list.

Wait times are going to be longer than usual at the moment, due to the current Wattpad purge [info on Fanlore | Wattpad subreddit thread], but if you're in line, then your invite will come through eventually.

Update: There's now a Megathread about this on the AO3 subreddit.

[insanitysilver]

Our Place in Time series by inameitlater

Will remembers falling. He wakes up months before Jack got him to work for him. Months before he met Hannibal for the first time. Free from his past he decides to change events and meet Hannibal again.

titles/chapter headings/body text/headers/page numbers: EB Garamond

217,671 words | 583 pages

OK: what a series. I love this series so much and I was so excited that I got to bind it for boundtobebookbindery on insta for the Halloween Downunder Fic Exchange and make it into one of the largest books I have made to date. These fics are interesting and moving to read, and I loved having the opportunity to read them again while I was typesetting them. It made me want to rewatch the show which honestly doesn't take much these days, haha.

I had so much fun designing this - I wanted it to look like a classic binding that you would see in the show because honestly, what else fits for Hannibal? The cover design was inspired by various Cambridge panel bindings, done in Colibri copper coloured cloth, with a rectangle of Crepaldi marbled paper in the centre. I loved matching the endbands to the cover and the Florentine endpapers that I chose, as the colours gave a nice pop against the cover imo. For the typesetting, I completed it entirely in EB Garamond, and I found some truly wonderful images on rawpixel to use for the various title pages and chapter headings. Each fic had a different image used for the chapter headings to match the title page!

Thank you @belespe-bindery for running the exchange, and being so supportive and wonderful during this whole exchange. And finally, thank you so much to the author, Mara, for allowing me to pester you about making this book! I hope your copy arrives safely and soundly <3

#woah this one is so pretty #bookbinding

[insanitysilver]

Have I mentioned how much i love ao3? So I'm currently watching a show and I like to look up fanfics but obviously I don't want to get spoiled so I just go to filters scroll down to 'date updated', look up the date the episode aired on, go 6 days ahead to the day before the next episode, and it filters out all the fics about episodes I haven't watched yet! It's great.

#ao3 tips

[insanitysilver]

I use this emoji key in my fics on Ao3 and wanted to share it with y’all because it’s been so incredibly helpful to my readers as a way to comment without having to form coherent thoughts lol and has definitely boosted commenting on my fics!!

Emoji Key for those who don't know what to say in the comments!

❤ = you wish you could kudos again

😭 = I got you right in the feels

🔥 = this was so hot!

🐰 = it’s so fluffy!

[insanitysilver]

IT'S THAT TIME OF YEAR AGAIN!!!!

ITS TIME FRIENDOS!!! NO EXCUSES, JUST RESULTS!!

#building community

[insanitysilver]

Tips for Reading with ADHD

(or without ADHD, if they help regardless)

Physical print:

cover the page with a piece of paper and reveal lines/paragraphs as you read them

use a highlighter to emphasize important/interesting parts

take notes as you go to be physically engaged with the material

Digital media:

copy and paste the text into a doc/word processor

change the font size/style/colour to something more legible

make your own paragraphs and spacing

copy and paste one paragraph at a time to isolate them from the distraction of the rest of the text

install a browser extension like BeeLine Reader or Mercury Reader

zoom in on the page and scroll slowly so you’re revealing lines as you read them

physically cover the screen and reveal lines as you read them

if you do better with physical media, print it out or find a physical copy

Both:

read out loud

pace, move around, or use a fidget while reading

set a timer for 5 minutes and read in small chunks with breaks in between

divide the material into sections and read one section at a time with breaks in between

have another person, audio book, or text-to-speech program read it aloud as you follow along

[insanitysilver]

I made this zine last year to teach Japanese stab binding. It's a technique that every artist should know—with just a few tools, it's so easy to bind your own sketchbook or to make a physical version of your art/writing/etc. Download the PDF version (with bonus photos & tips!)

#bookbinding

[insanitysilver]

hey! as an artist do you ever feel discouraged by the like/reblog ratio here? ive been postin art here for some time and ive found for every 20 likes i get maybe 1 reblog and while i dont wanna come over as greedy it like kinda discourages me :( i would rlly like to stay on tumblr bc it feels much more anonymous than insta/twitter but i also crave Validation ykno. ty in advance!

Okay, but I fear you won’t like my answer... 

My reply is - no, I don’t, because tumblr actually makes it super easy to ignore the reblog/like ratio. The two are lumped together into a category called ‘notes’ so unless you are looking for it, you won’t know what your reblog/like ratio is, and it’s super easy to view it as a lump sum of people who saw your art and smiled.

Here’s the thing; liking vs reblogging is not personal. And it isn’t something to try to change the tide over. I’ve seen my fair share of posts on here AND twitter, with most of them CONDEMNING liking - going so far as to call it useless. But I disagree. Strongly. 

My opinion on the matter is this - if people wanted to reblog the post, they would reblog it. If they don’t, the cards weren’t right. The stars didn’t align. It isn’t a matter of quality - it’s a matter of the right content being there at the right time for the right audience. Because let’s face is - PLENTY of stuff gets reblogged.... when the circumstances are right.

But the circumstances HAVE to be right. EXACTLY right. There has to be a CHAIN of the exact right circumstances. That’s how sharing ANYTHING works. 

Let me put it this way - say we have a hypothetical follower called J. 

J is scrolling his dashboard and comes across a post he likes, say, of a frog picture. He likes the post and has to make a decision - to reblog or not reblog the frog?

Say he likes the frog enough to reblog. It’s  a natural thing - he wants to show it to his followers. He may not think of it consciously, but he’s following an instinct to share information with people. 

But what happens after? Well, it’s not RANDOM. The thing is, J’s followers are NOT the followers of the blog he reblogged it from. They’re a degree of separation from the OP, and are therefore that much less likely to share interests that align with the OP’s content. 

SO what happens is this:

Some people on J’s follower list see the frog and like it. 

Of the ones that like it, a percentage are just liking out of habit and politeness.

A few are liking it to find it later and show it to their irl friends.

A few are liking it because they DON’T want to reblog it, because it doesn’t align with what they want to show to THEIR followers (who are, let’s be honest, even MORE removed from the OP’s frog-centric content).

And who’s to blame? 

ABSOLUTELY NO ONE. Because you cannot force people to reblog stuff any more than you can force people to show their friend their phone when they see a funny meme. 

Can you imagine something like this happening?

This is ridiculous, right? We cannot presume that people are not reblogging because they’re out to be malicious on purpose. Most likely they just aren’t motivated enough to share it in their own social circles for their own reasons - and that’s FINE. 

Look, I get it. People not sharing your stuff gets you less notes. I get how that is disappointing. But if you put ALL of your motivation into internet clout, then you have to put effort into making your art VISIBLE. That’s the only way to get more reblogs. 

For example, if you’re prioritizing visibility:

Get more social media accounts. Make sure the usernames are the same, or at least recognizable, across all social media. 

Organize your art tumblr and twitter. Make a pinned post that shows off your best work. TAG! Learn common tags used for artwork similar to yours.

Interact with other artists! Comment on posts! Reblog others’ artwork! 

NETWORK!!! That is the only way to guarantee that the flowchart of reblogs gets more than once branch.

Twitter circumvents this issue by shoving likes in your face as often as Retweets and that’s certainly one way to give your reblog-tree a boost, but it’s not foolproof. Tumblr has tags you can follow - and that DOES give you more of a possibility of getting reblogs of the content because if people are in a tag, they are LOOKING for stuff. On purpose. They already like what they see.

I feel your pain, I really do, because it took me literal YEARS to find an audience that consistently likes and reblogged my stuff. And your audience deserves to find you - but your followers aren’t your agent. It’s not their job to advertise on your behalf. 

They’ll reblog when they want to - and that’s a good thing. It’s more genuine that way. 

#writing positivity #building community

[insanitysilver]

I commented on a person's fics and now I'm a beta reader for their current ongoing work! Traded comments with another person and now we're fandom friends and I gained the courage to join a fan server where we get to yell about our fave characters all we want and admire each other's works! Commenting RULES!

IT ABSOLUTELY RULES!!!!!

#building community