Writers' Workshop General Chat Thread

[Gama]

I've been on and off active in this subforum for nearly a decade now and in that time I don't think shipping fics have ever been popular. One or two have popped up, sure, but popular, nope. Journey fics on the other hand - now there's a million of them!

 

[unrepentantAuthor]

It's no surprise that journey fics should be abundant. Is there equal demand for them?
Also, I'm interested. Anybody ever see any other pokémorph fanfiction here besides mine?
Oh, and any PMD stuff? I've got such a soft spot for PMD.

 

[canisaries]

It's no surprise that journey fics should be abundant. Is there equal demand for them?
Also, I'm interested. Anybody ever see any other pokémorph fanfiction here besides mine?
Oh, and any PMD stuff? I've got such a soft spot for PMD.

Oh, there's a good bunch of PMD here. Lucarioknight does a lot of it, he's currently writing one called Unequivocant which I'd definitely recommend (and not just because I did the banner art for it uwu). Ambyssin has Guiding Light which I've been meaning to check out, and I recall seeing many other users with PMD fics too.

As for pokémorphs... I haven't read enough fics to accurately say if there are any, nor am I 100% sure what counts and what doesn't since I hadn't even heard the term before you came around. With that in mind, closest thing I can think of is some scenes in my own fic Hunter, Haunted where the protagonist trips balls and thinks he's a Houndoom-like monster. Pluggity plug.

 

[diamondpearl876]

PMD has been picking up on popularity here, yep!

I've been on and off active in this subforum for nearly a decade now and in that time I don't think shipping fics have ever been popular. One or two have popped up, sure, but popular, nope. Journey fics on the other hand - now there's a million of them!

When we went through the Archive to clean it up a bit, seems most of the shipping was between 2003-2007 or so, like... before the WW was really called the WWand there was the "library" or something else. I dunno, it's been a while now, so my memory could be failing me haha.

 

[unrepentantAuthor]

@canisaries thanks for the recs, I'll get round to those at some point, I expect. I've seen the banner for Unequivocant, that's some rad art you have there. 'Pokémorph' is a term I haven't really heard anywhere since, again, 2006-ish. I'm in two minds about using it myself, but it's not as if there's a strictly better term.

@diamondpearl876 Yeah, that's about what I expected. Ship-fic in the pokémon fandom was starting to fall off in 2006 when I discovered FFN.

 

[Ambyssin]

Part of this conversation makes me feel like I should have something in my signature that advertises I have a story. <.<;

 

[diamondpearl876]

I've gone back and forth with putting links to my fics in my signature. I'd prefer a banner that could depict all of them, much like what @AceTrainer14 has, but... don't really know an artist to go to or even what I'd want on the banner anyway. Yes, there's the Review League and their artists, but I don't want to request prizes from my own project. Doesn't feel right.

Anyway, this reminds me, speaking of the Archive cleanup and WW trends. I did start out keeping a tally of the kinds of fics I saw (journey fics, anime fics, shipping fics...) but didn't really know if it was worth it, but if people are interested in those kinda statistics, I could pick that up again sometime? Could see how trends have changed over the years.

 

[Beth Pavell]

I honestly don't know how many people have looked at a story of mine via my signature. Probably not many ... as far as I can tell there's little traffic between the Workshop and the rest of the forum.

Journeyfics have always been common. I think they tend to have trouble finding their audience (Believe it or not, that's been a recurring problem with The Long Walk), and they're an effort to sustain so most end up getting abandoned after a few chapters. But even on fanfiction.net, it's looked like the shipping scene has been completely dominated by amourshipping

 

[Nitro Indigo]

I haven't read Pokémon fanfiction in years. I also don't think a forum is the best format for posting a story on.

 

[Iggy]

I haven't read Pokémon fanfiction in years. I also don't think a forum is the best format for posting a story on.

I haven't read any fanction and I don't plan on doing it. Once I think my work is suitable for publishing, I'll post a PDF and probably a .epub file for those who prefer e-readers.

 

[Nitro Indigo]

After posting that, I decided to take a look at Guiding Light and Unequivocant.

 

[canisaries]

really? i think forums are the best for stories. chatrooms, social media and boards are way too fast for literature - they prefer quicker, easier to consume and more interactive media such as art, videos and discussions. meanwhile, forums require the user to take it slower and so longer posts are more at home.

 

[InfiniteBakuphoon]

I actually kind of prefer the FF.net model myself: dedicated pages for each chapter and for reviews, a built-in chapter index, and easily available stats like word count, chapter count, etc. for those who care. Forums do have a nice intimacy to them - especially over here - but perhaps that's more useful for the writing process than for reading. As far as the latter goes, I generally like dedicated sites - specifically FF.net - more than forums (even with my first exposure to fanfiction being through forums, haha). But that's just me... there certainly should be room for both to co-exist (if only ideally, since forums apparently aren't as popular as they used to be, so I've heard?)

 

[Gama]

I agree with @canisaries I think the forums are great for reading fanfiction.

Additionally, @Iggy not sure if your PDF/e-reader idea related to publishing all at once but I am also quite a fan of serial publications. It means you can read in much the way you would watch a TV series: getting it one instalment at a time, consuming at the same pace as others that you can engage with, and having it take a manageable amount of time to engage with.

 

[lucarioknight56]

Forums, I find, are better communities to be posting a work since you can receive critiques for your writing and know where you need to improve; there's not really a suitable alternative out in the publishing world, or even Fanfiction. The closest you can get is having a betareader or proofreader, but having a diverse range of viewpoints is better than only one.

Of course, forums might not be ideal for reading fics. You have to sift through the reviews and authors' comments, so if you just want to read the story and not the stuff surrounding it, it can be inconvenient. Although I do like being able to read the next chapter of a story via my notification email; saves time and hassle, and that's one thing Fanfiction doesn't have.

P.S. Feel free to take a look at Unequivocant. I won't mind at all, being the author.

​

 

[Beth Pavell]

Forums require a bit more work on the part of the author to make stories more easily readable (Threadmarks are invaluable for this). It also has to be admitted that they're not naturally suited for searching stories - although we have the Workshop Directory for exactly this reason

 

[Iggy]

Forums are nice for discussions but certainly not for reading books of any kind. Too much distractions, even chapters are interrupted by discussions. I hate that. It's like an author gets intterupted during writing so his readers can start interrogating him. No book is written like that. I type my story in Libre Office Writer and export it as PDF when I want to publish it.
Should I ever live to see the end of Two Perfect Cowards, I'm thinking of releasing all of the background material I wrote for it; timelines, backgrounds, summaries, ect. For anyone curious how I constructed the tale it should be interesting.

 

[Ambyssin]

I actually kind of prefer the FF.net model myself: dedicated pages for each chapter and for reviews, a built-in chapter index, and easily available stats like word count, chapter count, etc. for those who care.

I totally understand that thinking. But I know for a fact that FF.net's word counter is broken beyond all get out. When I use the Document Manager, it always gives me a higher word count than Word or Google Docs. And when I use the site's scene break lines, that somehow adds hundreds to over a thousand words to a chapter. I'm... still trying to figure out how that works.

 

[Nitro Indigo]

Sometimes, a chapter on Fanfiction.net will turn into a mess of HTML.

I still stick firmly to my claim that the best-designed fanfic website is Fimfiction.

 

[Misfit Angel]

And when I use the site's scene break lines, that somehow adds hundreds to over a thousand words to a chapter.

ooooh, that explains a lot. I use the linebreaks quite frequently in some of my earlier chapters which are the only ones I ever posted to ff.net, I always wondered why the wordcount I had when I pasted my raw chapter in was so significantly lower than the final wordcount they gave me when I published. Such a strange thing, who'd expect linebreaks of all things to be made of words?

For me, forums are where I've lived my whole fanfiction-reading life, and they'll be where I die, too. I've tried reading fanfiction on ff.net and deviantart before, it just doesn't work for me. Even some other forums, it's a struggle to read simply because the board skins that are available are so atrociously bad looking.