Writing Advice From My Uni Teachers:

Literally no one:

Not a single soul:

Male authors:

Natasha Romanov, Black Widow

The greatest tragedy of Among Us is making friends and then accidentally disconnecting before you get to say goodbye

This is probably weird to ask, so here it goes. Where there ever any heroes of Egypt like Herakles, Bilgamesh/Gilgamesh, Arjuna, or Jamshid? I noticed that I have never really heard of any heroic epics out of Egypt and I was curious as be to why that may be.

Culturally, heroic epics simply weren’t a genre within Egyptian literary tradition. I think the closest you can come to such a “hero” within the Egyptian body of literary works, is the character of a magician, like Djedi or Si-Osire, or Isis herself.

There are for example the Demotic stories with protagonist Setne Khamwas (based on the fourth son of Ramses II, Khwaemwaset). Setne Khwamwas has two adventures: one in which he finds the Book of Thoth in the tomb of a prince called Neferkaptah, and another in which he meets a magician from the time of Thutmose III, aforementioned Si-Osire. Of course since these are Demotic texts, they’re very late in Egyptian history. The copies we have are from Ptolemaeic and Roman Egypt respectively.

Then there’s the Westcar papyrus, which is a Middle Kingdom text that includes a few “miracles” the 4th Dynasty magician Djedi performed during the reign of king Khufu. This text wasn’t meant as an heroic epic either; rather, it’s one in a tradition of programmatic texts. They reflect the outlook of the class and time in which they were created, but they are also literary works.

But like almost all Egyptian literature, the subjects of these works are either fully mortal (think the protagonists from The Eloquent Peasant, Sinuhe, The Shipwrecked Sailor), fully divine (e.g. the giant snake on the island of the shipwrecked sailor, the two brothers in Tale of the Two Brothers), or the spirit of a deceased person (Neferkaptah in Setne Khamwas). And like most Egyptian literature, there’s a greater lesson to be learnt from the narrative. E.g. in the Shipwrecked Sailor, the sailor admonishes the official he serves to speak the truth of what happened, and The Eloquent Peasant imparts on the reader the importance of good speech.

Blood. As I shed one last red tear for my fallen sister, I realize the entire world now revolves around this singular word.

VAMPYR (2018)

Discovering that you’re 10 days behind the Discovery of Witches RTR.

Me: I can fix this.

Ya know how in Watchmen, Dr. Manhattan exists in all times at the same time? That’s what watching this felt like. I am both in 2020 and 2005. Who is this intrepid time traveler???

Feedback culture is dead, long live feedback culture!

AO3, fanfiction, and comments: the system isn’t working. 

Fic authors have a problem with feedback – or rather, with the lack of it. Fanfiction has a notoriously low ratio of comments to hits, and many of us have expressed our frustration that we can get a hundred, two hundred, five hundred, even a thousand views on our stories, but only a handful of readers will leave kudos, let alone comments.   

Unfortunately, this only gets worse for long, multi-chapter stories (aka, the longfics we know, love, and would sell our souls in a second if it meant an update), which also happen to be the stories that authors need the most support to continue and complete. Law of diminishing returns, y’all, and it sucks. 

We’re not here to guilt you into leaving comments. We want to address the problem by changing the format, and we need your help to do it. 

The goal is to increase the amount of feedback authors get from readers, especially on stories with multiple chapters, and to make it easier for everyone to show how much we love fics. We’re opening a discussion with ao3 to figure out how/if any of these options can be implemented, but first we need options to present! 

Some of our current ideas: 

Ability to leave a form of kudos on every chapter, instead of only once on the entire story: this lets authors know that you’re here and you’re reading their updates, so their hard work isn’t getting tossed into the internet void. 

Comment templates: suggested comments that can be customized or posted as-is. Many of us draw a blank or get nervous when we try to think of a comment, so having pre-made options will both increase the total level of feedback and serve as practice, making it easier to leave more in-depth comments in the future. 

Upvoting/leaving kudos on comments themselves: positive reinforcement makes giving feedback more fun and rewarding, and it lets the author know that readers are present and agreeing with other comments, even if they don’t leave one themselves. 

We’ll contact AO3 to discuss the possibility of adding any of these as native features, and if that won’t work, we’re looking into creating and sharing a user script. 

 What you can do to help: 

 As a reader, what would you like to have? What would you be most likely to use? New ideas, opinions on ideas that are listed here, they’re all good. 

As a creator, how would you feel about each of these options? Can you think of other ways of receiving or encouraging feedback? 

Pros and cons of these (note: our thoughts on this are discussed in this google doc) 

GET THE WORD OUT! Reblog this post, send it to your friends, link to it from your stories. We need as much input and support as possible to get this off the ground. 

Feedback makes for happy authors. Happy authors make for more stories. Let’s keep this part of fandom alive! 

More details about our thoughts, discussions, and ideas can be found in this google doc.

Red Avadat, Red Munia or strawberry finch. 🐦🍓