Casefic done! \o/

[extrapenguin]

I finished my casefic! According to gedit, it's 30k, so expect maybe 28k on AO3. I first got the idea, fully formed, on 25.9.2019, but put it aside until I was done with Yuletide and For No Cradle Lasts Forever. The first attestation of actually writing it is 10.3.2020; it's now 13.4.2020 and so this was a project of about 35 days, which gives me a daily wordcount of ~860, w00t!

Writing trivia: I had 10k on 18.3., so I had a very productive 8 days! I jotted down scene outline things, but wrote entirely in order, aside from the transition between chapters 5 and 6, which I wrote when I was at the start of chapter 5. Because the entire premise is me being horrendously evil towards my readers, I have done my best to end every chapter (save the last, chapter 7) with a cliffhanger. (Some of them involve less hanging off a cliff than hanging 5 cm in the air, but eh, all chapter transitions happen midscene!)

I'll spend the rest of the week writing my exchange assignments – I want to finish at least one – and then take a second look through for typos and foreshadowing/consistency fail. But! The first chapter will turn up next week. I just need to figure out the summary and the tags... E-rated, CNTW, Weilan, casefic a wordcount tag (probably the 15k-30k one; why is the cutoff right at my fic's length, sigh), and then trying to figure out how to tag the rest of the stuff without spoiling all of it. Potential canonical tags I've found include Suspense and ... nothing else. Do you know of good AO3 canonical freeforms for "deliberately undertagged to avoid spoilers" and "narrative has twists"?

*goes off to brainstorm other fic*

Comments

[isis]

Plot Twists is a canonical freeform!

[extrapenguin]

Ooh, ty! I had ... completely missed that, because I only searched for "twist", not "twists".

[maggie33]

Congratulations. And wow, 860 words a day for more than a month is very impressive. At least it is to me. :)

[cyberbrain]

Do you know of good AO3 canonical freeforms for "deliberately undertagged to avoid spoilers"
Not a tag but I think "Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings" would communicate that meaning to me.

[teaotter]

Congratulations!

[extrapenguin]

IKR? Over previous projects in the same range (27k-44k) I managed perhaps 500-600 words per day. This is very impressive (and probably caused by all of my non-writing hobbies getting cancelled).

[extrapenguin]

One would think so, too, but I've had several incidents where people objected to a CNTW'd fic not having a specific thing tagged. (Including one instance where the commenter suggested tagging for CNTW when the fic was already tagged as CNTW.) So if there's anything to reinforce that interpretation, I'd like that tag!

[extrapenguin]

Ty! \o/

[cyberbrain]

Oh! I see.

I was going to suggest "Dead dove do not eat" but I think that one requires things to be tagged?

The tag search came up with: "Freeform: Untagged" ‎(6600 stories), which is canonical. Maybe that could work? I also found "Freeform: Author Chose Not To Tag" (62 stories) but that one isn't canonical.

(Including one instance where the commenter suggested tagging for CNTW when the fic was already tagged as CNTW.)
Lol, I don't think that situation can be helped. Did the reader not read the tags before complaining at you?

[isis]

And in fact "Untagged" has the syns: No tags to avoid spoilers, Some things are left untagged, some things untagged for spoilers - so if your desire to use a canonical is out of kindness for wranglers, using any one of these three tags will just automagically syn to "Untagged" and not need to be dealt with. (Though honestly, you don't need to worry, go ahead and write your own freeform to express what you want, it will just get dumped into No Fandom anyway. Unless people are likely to want to search on a tag, it doesn't matter whether it's canonical.)

[extrapenguin]

I guess Untagged + an author's note clarifying that it's lightly tagged would work. But I guess it's impossible to clarify against people being stupid.

Did the reader not read the tags before complaining at you?
I admit that the content they found disturbing was disturbing, but I had tagged the fic CNTW and added extra warning notes in the chapter endnotes ... and the reader sent a mutual friend/acquaintance to complain to me that my fic should be tagged CNTW and have extra warnings in the author's notes. (I headdesked and informed the messenger that the things their friend wanted were already there.)

[cyberbrain]

Tbh, while "Untagged" is good, it doesn't sound descriptive enough to me. I can easily imagine someone reading it as "tags to be added as story progresses," or something of the sort, so isis' words above are on point. And, yeah, an author's note would be helpful.

But I guess it's impossible to clarify against people being stupid.
Yeah, pretty much. Also, if someone wants to complain or find a problem, they will.

and the reader sent a mutual friend/acquaintance to complain to me that my fic should be tagged CNTW and have extra warnings in the author's notes.
Hoo boy. :/// *facepalm*

[extrapenguin]

Ohh, thanks! I was searching for canonicals mostly to cut down on the one-typo-off tags and such, and I'm a terribly uncreative tagger, but those look good! "Some things untagged for spoilers" it shall (probably) be.

[extrapenguin]

Yeah, I think I'm going for one of the noncanonical variants isis mentioned.

WRT the example, I *think* part of the issue might be that in a lot of fandoms nowadays, when people tag and warn for "gore" (for example) they mean a papercut or something, due to warnings inflation, whereas when I tag for gore, I mean that entrails go flying. So they're low-balling their expectations due to me not attaching an "no really take care of yourselves uwu" tag there. (And even outside the warnings inflationed fandoms, I don't tend to overtag, and a lot of people want tags as warnings + want to be warned for much smaller presences of the ingredient they dislike than I would even think of warning for, so. My ass, I want to cover it with this one.)

[mekare]

Congratulations!

[extrapenguin]

*twirls*

[jiokra]

Congrats!!I It's always so satisfying to finish a longfic.

[extrapenguin]

Thank you! Finishing posting is similar but not identical in satisfaction, since there's no "now I get to show this to other people!" going on, but OTOH that's the posting thing. I'll give this an edit tomorrow and maybe post on Tuesday.

[jiokra]

I'm so impressed that you didn't post as a WIP while writing. After a certain point, I get so discouraged without feedback that if I didn't post as a WIP, I'd just give up.

[extrapenguin]

My experience is that I need to be able to retool it from the start if necessary (like that time a fic ended up thematically veering off course midway, so I had to rejigger my flashback timeline completely), and if I try posting a WIP it will never be completed. So this way it goes. Even for the 75k thing.