…is this supposed to be considered weird? I don’t get it.
I think it’s more that it was an unexpected feature. I’m glad it’s there.
Yeah I actually found it while prepping for brain surgery, and was incredibly relieved that it was a built-in feature and not something I’d have to leave convoluted instructions about or whatever. It’s a bit morbid, sure, but it’s a great feature.
…an unexpected but very appreciated feature.
This is a feature designed by women who’d been in fandom for decades, and who had faced the issue of, “X is dead, and we know she loved fandom, so… can we reprint her stories? Who can decide? Her family knows fuck-all about fandom. Who was her best friend? Do they know if she would’ve liked her story to be reprinted in the Best Of OTP Fic zine?”
Running across that once doesn’t make you think about a policy, but by the time it’s five to ten times, and then you’ve seen people vanish from the internet (might be dead; might just be not interested anymore) and nobody knows whether it’s okay to collect their fic in an archive or transfer it to a new one….
Yeah, the FNoK policy is one of the awesome things about AO3.
❝Britney was no record label’s puppet. She had a key voice in the production and her creative touches made the video iconic. The school class was her idea, which she convinced the management would be better than their idea. Britney wanted the video to relate to her fans and their experiences, so felt a school was more natural and realistic to them and her personality. The idea was they are daydreaming about getting out and having fun, remembering a guy she broke up with. All the uniforms were picked up from K-Mart for about £19 with costumiers working fast to get them fitted. After a couple of takes Britney felt that the tails of the shirt were getting in the way of her hand movements, so before another take she tied a knot in the shirt. It happened naturally. She was in fantastic shape so her midriff was toned. I lost count of how many backflips she did. It was groundbreaking too with the casting, because we had a diverse cast of dancers – which represented the truth about American schools. It was innocent in its conception, but the integration of the styling and choreography created that edge.❞
It’s impossible to stress how important this is. But here’s a good example:
2000 AD, the British sci-fi/fantasy anthology that publishes Judge Dredd among a hundred other awesome series, has an open doors policy for submissions of “Future Shocks”, done-in-one four page stories with a final twist. And while it’s not mandatory, in their submissions page they suggest using no more than five-six panels per page, with no more than three word balloons per panel, and no more than twenty five words per balloon.
And once you get past the first “Ok, so 75 words per panel, gotcha” stage, it becomes an absolute godsend for starting writers. By the third script you write like that there’ll be exactly zero fat left. Every word counts, every panel counts, and because it’s just four pages, you can churn out drafts and edit them in much less time than it’d take a full 23 page issue, let alone a massive graphic novel.
So yeah, anyone starting on comics, or literature of any kind: start with short stories. Start and finish them. Four, eight, ten or twelve pagers, whatever. But do them. Finish them. And never stop doing it.
sky's stuff 