I'm In Tears 😭 This Is Extremely Beautiful. Thank You So Much!!!!!

for wip wednesday this week, i thought people might maybe be interested in the planning board i made for Arc 4! Censored scene titles to avoid too many spoilers~

kanban boards are great for outlines, cause you can drag and drop scenes around when you're planning to work things out better, and I like having a 'physical' visual like this, it helps my brain.

tags are plot threads, using the colourful tags plugin to colour-code them so I can see at a glance what's what, with main plots in brighter colours and subplots subdued to mark the distinction.

I have two markers to pull out scenes: major plot beats, and spicy scenes. I wanted each chapter to have at least one of each (though as you can see, I didn't always exactly succeed). doing that helped me make sure I was balancing my developments, and having the tags let me see if I was abandoning key threads halfway through (which in draft one...i definitely was!)

not in the screenshot is the final board, which is cut scenes, because i refuse to throw things away when i might need them later.

ooo i'd love to hear more about the casting day announcement from your pov if that's ok! like how did people react? did you think they looked the part but wasn't keen on their past acting work? did everyone freak out lmao

HELLO!!! i love talking about it!! let's gooo

so the day of the casting announcement for me was also the day i found out they were making rwrb into a movie, idk how it was for other people, but before that day i hadn't realized we would get a movie

so i was just SO HYPED about getting a film at all, you know?

then we got this announcement:

and i looked at them and IMMEDIATELY went to taylor's instagram and i was like "is that the dude from the kissing booth?" (i have never seen the kissing booth before that, but i have seen people on youtube doing some of those commentaries where they make fun of every single movie under the sun for views - the person i was friends with at the time loved watching those, so i have seen a few)

and i IMMEDIATELY became obsessed with him because i thought he was the most beautiful man i've ever seen. height aside, he was pretty much what i imagined alex to look like. back then, i'm pretty sure he hasn't been in many things so i watched tkb2 & 3 for him (or mostly his and joey's scenes because i didn't like jac*b el*rdi) and i watched minx, where he was AMAZING.

meanwhile nick creeped up on me much slower - but he did have many more movies out so i also watched all of those. at the begining he hadn't been dyed blonde yet so it was a bit harder to imagine him as henry, but the second they made him blonde i thought he was spot on as well. the filming was in progress around the same time purple hearts came out so i waited for the premiere with him and the rest of the cast, because they were all SO excited for nick - they even had a watch party and they all watched it together when it came out, and on the day of the premiere they decorated nick's trailer with tiny handmade purple hearts which was super sweet and he was adorably blushy about it.

okay back to the casting announcement day.

we got the announcement and immediately EVERYONE was negative. and i'm not exaggerating. everyone said they looked nothing like the characters, they said taylor is too pretty to play alex, that neither of the boys deserves to play these characters bc they're both straight and "sTrAiGhT acToRs sHoULdn'T pLAy quEEr cHaRaCteRs." it was just CONSTANT negativity. if someone was excited they were made fun of. people would go into nick and taylor's comments on insta and say pretty bad things.

the fandom for the movie on tumblr was nonexistant tbh. there were a few people who were fans of the book and were very vocal about how awful the movie will be with those awful actors. see, people had fancasts for alex and henry and they weren't willing to let those go. even if the guy they had in mind for alex wasn't even mexican and the guy they had in mind for henry wasn't even an actor.

i was still patiently waiting for any news to come out and for tumblr to get on with the program. at the same time first updates accounts on the movie, firstprince and nick & tay started appearing on instagram so i was mostly there, having thought that tumblr will just hate this film forever. i reread the book then and having many feelings about it i went into the tumblr tag again - there wasn't much change, but there were a few people who seemed to be just as excited as i was and i would have blocked all the negative people back then.

one of the people i saw being excited about the movie and the boys was @sincenewyorks so after some time and after gathering some courage i messaged them and we talked. there were also a few other people who were being positive by then, but all in all the fandom was pretty small and people still negative especially when they found out that june and rafael luna won't be in the movie - that brought a whole new wave of hate. some hardcore book fans have already decided the film would be awful.

i was just happy to follow the boys and the rest of the cast through the filming process, a little bit here, but mostly on instagram and in private messages with like-minded people here.

fun fact: the nick and taylor tags on tumblr were practically empty by then - taylor's had a few gifs of his naked scenes from minx and a few gifs from the kissing booth. nick's tag was almost completely empty.

flash forward to the day we got the trailer. this is the day EVERYTHING changed, because the trailer came out and suddenly? all the haters went silent. (take into account the fact that i had blocked some of them already so that might also be why lol) and the movie started reaching more and more people. overnight there were a lot of gifs from the trailer and people started posting about the movie more.

in the following weeks, more and more people were talking about the movie and nick and taylor and the bad comments were mostly kept to minimum. we could all see how excited taylor and nick, but especially taylor were about the film.

the the strikes started and we were all heartbroken that the movie wouldn't get the premiere it deserved and secretly hoping the strikes would be done by the time the movie was supposed to come out, but that didn't happen, unfortunately.

then the movie came out and some people really loved it, some others said it was disappointing, there were a few really weird takes, but mostly people REALLY loved it. the fandom has already grown bigger at that point and there were many more people willing to freak out and talk about it. then people started watching nick's and taylor's previous movies as well and their tags filled out and the rest is history, i guess.

sorry that it got SO LONG omg. some people were annoying about the casting announcement, and there was a lot of negativity at first but to be honest? i still had so much fun and the whole experience will always remain in my heart as a positive one <3

if you have any other questions, please do ask me, i can always talk about it more, i love trips down the memory lane lol

In the spirit of encouraging people to comment on fanfics while also making it easier to do so, I feel obliged to share a browser extension for ao3 that has quite literally revolutionized the comment game for me.

I present to you: the floating ao3 comment box!

From what I've seen, a big problem for many people is that once you reach the comments at the bottom of a fic, your memory of it miraculously disappears. Anything you wanted to say is stuck ten paragraphs ago, and you barely remember what you thought while reading. This fixes that!

I'll give a little explanation on the features and how it works, but if you want to skip all that, here's the link.

The extension is visible as a small blue box in the upper left corner.

(Side note: The green colouring is not from the extension, that's me.)

If you click on it, you open a comment box window at the bottom of your screen but not at the bottom of the fic. I opened my own fic for demonstrative purposes.

The website also gives explanations on how exactly it functions, but I'll summarize regardless.

insert selection -> if you highlight a sentence in the fic it will be added in italics to the comment box

add to comment box -> once you're done writing your comment, you click this button and the entire thing will automatically copied to the ao3 comment box

delete -> self explanatory

on mulitchapter fics, you will be given the option to either add the comment to just the current chapter or the entire fic

The best part? You can simply close the window the same way you opened it and your progress will automatically be saved. So you can open it, comment on a paragraph, and then close it and keep reading without having the box in your face.

Comments are what keep writers going, and as both a writer and a reader, I think it's such an easy way of showing support and enthusiasm.

Ok hear me out.

In my experience, people usually only know a perfume or a cologne by name for 2 reasons. 1) they wear it, or 2) someone they love wears it.

Now. Santal 33.

Considering it’s a cologne and not a perfume, there’s only 4 men close enough to Henry that he’d know their exact cologne. Percy, Phillip, Shaan or his dad.

So, allow me to bring out my headcannon.

Santal 33 was Arthur’s cologne. It’s a newer cologne, yeah. 2011 debut, coming as a replacement to 2006’s Santal 26. So I get that. But sometimes your favorite cologne or perfume gets discontinued or reformulated to hell and you need to find a new one. Maybe that’s how Arthur stumbled onto it in 2011, and for the memory building years of 11 to 17, that’s what he smelt like.

So in Rio/Melbourne, when Alex is very close to a young, still freshly grieving Henry, the scent of his father is just too raw, too overpowering, too painful.

and that’s why he reacts how he does. But promptly forgets it, also.

And when when Henry stumbles into Alex in that closet, stressed, truthfully a bit scared too, suddenly he smells home. He smells safe and home and comfort and love and realizes it’s Alex he smells but it’s also dad. It’s dads cologne. It’s “Santal 33”.

And, it’s doesn’t take long for Alex to stop just smelling like home and safety but for Alex to become his home and safety. And he laments to Percy, that it’s weird, that he’s a freak that his fathers cologne does it for him.

And Percy asks, does Alex’s cologne arose you? And Henry stops in his tracks.

No, actually. The smell of Alex under it? That’s sexy sure but not as much as it’s comforting. Alex smells uniquely like alex. His own natural scent and his fucking cinnamon everything- coffee, gum. His detergent, his dryer sheets. He smells like alex and it’s not that the smell does it for him, smelling alex just smells safe. Alex’s scent just makes him feel calm. And the cologne? It’s part of it. Part because it smells like his dad, part because it smells like alex. Equal parts honestly. Henry isn’t aroused by Alex’s scent, he’s calmed by it. He feels loved when wrapped up in it. He wears Alex’s clothes and smells Alex all over him and he feels wrapped in a blanket of love.

That’s all. Thank you

my contribution to the pink henry dtiys 🫡

You mentioned the ao3 author curse in one of your asks and I’ve never heard of this before? I am now super curious if you could maybe elaborate?

Oh BOY anon! Welcome welcome, this is a fun one.

You ever see one of those posts floating around, either here or on other social media, that's just a compilation of the most unhinged AO3 author's notes you've ever seen? The ones that are like "sorry this chapter is a day later than normal! My house was flooded and my fish died and my grandfather was struck by lightning three times in a row so I had to finish editing this in the hospital overnight. Please forgive me, next week will be back to our regular schedule!"

That's the AO3 author curse. It's not an always thing. It's not even a most of the time thing. But sometimes life goes to absolute shit, and sometimes that happens when you're in the middle of posting a fic, and sometimes you end up being incredibly apologetic about schedule slippage on writing that you are doing in your spare time for free while you're having to deal with Actual Real World Stuff and explaining why the schedule slippage occurred in the author's notes that makes your life sound completely batshit.

A couple of examples:

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CRACK

sideblog for weird or unhinged ao3 screenshots and quotes >:D feel free to send/submit yr own

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Im the one who just egged your house

starting a collection

(Me: I haven't yet had anything happen while posting, but while co-writing a fic with @ships-to-sail that was literally set in the afterlife and all about grief and the impact we have on the people we leave behind I had multiple family members/family friends die, which was uhhhhhhhhh not conducive to writing that particular subject matter lmao)

it’s 2024, and no one knows they’re engaged 💍 ✨💕

i’m going to say something that might make me seem ungrateful, but i think it’s true of many fic writers:

we want you to leave comments ON ao3.

we’re not angry or disappointed or anything like that when you leave qrts or lots of tags on our fic posts, not at all. we don’t NOT want you to message us to tell us how a fic touched you. but in addition to that, please consider just copying those words and posting them on ao3 as a comment.

why?

the reason is simple: leaving commentary in other places is ephemeral. story posts get pushed down. chats get pushed down in the list of chats, or worse, pushed up in lists of messages as the conversation continues. but comments on ao3 are easily accessible. and this is important because writers read and reread these comments regularly.

writing, especially writing longfics, is exhausting and drains your confidence over time. having a collection of people who enjoyed your past work at your fingertips is an excellent way to build yourself up when you’re feeling down. fic writers need this a lot.

i know over the past few years there’s this trend to be very descriptive with what is an “acceptable” comment. that’s all nonsense, as long as you’re not being an asshole, just say what’s on your heart.

but post it on ao3. please.

You’ve used dozens of writing tools, and they all do the job, but before you start your next long-form writing project, I recommend you try Obsidian. I wrote the first draft of my first book entirely

King Alex The First with his stupidly handsome boyfriend watch me spend the next few months replacing acd with the king for every video or photo i see of mary&george On Patreon the version without watermark and wallpapers!