New [community profile] ladiesbingo card just dropped!

Friday, September 5th, 2025 06:49 pm
lightbird: http://coelasquid.deviantart.com/ (Default)
[personal profile] lightbird
I flopped last year. Here's hoping I do better this time, lol.

Episode Tags and Missing Scenes Wabi / Sabi Journalist / Chronicler Midnight Found Families
Sacrifice / Letting Go Neutral Colours Revelations and Concealments Kinetic Energy Information is given off the record
Street Food Truth or Dare Wild Card Landscape/Panorama Superpowers
Ritual Marks and Body Decorations Slice of Life Pre- Slash / Femslash / Het Coffee Shop AU If only you'd notice me: Yearning and obliviousness
Documentation Hopelessly Devoted Epistolary fic: Emails, letters etc. Loss of Faith Flesh and Bone

Feedback: when, how, what, who

Friday, September 5th, 2025 10:05 am
troyswann: (Default)
[personal profile] troyswann posting in [community profile] fan_writers
 So, I'm currently constructing a course to teach young artists (in this case dancers) to build the habit of creative journaling as a foundation for developing collaborative projects and writing grants and stuff. *handwave* That's not relevant except as the impetus for this musing about feedback.

I want to teach them a little bit about how to fruitfully solicit, receive and offer feedback, and that got me thinking about how much I've learned from fandom about this process. Having a good many years and a few hundred fics-worth of experience working with beta readers, I can say that fandom did a fantastic job of preparing me to take and give feedback in my other professional spaces (teaching and learning, pro publishing etc.). The idea of involving beta readers in the creative process was just woven into the fic-writing experience and fandom culture when I dipped my toe into it, and that expectation trained me to hold my deathless prose lightly and to onboard the help and insights of a reader way more graciously than I ever had before. This shift of mindset was due in some ways to the gift-culture ethos of fandom; the delight my community took in working to make cool stuff together helped me to shift my stance from defensive protectiveness to openness. This is something I would like my students to experience in their own work.

So, to that end, I would love to hear what y'all think about soliciting and receiving feedback on your work.

Some things I'm chewing on in that regard:

1. The right feedback at the right time: When I'm asked to beta read for someone, the first question I ask is what kind of beta they are looking for: cheerleading? Line-by-line? Structural? etc. I have found that getting the wrong kind of feedback at the wrong time can be harmful to the process. When I'm struggling with the question of whether this story is even viable, telling me that I have too many adverbs and dangling modifiers is gonna derail me completely. How do you articulate to a beta reader what you need at a given stage of the process?

2. Building trust: Asking for feedback requires a lot of trust, I find, since you're giving someone your baby and asking for help raising it. I used to lean on people I already knew and whose work I admired (sometimes different people for different sorts of stories). What do you do when, for example, you're in a new space or are interacting with someone, either as beta or author, whom you might now know very well? How do you establish trust and boundaries necessary for a good experience?

3. Articulating values and qualities of useful feedback: I have found that building a good beta relationship requires me to "hold my values strongly and my opinions lightly" as a colleague of mine wisely advises. For me, some core values can be captured in the "think" model for feedback:

true, helpful, inspiring, needed and kind.

Other models add to that basic structure: timely, specific, honest and brief.

At the heart of these qualities I find two key requirements for both sides of the relationship: the focus on the work; and, as a corollary, leaving our egos at the door. We have to be both kind and courageous, to simultaneously consider the human being and to ensure that the work itself is at the centre of the relationship. It's tricky.  What values or qualities do you see as central to the beta relationship?

PS. Thanks to all the folks engaging in interesting conversations here. I really appreciate this space.

괴담출근 (GSGW): GSGW Reverse Big Bang 2026

Friday, September 5th, 2025 09:24 am
elesteria: Twitter: @sharkhwa (Default)
[personal profile] elesteria posting in [community profile] fandomcalendar
description

Jin Nasol of GSGW, with text saying 1 Day Reverse Big Bang. Credit to happ13unni

Description: A collaborative fan event between Artists & Authors for
Even If I Fall Into a Ghost Story, I Still Have to Go to Work (GSGW)
by Baek Deoksoo.
Schedule:
Artist and Writer sign-ups begin September 6
Posting Begins March 13
Links:
Carrd
Tumblr
Twitter

Ficlet: Masquerade Ball (Wish Me Luck)

Friday, September 5th, 2025 02:48 pm
thisbluespirit: (writing)
[personal profile] thisbluespirit
Another of the AU_gust ficlets, this one for the prompt "Masquerade Ball" and also for [community profile] allbingo Crime Classics square "Foreign Bodies." I put 0 research and accuracy into it and the fandom doesn't have enough fic to warrant an AU, but I was thinking about WML when I saw the prompt. Anyway, less traumatic than the actual incident's end in 1.6, one trusts.

Masquerade Ball (633 words) by thisbluespirit
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Wish Me Luck (TV)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Colin Beale/Matty Firman
Characters: Colin Beale (Wish Me Luck), Matty Firman
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Regency, Spies & Secret Agents, Ficlet, Community: allbingo, Costume Parties & Masquerades, Alternate Universe - Napoleonic Wars, handwaves accuracy, Matty just being Matty in any time period, Implied Sexual Content
Summary: Matty and Colin get caught in a compromising position.

(I thought I was doing better today but I just failed at the summary sentence three four FIVE times in a row, so I do hope my editing was actually okay. It was only tweaking, so let's hope so.)

Feedback Post for Summer 2025

Thursday, September 4th, 2025 09:37 pm
littlefics: Three miniature books standing on an open normal-sized book. (Default)
[personal profile] littlefics posting in [community profile] seasonsofdrabbles
Now that the most recent round has wrapped up, we have a few topics we'd like feedback on. To give feedback, you can reply to this post, privately email us, or leave a screened comment on the Mod Contact Post.

1) Timing of next round
We're thinking of starting the next round in mid to late October, conscious of not overlapping too much with important [community profile] trickortreatex dates. Let us know if you feel there are other timing considerations for the fall round.

2) PROPOSAL: A year-long beta post
Many exchanges have an optional beta post where people can offer to beta-read others' work. Is this something you would be interested in using, whether as a writer or a reader? We would probably make a new one annually.

3) Regarding our rule that participants can't opt out of requesting or offering single drabbles
This round, we implemented a new rule that stated that while participants are still welcome to request/offer other drabble types, they can no longer exclude single drabbles from their offers or requests. Overall, we are heavily leaning towards keeping this rule as is in future rounds. Some reasons why: we like that the universal minimum for this exchange is now 100 words, it was easy to implement on the modding side, it changed the signup process on the participant side very little, it allows us to still use drabble type as a matching criterion, and it is anecdotally helpful for defaults/pinch hitting. We've considered a couple other approaches (such as making drabble type an entirely optional freeform) but we believe the current approach works best for us.

However, we'd still like to hear if you felt it had a substantial negative impact on your experience, or if you think another approach would be better.

4) Anything else on your mind?
If you have any other comments or ideas not related to the above, those are also welcome!

What I'm currently playing, September 4 2025

Thursday, September 4th, 2025 05:53 pm
estirose: Maria faces the enemy, Final Fantasy II CGI (Maria eyes wide - Final Fantasy II)
[personal profile] estirose
Not all at once, obviously! But I've spent at least a couple of minutes with the following games since last Friday:

* Fantasy Life i. I'm post-game, just trying to collect some special flowers and rise up in various Lives. I'm Hero in farmer and working on Hero in Magician. (To be honest, I've mostly just gone in to do flower collection this week.)

* Stardew Valley. Currently doing a my-mods-only run, just finished up the Community Center in early Summer year 3 (I never ever let that completion run past year 2!), working on trying to convince the game RNG to give me the last remaining Dwarf Scroll and have just set up a mahogany forest as I need about 300 hardwood (200 for one thing and 100 for another).

* Vampire Survivors. This was on sale so I've kind of poked at it. (I also picked up the Among Us DLC because Among Us.)

* Baldur's Gate 3. It was on sale as well, so I went for it! Currently playing a half-elf bard. Also trying hard not to kill a druid that I would really like to thud. Have not found one of the companions that was with me in the prologue. Would like to do so. Playing blind, which means I may miss people.

* Hustle Cat. Someone on fandomgiftbasket would like Hustle Cat fic. This game doesn't play well with Linux boxes, but I do have a Win 11 virtual machine, so I just shared my Steam library off to the Steam account I use for my Windows boxes to play through it again. I may or may not be able to write fic, but heck, it doesn't hurt to play it again.

Rare Male Slash Exchange Post Reveal Pinchhits Due Urgent

Thursday, September 4th, 2025 10:29 pm
tentaclemod: (Default)
[personal profile] tentaclemod posting in [community profile] pinchhits
Event: Rare Male Slash Exchange, a gift exchange for fanfic, fanart and podfic.
Event link: AO3 | DW
Pinch hit link: https://raremaleslashex.dreamwidth.org/2025/08/31/
Due date: due asap, negotiable

EPH 1 - 赤ちゃんと僕 | Aka-chan to Boku | Baby and Me, 銀と金 - 福本伸行 | Gin to Kin - Fukumoto Nobuyuki, 忍たま乱太郎 | Nintama Rantarou

EPH 2 - The Mandalorian (TV), Star Wars: Obi-Wan Kenobi (TV), Andor (TV), Crossover Fandom

Community Recs Post!

Thursday, September 4th, 2025 10:05 am
glitteryv: (Default)
[personal profile] glitteryv posting in [community profile] recthething
Every Thursday, we have a community post, just like this one, where you can drop a rec or five in the comments.

This works great if you only have one rec and don't want to make a whole post for it, or if you don't have a DW account, or if you're shy. ;)

(But don't forget: you can deffo make posts of your own seven days a week. ;D!)

So what cool fanvids/fancrafts/fics/podfics/fanart/other kinds of fanworks have we discovered this week? Drop it in the comments below. Anon comment is enabled.

BTW, AI fanworks are not eligible for reccing at recthething. If you aware that a fanwork is AI-generated, please do not rec it here.

And yet another game

Wednesday, September 3rd, 2025 08:10 pm
estirose: A set of girl scout badges below brownie graduate wings (Girl Scout Badges)
[personal profile] estirose
Baldur's Gate 3 was on sale on Steam, so I thought I'd pick it up. (Still expensive, and I picked up a DLC as well.) I created a half-elf bard, figuring she'd be the face of the party. Took me a bit to remember that my character was a bard and therefore maybe shouldn't be on the front lines. Oops.

(I'm not as familiar with the D&D5e ruleset, but I am with 3rd edition D&D, and I am definitely familiar with Pathfinder 1e and 2e, which descend from 3rd edition D&D just as D&D5e has. Therefore the whole thing is familiar and yet not.)

Apart from nearly killing my character by charging into battles, I've only borked one roll (it's like... Tav, honey, how do you manage to fail a DC 10 roll with +3 on the dice?). Also set my character on fire a few times. I figure I'll get the hang of things. I've set the game on the easiest difficulty possible because I want to get the whole storyline (I'm going into it pretty blind, TBH, apart from some absorbed knowledge about the NPC companions).

Days of What

Wednesday, September 3rd, 2025 07:53 am
kalloway: (Panilla Saga 2 Mephisto)
[personal profile] kalloway
I know I had something that I wanted to mention... Ah well.

It's honestly kinda nice that the work-week is half over already. Last night wasn't bad at all, either, just normal-busy with a few bits of bad timing. I ended up taking a few bits of a model kit (Starfall) in because while I don't mind gently reaming a single tight hole with my hobby knife now and then, fourteen of the same part is kind of pushing it for patience and safety. So I found an appropriate drill bit in the big box and just quietly took care of all of that between calls. ^^;;

I'm in a couple of gunpla discord servers and in one of them, a handful of people are basically playing tariff-chicken and reporting back. Current (and more research is needed) studies suggest that if a holy grail pops up on Suruga-ya in the $100-150 range, or an order around that amount is made, fees+tariffs pretty much negate the free shipping. Obnoxious but not horrific.

[community profile] bitesizedcleaning has their Annual September Stampede running right now. I haven't actually started on it, but I do want to give it a try. Flat surfaces... ^^;;

Oh, now I remember - I don't think I even mentioned this, but there was an anime convention last weekend a couple of towns away. I didn't go because it was a first year con, looked messy, and the single-day badges were something like $60. in this economy?! Anyway, some Youtuber guest of theirs was running a non-sanctioned predator sting and while a couple of people were arrested after being confronted, one of them was carrying a (completely legal) gun. I guess that while the police and con-ops were cooperative, they were also very much like 'uh, don't actually do this and we didn't think it'd be during con hours what the actual fuck'. So yeah I do not have words for how catastrophic that could have been and I am very glad I didn't go.

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