made me think of this

ALT

[id: x/twitter qrt from user styloshka that says "I read a forum post about art once, that it's a product of the dialectic between the effort of the artist and the friction of the medium. You push on the thing and the thing pushes back on you, it has its own voice. The weight of a piano key, the tension of a guitar string." original post from user colleen_daves says "Don't you want to skip over the mindless drudgery that is making art?" I do six stand embroidery and break like 10 needles a day, would I prefer that activity didn't hurt my hands and make me angry? Sure. But that's what makes having the finished piece after so worth it to me."]

link

Don't get me wrong, I absolutely loved when I got assigned a solo and would dance it over and over as much for pleasure as for the quest for perfection, but I loved the rest of it too.

I loved the slow methodical mediation of the stretches before class. I loved the quiet discipline of the barre exercises, the endless repetition, the feel of me shaping my body into the same forms, closer ever closer to correct.

Most of the others didn't rush onto the floor the moment it cleared to stretch alone.

Most of the others complained endlessly about barre. For me it was part of it. All of it was dancing and I loved dancing in every fiber of my being, pushing ever pushing at the boundaries of what my body can do.

It was never boring to me, not even the most mundane, repetitious parts. I gave no fucks for those few performances in front of the audience; I was dancing for me and that included doing feet positions over and over at the barre. It was doing the thing that mattered and I loved every second of it.

I was the same way with the assorted marital arts styles I studied over the years until my body gave out. The spars are the glamourous bits, but I loved the drills too, repeating, repeating, repeating.

I was the same way with candle wicking and needlepoint, my fingers reading canvas. My fingers mindlessly going in and out or doing the knots over and over.

It is possible to love every part of the thing, the colours unrealing on canvas, the patterns on linen, the repetition of form of drill of motion. Effort and beauty and sweat forever tangled together.

This is what Annie Dilliard said

A well-known writer got collared by a university student who asked, ”Do you think I could be a writer?”

”Well,” the writer said, ”I don’t know. . . . Do you like sentences?”

The writer could see the student’s amazement. Sentences? Do I like sentences? I am 20 years old and do I like sentences? If he had liked sentences, of course, he could begin, like a joyful painter I knew. I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, ”I liked the smell of the paint.”

this is one of my favorite bits about tumblr

the users seem to actually prefer text posts to anything else, and treat it as a chore to play a video especially with sound

You mean Miranda like in Shakespeare's Tempest Miranda, the sweet and smart girl with who believes that all people are fundamentally good and has a mysterious manipulative and omnipotent parent who doesn't explain anything to her and pretends to separate her from her true love on the account of an old feud, except in the end we discover that it was all planned from the start and he wanted the two of them to be together?

I see...

excuse me hold up beg your pardon whAT

I don’t know about others but the only reason I put both is so that whichever someone clicks on, they will find my fic. So if there is supposed to be rules, I guarantee you that no writer knows these ones. We can barely get people to comment, you think we’re going to specifically choose & or / ? Hell no.

I’ve been in fandom for twenty years, and “/” means romance and “&” means no romance was literally one of the first things I learned. It dates back to Star Trek fanfiction of the 70s. I’m boggled by the fact that anyone who’s been reading fic on AO3 for more than like five minutes wouldn’t know that, and I’m curious as to what fanfic community you come out of.

I don’t think that tagging with both is actually going to get your fic in front of more readers. People looking for romance often exclude the “&” tag if there are too many gen fics tagged with both. People looking for gen often exclude the “/” tag if there are too many fics with both. So rather than putting your fic in front of twice the people, you are in fact more likely to get your target audience ignoring your fic because it has a tag they don’t want.

Also, by overtagging you are more likely to annoy potential readers away from your fic than entice them. A fic tagged both & and / better have both romance and a ton of platonic interaction between the two characters, like a slow burn romance friends-to-lovers arc. If it isn’t, I’m going to be very unhappy because the author lied to me with the tags to try and trick me into reading a fic with deceptive advertising.

When I’m in a fandom and see tagging where some of the tags don’t really apply and are just there to get it in front of more eyes, I’m going to assume one of two things. Either the author is a newb who doesn’t know anything, or the author is purposefully spamming the tags because they don’t care about lying to their potential audience and think that “spray and pray” is an effective tactic. In the first case, their writing probably will not be very good, so why bother reading their fic. In the second case, the fact that I can’t trust the tags to be accurate means I’m not going to read it to see if it’s interesting even if it has a tag I like. Chances are, that tag isn’t actually in the fic anyway, and even if it is, by spam-tagging the author is making the archive harder to use for everybody. Why would I reward bad behavior with attention? No. Far better to mute the author and move on.

More to the point--and no, I will never stop harping on this, because we have GOT to stop leaving our strongest points in the drawer--it doesn't matter if you heard of this convention before joining AO3 or not, because it's in AO3's tagging FAQ.

[id: the "How do I tag a romantic or platonic relationship?" section of the tagging FAQ here.]

"But Jo," you may argue, because you're wrong. "There's no way to find that without digging through site FAQ menus, and that's really inaccessible!"

sure

except

that when you go to post a new fic, and you go to put in those relationship tags, you see this

[id: the Relationships field]

and that tooltip, the one THERE TO EXPLAIN HOW THE FIELD WORKS, links to the Relationships segment of the tag FAQ, which explicitly lays this shit out.

I don't care if you don't know fandom history. I don't care if you've never heard a goddamn word about the spirk shippers. I don't care if you've never been exposed to fandom culture in your life. It is, frankly, not fair to expect those things of everyone.

What is entirely fair to expect is that you will READ THE INSTRUCTIONS PRINTED NEXT TO THE FUCKING BOX, actually. Forget fandom conventions. It genuinely doesn't matter whether you agree with or respect fandom conventions. This is a site policy. This is explicitly how tagging on AO3, specifically, works.