Well, I'm here

[zaniida]

I got persuaded by ysabetwordsmith to make a Dreamwidth account for a possible upcoming event promoting my Five Moments of (Nonsexual) Intimacy fic form. So here I am.

I have multiple identities online. I don't yet know whether I want to openly combine them here, but they're not that hard to connect. And since my Pillowfort post about the fic form is under my Arkylie Killingstad public persona, it makes no sense to be coy about that, especially as questions might arise about whether I (Zaniida) swiped the idea from "her" (Arkylie) when they're really both me.

I specifically chose an AO3 pseudonym that's distinct from my normal online identity, because I do delve into dark topics and don't want the unwary to happen across them while looking through my more family-friendly fare. Also, I started Arkylie Killingstad when I realized that I needed a personal public identity that isn't borrowed from my favorite media and thus is entirely my own, without being necessarily connected to my real-life name. So I would hope that the connection to Zaniida stays in fan-friendly spaces and doesn't leak out too much to the world at large.

Anyway! With any luck, I'll be able to set this event up in time, and claim August as the month for creating variations of my fic form ^_^

Comments

Welcome!

[ysabetwordsmith]

I'm happy to see you here.

Yes, it's a good idea to use separate pen names for wildly different genres, precisely to keep people from stumbling unawares into material they might find repugnant or distressing. I write everything from fluffy fluffness to WARN ALL THE THINGS. Nowadays, most of it goes on my Dreamwidth because it's crowdfunded and my fans are diverse, but back when most of my publication was in magazines I had different pen names.

Re: Welcome!

[zaniida]

What I've ended up doing is using my Arkylie Killingstad as a public persona for YouTube and Fanfiction.net, along with a few others, while Zaniida is a persona for AO3, where I publish my darker fics. I don't think I'd be using it over here except that I couldn't figure out a way to avoid confusion without leading to a giant public discussion of personas that would undo the very reason I was trying to keep them separate.

Zaniida is, after all, the name under which I post 100% of my fanfics and most of my additional fan content; FFN gets a "family-friendly" subset, by which I mean "if my friends and family ran across this and spread it around, I wouldn't have to run damage control." So that collection is never going to be darker than a good Halloween story, never going to delve into sexuality, never going to deal with particularly controversial issues, never going to make use of swearing except in a few extreme circumstances (I don't swear much in any case, but even less over there). And some of my FFN fics have been edited to remove/censor certain portions or elements, sometimes whole chapters -- but in cases where doing so would gut them, the fic just stays exclusively on AO3.

For example, one of my FMI fics includes as a key element the reveal that one character was born with malformed sexual organs that her parents and the doc saw fit to just cut off, and that it leaves her with odd feelings about her gender identity. I think that this issue is worth writing about, I think I handled it about as well as I could given my current understanding of the issues, and I'm not ashamed of having explored such a topic -- but I do not in the least want to go into that topic with certain portions of the people I know. (That fic also includes situational nudity as a significant detail, and I know people who'd be offended by that as well.) Hence, I keep those AO3-exclusive, and lock the most controversial pieces so that only fan-minded people can access them.

[alexseanchai]

a possible upcoming event promoting my Five Moments of (Nonsexual) Intimacy fic form

OH EXCELLENT

With any luck, I'll be able to set this event up in time

if you have questions about how to run writing events, the yuletide_admin profile page has a permanent invite link to the Yuletide Discord, where the #fest-questions channel exists explicitly so people who don't have experience running writing events can ask advice from people who do. like, I think morbane has been a Yuletide mod for ten years at this point? not sure, but you get the idea. the server is mostly fannish and thoroughly pan-fandom; a couple of the writing events that have dedicated channels there are for original works—or effectively for original works, hi jukebox_fest—and several more include original works. you'd also be welcome to advertise this event in #events-promo channel and discuss it in #small-fests channel. 😸

I appreciate it!

[zaniida]

I'm nervous, but trying to remind myself that my nerves have shown no correlation to how difficult something is or how likely I am to succeed or fail.

Also, since I've completed my July Prompt, I'm working on my fics again, and trying to get some advance work done on some FMI fics that I've had in the works but been putting off. Ideally, I'll post a couple short pieces (on AO3) around the middle of the month, so that I can make the announcements about the event coming up, and then I'll get some more pieces together to post on the first of the month, to kinda showcase the form and put it through its paces in a few ways.

I'm very much hoping to make my first fic posted for this event to be a My Little Pony one, if only because a six-person team is perfect for this fic form and "FIM FMI" is just too good to pass up ^_^