One Wank After Another

[coalcube]

A blank assignment is a funny thing, isn't it? When you have it, you don't appreciate it, and when you miss it, it's gone.

Wednesday 10 December: Default deadline (9pm UTC)
Wednesday 17 December: Assignment deadline (9pm UTC)
Wednesday 24 December: Main collection works reveals (9pm UTC)
Thursday 25 December: Madness collection works reveals (9pm UTC)
Thursday 1 January: Author reveals, end of event (9pm UTC)

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Comments

[(Anonymous)]

"DNW: italics or other emphasis"

I am sad, because I would write this person their cool age-gap rarepair request, but I cannot hide my light (unconstrained abuse of italics) under a bushel.

[(Anonymous)]

That is a really restrictive dnw, wow. I guess it's doable... but they'd be getting 1050 words from me.

[(Anonymous)]

If you look at the actual letter, they say a few times is fine, so it's not that restrictive: "DNW: italics or other emphasis*, unhappy endings
*once or twice is fine, but having repeated italics messes up my breathing when I'm reading. Yes, this is unhinged. I'm just really bad at breathing), okay?"

Unless you can't go two paragraphs without italicizing I don't see how this would be a problem.

[(Anonymous)]

Wow, that's one of the worst DNWs I've seen.

[(Anonymous)]

Really? My god, you’ve had a smooth run of things, then. I’ve seen some truly terrible DNWs and this isn’t even a blip.

[(Anonymous)]

It's possible they use a screenreader. Some of them don't do well with italics or bold, or they read it in a funny voice.

[(Anonymous)]

Oh good point.

Logically they probably mean formatting emphasis, but "other emphasis" is a bit vague.

[(Anonymous)]

DC is curious why people are so horrified by this DNW? It would make me a little sad too not being able to use italics, but it doesn't seem terribly hard to work around; just write your fic as normal, then before posting, highlight the whole thing and Ctrl-I twice (or Cmd-I, etc). It's also a common accessibility thing for people with vision issues.

[(Anonymous)]

SC

& yeah the "other emphasis" thing is vague but IMO it's obvious what they meant? And in the very rare case this is truly a batshit insane recip who doesn't want the narration itself to emphasize anything, that's not something mods would ever enforce, lol.

[(Anonymous)]

Most of the things I offer are book canons and a lot of them use italics and other emphasis in specifically-established ways, like for telepathy. I'd struggle with that. Other canons have specific-language words italicized.

I'd find it possible but I'd struggle and would write a shorter fic.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, I like my italics, but I'd shrug at this and easily comply. Hell, I've written fics where I've emphasized every which way, and then on reread was like "Tone it the fuck down" and taken them all out.

[(Anonymous)]

DC

Yeah, I’ve written for this exact DNW before, and it’s fine. There were a couple of times when I had to think through my sentence structure a bit more carefully to make it read the way I wanted to, but to be honest, I think a lot of authors overestimate how much heavy lifting their italics actually do. Usually what happens to me is that I use them liberally when I’m writing (for anyone other than that recip) then go back six months later for a reread and find them annoyingly excessive. Once or twice I’ve accidentally pasted my work into the HTML box instead of rich text and so had the italics stripped by accident, and the fic still read fine.

The only time I think it’s an actual challenge is if you need to mark larger blocks of text as separate from the rest - like long quotes/extracts, or dialogue that isn’t spoken aloud. But even then if your writing’s otherwise clear, the reader should usually be able to follow this without formatting support.

[(Anonymous)]

That would be an insta default from me. They may have good reason to DNW them, but that's just not how I write.

[(Anonymous)]

Wow, a lot of bad writers on coal.

[(Anonymous)]

Lol eat a dick wanker

[(Anonymous)]

Wouldn't you just write the fic as normal and then paste it into ao3 with all the formatting removed? This doesn't seem like an issue.

[(Anonymous)]

DC

That only works if you use italics as a fun but narratively unimportant stylistic quirk

[(Anonymous)]

Ignoring the part about whether or not using italics is a valid writing choice and to answer your question from a practical stance, I still default to coding stylistic choices when I'm writing (so, < em >, etc.) rather than just making it italics through the doc controls. It's such a habit at this point I would need to go back through and remove that rather than just pasting with plain text in ao3.

[(Anonymous)]

Ooh! Fandom?

[(Anonymous)]

The Old Kingdom - Garth Nix
Dandadan (Anime)
The Invisible Library - Genevieve Cogman

[(Anonymous)]

I use italics occasionally, but unless you're trying to write Miss Climpson or some other character who canonically abuses italics, it should be pretty trivial to write a fic without any. I don't think I've ever made a piece of writing worse by going through and getting rid of all the italics.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, I understand the first instinctive, "Nooo, my precious emphasis!" reaction, but looking at some of my more recent works in practice I average maybe one italicised word per 1k of fic, so it's not exactly a dramatic rewrite.

[(Anonymous)]

Just write it, then erase the italics *shrug*. You can repost it on FFN or something with italics on afterwards.

[(Anonymous)]

DA

No. I wouldn't post the italic-less fic under my name to begin with, so I'd prefer to default.

[(Anonymous)]

OP

I am amused that this has generated discussion for nearly two months on here.

2025: whatta wholesome year for coal.