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)]

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)]

I also like maintaining the formatting convention of the canon in those respects, but it wouldn’t really bother me to strip that formatting out at the end. If anything, I guess a fic where I had to specify with dialogue tags that telepathy was being used instead of just putting it in italics would be a little bit longer than otherwise.

[(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.