In my insomniac need to find something to entertain me, I begain looking through my bookmarks. The Faro Fixer seems to have deleted everything! I know she had issues (social anxiety, agoraphobia, I'm not sure what) but I am devestated that she withdrew this far. I think she's got one Star Trek fic left on AO3, but the few SPN fics she'd imported there are completely gone. I think I need to make a habit of somehow downloading my fave fics, and even my not so faves, just in case.

I've been downloading fics to my computers for years. I've been burned by missing stories too many times.

ION, I've seen a tag called "Identity porn" in lots of Avengers fics. What does that mean?

Secret identity vs. superhero identity (Peter Parker/Spider Man) and how maintaining those two can cause hilarious hijinks and love triangles, etc.

I know what you mean. I was just about to bemoan not having saved nanoochka's Olympic skier/chef Dean/Cas fic before she filed the serial numbers off for publication, but I just now found a link that still had a cached copy.

I sometimes feel bad when I see a notice from an author asking people to get rid of fics they've written, either because they're trying to go pro or being a fic writer "isn't who they want to be anymore" or whatever, and I don't dump the fic. I wouldn't pass the fic on to someone else, but I wouldn't expect anyone to get rid of a saved fic of mine if I suddenly wanted to try and remove my fic writing identity from the web. I know it can't be done, for one thing, and also once something is out there it's left my control.

I feel about it the same way I feel about Amazon erasing ebooks from people's Kindles. Fine if you don't want to provide current access to your work, but you should't get to change history.

Did nanoochka ever finish that fic where Dean was dating some perfect guy and on the outs with Cas?

It seems she did, though I wasn't aware of it. I think I lost interest (or just patience with Mr. Right) and stopped reading before it was done.

Huh. I had alerts set up on her LJ, but it drifted right off my radar. And I'm monitoring AO3 pretty obsessively, and I didn't see it there.

I do get bored enough, and I'm sure curious if D/C was her original (or eventual) endgame.

How do people, in general, feel about quoting canon? Right now, I feel that I'm okay with lines of dialogue being put in the mouths of the person that said them, but blocks of dialogues (including exchanges) not so much. And putting them into narration whether it's thoughts or description...I'm probably reacting to accumulated uses over different stories, but it feels somewhere between twee and heavy handed--when it's not lazy. You can't jump from a casual paragraph to "she's like the sister I never wanted" just because we have episodes fresh in our memory--that's what gives fic a bad name, the idea you don't have to write a "proper" story because we show up knowing so much.

Unrelatedly, anyone know of a browser script that can just delete the words "sex hair! from any fic featuring Castiel? Ta, ever so. Switching the description of his hair from black to any variant of dark brown is gravy.

It tends to throw me out of the story and make me think of the writer as being cutesy unless it's a short quote that's clearly something the characters have said with repetition (i.e. the "bitch!"/"jerk!" exchange) rather than something a character just said on one specific occasion. I realize fanfic writers are working with a limited amount of source material (though lots more than most in the case of SPN), but I'd rather they try to nail the character's general method of speaking rather than parrot his or her exact words at me.