For the DVD commentary- how did you decide to write the concept for the Dragon fic and what was it about it that attracted you to it in the first place?
Thank u!!! I so appreciate u asking about this omg... I really do like this fic quite a bit... 😁Short answer I love Charles and I love fantasy....
how did i decide!!! i saw these Charles pics:
and went. That's a fantasy protagonist if I've ever seen one. The lighting. The hair. The stubble. The mark on his cheek. The set of his jaw. There's hope there and determination and tragedy. There's weight on his shoulders. There's a certain beauty. There's grace.
sooo I went to my friend @wdcseb who i bounce ideas off from time to time...
what became this fic was actually my THIRD mental stab at conceptualizing a charles fantasy fic.... the first was one of those worlds where you Enter into it and when you return home nothing is ever the same again.... the second was more of a... Charles is a puck-like figure... The third was this because like... Racing... Dragon riding... And it sort of became what it was for a couple of reasons: I didn't want him to be a knight or a soldier, I didn't want to write something that was heavy on war, I didn't want to lean into some sort of monarchy aspect....and I also LOVE Terry Pratchett's going postal so... Ok why not dragons and the mail...
of course, as I talked about in the other dragonfic ask... I like reading fantasy. I've read... All shades of it I guess so I wasn't too worried about being able to do it...like when I wrote f1bb I genuinely thought a lot about brandy sandy... He writes like he's hacking at the story until it becomes something. It's not beautiful but I do enjoy where it takes me (sometimes. Wax&wayne sucks). So having written most of that I figured I could give this ago and try to capture some of the feeling of those charles photos and the feeling of the sort of fantasy I read when I was a kid...as well as sort of a clumsy genre work in general. I think about a lot of my fic as practice or as trying something out for an audience and that is what i was doing here, in a good way
I guess what I like about this fic is that it gave me the leeway to write about some things I would never address directly in Canon fic (loss, for example) and because it allowed me to tackle the "myth" of Charles - il predestindo - in its own way and setting. And also because it's mostly about a dream - what does it mean to enter into a dream and come out somewhere else entirely? and then once i got rolling, I got excited... And the fic happened!!! And ended up. Much longer than intended but that's OK...
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Communities closed beta is here
Hello again! We’re back with an update on Communities, a big idea we had last year that we’ve been working on steadily since then. We’re abnormally jazzed to announce that we’re beginning a “closed beta” phase of this new feature, which means many of you will get to play with it soon!
We want to build this whole thing together, with as much input from all of you as possible. We’ve read and re-read the feedback from our previous post, and we’ve been surveying and interviewing people about this idea for a few months now. But it’s time to open this up even more for hands-on testing.
We’ve already begun reaching out to most of you who interacted with our previous post, as promised, with a survey asking whether you’d be interested in helping (check your email!). Over the next couple of weeks, we’ll be using the results of that survey to narrow down who we’d like to help test Communities in these initial batches.
The process is looking a bit like this:
If you received a Communities survey email to your registered Tumblr email address, fill it out! If you’re interested in helping us in this beta test period, that’s your way of potentially getting early access. If you did not receive an email with the Communities survey, don’t fret! Communities will be rolling out to more people as we expand our testing.
We’ll go through the results and choose a diverse range of community ideas to gather a wide array of feedback.
Selected testers will receive a second survey with more detailed questions about their proposed community. Very practical stuff, like the name, title, and description, whether it should be public or private, the About page contents, its own community guidelines, and more.
We will create the new Tumblr community on your behalf using the information supplied. We’re building the tools that will let people create and edit communities themselves, so eventually you’ll be able to change them without needing our help. But for now, we’re creating and editing them for you, as needed.
After we’ve created the community, you’ll be made its first admin. Everything from here on out is up to you – Tumblr staff won’t be in your community (unless you invite us, of course). You’ll be able to invite anyone on Tumblr to your community. However, your community will have a population cap to start, limiting how many people can be in it and invited, as a way of keeping this beta test somewhat contained and manageable for us. We’ll be able to raise that population cap for communities that are growing and if we want to test further in that direction.
And throughout, we’ll be asking for feedback, both in some special communities for everyone in the closed beta, and via more surveys and the Support tickets we receive.
This closed beta version of Communities is far from finished, and that’s part of the reason we want to start opening it up to more of you for feedback. There are a lot of rough edges and known issues, but we think it’s far enough along that it’s usable enough for testing. We need feedback in order to feel like we’re building the right thing.
The very first public community is called “Communities Feedback” for this reason! We want everyone helping us test out communities to tell us about it, so people in this closed beta will be in there by default. We want to use that space to be more public and real-time about new pieces we’re building, bugs we’re fixing, things we know are broken, and answers to common questions. There is an additional, private community for community admins, to help shape how administrating and moderating these spaces will work. And if you don’t want to use those spaces, you can always use the “Feedback” category in our Support form.
Stay tuned for more, and keep an eye on that Communities Feedback space if you’d like to see how things are changing over time.
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