Glittering fragments in chaotic, unstable orbit. A sharp friend with a fungal halo. πŸ”ž

I do what I am: πŸͺžπŸ•ΈοΈπŸ—οΈπŸͺ‘πŸ”ͺπŸ„πŸŽ­πŸŒ™πŸ©Έ


(Disclaimer: this post includes some whining about how Cohost does things, but this is not primarily a post complaining about Cohost. This is describing how crossposting my fiction means dealing with a cluster of extra steps unique to each platform.)

First, I write the story. This is the fun part! I get to use the text editor I'm most comfortable with, and it's just a matter of getting words on the page.

Next I publish it to my own website. Easy enough. Just need to pick a title, some tags, a preview snippet, then push it up. My site ensures that posts in the same series get linked together.

Now I publish to Cohost:

  • Cohost uses markdown just like my website does, but this site's version is special and doesn't handle line breaks in the standard way, so I have to unwrap all my paragraphs using a script I wrote just for that purpose.
  • Also Cohost doesn't support one of the markdown extensions I rely on that converts three hyphens (---) into an em-dash (β€”), so I do a quick search and replace there.
  • Now I copy that, navigate to the post composer, paste the story in, figure out which of my tags need to be content warnings, and add some extra tags.
  • Then make sure all entries in a series are reasonably discoverable by adding a little link at the top (which I usually grab by going to the last post, entering the editor, and copying the markdown).
  • I'm still figuring out how I want to handle significant breaks in the story because unfortunately Cohost just puts its "read more" break at the first <hr> or --- line, but that's historically been what I use for my story breaks. Unfortunately, that means one of: not using an explicit "read more" break, using it and accepting that it looks misleadingly like a story break, or doing another search/replace to make them... something else. I've backslash-escaped it before to make a literal three hyphens. This most recent time I've used:
    <hr style="width:50px;border-bottom:none;border-left:none;border-right:none;border-top:10px dotted;margin:2em auto;">

Now I publish to Tumblr:

  • Easiest way to avoid formatting problems here is not to copy the raw markdown, but to navigate to where I've published the story on my website and copy the rendered text.
  • That grabs almost everything I want, including styling! But it completely treats my story break <hr>s as if they were invisible, so after I paste the story into the Tumblr editor I scroll through my website's page to reference where I put them, then manually reinsert them into the Tumblr editor. I also add Tumblr's "read more" break which thankfully doesn't render as an <hr>.
  • Now the tags for Tumblr are pretty much exactly the same as the ones I use for Cohost, minus the distinction between tags and CWs. Unfortunately CWs in tags aren't visible if someone is viewing your post from a reblog, so if there's anything particularly noteworthy, I try to remember to add a message at the top of the post body itself.
  • Then I do the same thing as I did for Cohost where I reference the series link from my last post (but thankfully don't have to go into edit mode here).

Now for Twitter:

  • For shorter fics, I'll go through the trouble of breaking down the story into tweet-size chunks. I hate to break a sentence across tweets, and I hate for some tweets to only be a few words long, so this sometimes means doing some light rewriting as I go to fig into tidy 280-character chunks. (This section has fewer bullet points than the others but do not be fooled, this step alone is worse than everything above.)
  • If I'm leaning on visual styling as part of the story, I have to invent a pure-text alternative.
  • Don't forget manual tweet numbering for the thread, of course.
  • Yes, this is a miserable slog, and Twitter has kind of broken thread rendering, but most of my audience is still there, so I put up with it at least sometimes.

Mastodon and Bluesky don't give me enough attention to be worth the same effort. For them (and with longer stuff on Twitter) I will log in and post a link to my site if I'm still feeling motivated after the above.

At one point I signed up for a pillowfort and an AO3, and I know there are a few other places, but wow this already feels exhausting and I kind of hate it. Can we just go back to everyone having their own site with an RSS feed and maybe a mailing list?


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