THE GREAT MIGRATION: I AM MOVING TO AO3!!

When? I'm moving stuff over starting in the next two weeks - I work at a high school so I have that time off for the winter holidays.

How can people find my stuff on AO3? I have the same pen name on there as on here - BethNottingham without a space in between.

Why? Well, partly because I just like the formatting there better - the tag system makes it so that people can find or avoid exactly what they're looking to find or avoid more easily, and it simplifies things for me when describing my stories. I'm not limited by a short description box - I can also use an abundance of tags.

Plus, the series option will make things easier with Red Queen, and eventually with Saving Draco (outlined as a two-parter, unless I decide it really needs three). Instead of putting a whole "chapter" at the end explaining that a new part is up/people needing to follow me when they only read for one fandom I write in so that they can get the next story alert, AO3 will just put a link in there for me.

Partly because it's a great excuse to re-proof and edit my stuff where I think it may need it, without having to take down and replace chapters. Want to read or re-read my stuff that's already out? I got you fam, it's all still here. But I can clean it up a bit for AO3 and have a nicer version out there when I feel the need.

Partly because I have hopes (based on other people's experiences) that the culture over there is a bit different from here - for one thing there's a kudos button so that people who don't want to write out a whole comment can at least "hit the like button." For another, the comment function isn't misleadingly called a "review" function. Because really, despite claims I made when I was 16 and desperate for the internet to like me... I have no interest in criticism - constructive or otherwise. This is a hobby, not a job, y'know? I write things for free 'cause I like it, and if other people like it, they can tell me so. It's not a review I'm looking for.

Anyway, with AO3 being a more popular site as well, I'm hoping that as I put stuff up and people find it and respond, I'll be motivated to actually do some updating. Wouldn't that be something?

Does this mean you'll branch into more adult content? Eh, probably not. I'm Aro/Ace, and while I'm told I write romance pretty convincingly, I have to have my friends and sometimes my mother help me write lemony-leaning stuff. Which is a lot of trouble to go to unless the story is such that it really needs such scenes.

How much "moving" are we talking here? I'm not planning on deleting my account on FF or anything - in fact there are some fics that won't be moving, but will remain posted here. I really don't want to delete any fics, because I've had too many experiences of searching for "didn't I read a fic like this that one time?" and then I can't find it to save my life, because the author deleted it. And I don't ever want to be ashamed of how I started out with fanfic writing, even though I've come a long way since I was a teenager on here and the difference is pretty noticeable. But I don't know if I'll be updating on here anymore. It'll depend on how well the move goes.

How is that different from how you never update on here anyway? Trick question: it's the same me with the same mental health shit, the same ridiculous work schedule and the same aversion to doing a lot of work for not a lot of payoff. So probably it won't be different at all. But hey, a girl can hope!

If a WIP doesn't get moved over, does that mean it's abandonedYep.

Original Stuff from my profile, NOT having to do with the move:

Greetings and salutations, citizens of FanFiction. I am a woman in my mid-20's from the the United States, just north of the Bible Belt, with a Bachelor's in Communications, an awesome job at a High School (helping and supervising kids while they solve other kids' IT issues) and an extremely sporadic, unreliable update schedule. You have been warned!

Various Explanations of Thus and So:

FLAMING*

I used to have this long message on here about the difference between flaming and concrit (and this section remains because I alluded to it in several A/Ns). This was necessary because when I was first on here, I posted some fics with prominent OCs, and people were really mean about them on anon (despite the obvious and readable warnings in the summary and author's notes). I tried to be nice about it instead of telling them to f*ck off like I definitely should have, because I was afraid that nobody would comment ever if I was mean back to people who were mean to me first (Idk social anxiety stuff). And then over time it got longer and more convoluted as I tried to avoid saying what I'm about to say right here: I do this as a hobby, and I want all parts of my hobby to be fun. People saying nice things? Fun! People critiquing my writing when I'm not doing it for money/for a grade? Not fun. Them's the rules. If you see a typo or something, feel free to say something, but if you don't like my characterization or something, there are thousands upon thousands of other stories on this website available for your perusal.

Basically, remember the good ol' days of "don't like, don't read?" Yeah we're going back to that now.

FIELD GAMES MENTIONED IN “BROTHER, MINE.”*

Braveheart is a game where two teams try to get tokens into the opposite team’s buckets (the further the bucket from the middle of the field, the more points each token is worth) without losing a little cloth flag that each player has to tuck into their pants waistline, and try to steal flags from other players, who then have to freeze until a member of their team walks them back to base to get another flag and another token. In the actual camp game, the teams are the British and the Scottish, denoted by red or blue face paint on each player. In the Jurassic World version, each player's flag is either green and scaly or brown and furry, denoting dinosaurs or Neanderthals.

Commando is a game played exclusively after dark where some cars are parked in the playing field as hiding spots, and kids have to get tokens from one end of the field to the other without being caught in motion by a big spotlight. In the Jurassic World version, The spotlight has two lenses--the eyes of a fake T-rex head. He can't see you if you don't move! Instead of using cars, Jurassic World uses plastic dinosaurs, fake trees and clumps of fake bushes. (Since a theme park can afford better supplies than a summer camp, haha.)

Beth Nottingham Book News: *NOW PUBLISHED]

Title: A Tale of Gold and Roses

Summary: He was cursed royalty, doomed to live out his days as a mere beast.

She was a common thief, just looking for what she could carry.

Each was the first one who wasn’t shocked by the other’s face.

Still, despite this Beauty’s convenient gender, there was no chance that she was ‘the one.’

Was there?

A Tale of Gold and Roses is now available as an eBook or paperback on Amazon. Currently the eBook is FREE with Kindle Unlimited, or $2.99 to purchase the download; the paperback is $9.99

My website/blog is up, but it doesn't seem to be acting like it (which is to say, a link will get you there but it doesn't want to show up in a Google search. Since Fanfic's PM doesn't allow me to send links directly, the site is:

bethnottingham [P0!NT] wixsite [P0!NT] com [$L@$H] wordsmith (the strangely written words inside the brackets indicate the two most commonly used pieces of punctuation in web addresses.)