Suspense! Danger!

[melannen]

Last night I dreamed that Monsigneur Bienvenu was elected Pope, and then he started implementing huge liberal reforms in the Church, which quickly resulted in massive and ongoing assassination attempts, so he had to go on the run through the United States, and he was moving between safehouses all over the country but none of them lasted more than a few days before the bad-guys-with-guns found him again, until he ended up in a beautifully kept and super-secure townhouse in Georgetown belonging to a former-child-hacker-turned-middle-aged-CIA-security-consultant where he actually got a chance to rest and think, and also start an epic platonic love affair with his host. And on further thought, I'm pretty sure said host was supposed to be Jean Valjean even though he was never ID'd in the dream, considering his criminal history and the fact that he had a sister who was constantly coming around asking for money, and he'd more-or-less adopted the pretty single mother and her eight-year-old daughter who lived next door, and there were a constant stream of other people coming through the kitchen asking for help or at least a place to rest awhile. Which was kind of a problem for someone who needed a top-secret safehouse, so he had to move on again, but then the dishy-and-snarky U.S. Marshal who was organizing the safehouses (presumably Javert??) figured out a way to let him come back without being in danger, but I woke up before I figured out how he did it.

For the record, I deeply approve of silver fox cypherpunk Valjean. You can ship him with the Marshal instead of Bienvenu if you want. :P And also, I need to stop listening to the news on NPR right before bed.

ANYWAY.

I am shortly going to spam you all under lock. Because I have written a thing. That is, I have written a "Guide To Tagging Your Stuff on AO3".

But it kind of got out of hand? So it's now split into three posts + a review exercise. And I figured given that it's become over-elaborate, and the tendency of AO3-related things to generate wild fancies, and the taggingness of tags, I'd post under lock and let you guys pick it apart first, and then after a week or two decide whether to unlock it & link it on Tumblr, or not.

If you're in my circle but I don't grant you access, and you'd like to be a first-reader on this, let me know and I'll add you to access.

(PS: I blame this on the fact that I have been reading Why's Poignant Guide To Ruby. That book has done nothing to disabuse me of the idea that people who think Ruby is the best of all programming languages are more than slightly off-kilter to consensus reality.)

Comments

[lannamichaels]

Ooh, I love forward to those posts. (I'm on that filter already, yeah?)

[melannen]

You should be! It's not a filter - I've just set it all-access, because I'm too lazy to bother with filters. :D (It's going up slowly because I'm double-checking all my links as I go.)

[zing_och]

You have awesome dreams! I'm envious, these days mine are full of exam anxiety...

Apparently I hadn't given you access before (I had no idea, I'm bad about things like that). Anyway, if you don't mind, I'd like to read the AO3 stuff - even though I'm not a writer, I find the AO3 and the way the tags (don't) work endlessly fascinating.

[majoline]

Well, I am all for learning how to tag. Will I sound weird if I say that I'm not really sure how to tag? Like, I don't feel like I'm bad, just I'm not confident.

[melannen]

No, that doesn't sound weird! I think most people are less than fully confident; I've been tagging on various platforms for various reasons for several times longer than AO3 has existed, and I'm still not sure what to put half the time.

[melannen]

Added! And yeah, tag systems are just inherently fascinating to me.

[brownbetty]

(PS: I blame this on the fact that I have been reading Why's Poignant Guide To Ruby. That book has done nothing to disabuse me of the idea that people who think Ruby is the best of all programming languages are more than slightly off-kilter to consensus reality.)

Co-fucking signed.

I've always wondered whether Ruby makes more sense if Japanese is your first language?

[melannen]

Huh, I wonder. Come to think of it, some of the things that are making me go squinty are things that seems to have parallels in my limited knowledge of the eccentricities of written Japanese. But then why didn't he write the programming language in Japanese??

[brownbetty]

I dunno, maybe English is the Language Of Programming for reasons of Hysterical Tradition?

[ellen_fremedon]

That is an awesome dream.

[melannen]

It was! I've been having a run of good dreams lately - this one wasn't quite as awesome as the Star Wars/Sentinel/Young Wizards one I had the other day, but it was far more coherent.

[siegeofangels]

I very much enjoy those posts and think they make a lot of sense! Also they definitely clear up some things--sometimes I see a particular tagging method become commonplace enough to be normal to me, even if that tagging method doesn't actually work with the way the AO3 tags work.

As for specifics, I think Part 3 implies it is Part 4? That's the only thing that jumped out at me.

[melannen]

Oh, hey, you're right - I wrote that before there was a Part 4. I think it's fixed now?

And yeah, there are definitely people carrying over a lot of tag strategies from elsewhere that aren't... optimized to AO3. And with so much of AO3's tagging stuff happening in the backend, it can be hard to figure out what is and isn't good for AO3.

[pocketmouse]

I'd love to read it, though I'm sure you and I are of a similar mind in most things tagging related.

[melannen]

Go for it!

[carmarthen]

...okay, I kind of desperately want that novel as original fiction.

Probably the Pope love affair stays platonic, though. Because Pope. I just can't.

[melannen]

I think he would have to not actually be the Pope if it was turned into a real story. I can think of no reasonable explanation for why the Pope would have to go into hiding in Washington DC. But that wasn't all that relevant to the plot, so I think it's okay.

(I'm pretty sure he was the Pope because shortly before bed I'd been listening to people talking about Francis's 'humility' and going "they're trying really hard to make him sound as thoroughly good as the Bishop of Digne, but somehow I am not buying it." I think it was Hugo's chapter about why the Bishop had zero chance of ever making Pope.)

ETA: Actually, I think if I was going the original-novel place with it, I would have him be an American bishop who had spoken out against the Church hierarchy and been defrocked for it, and was in hiding from some Secret Order Of Assassins or something, amp up the suspense element, and make it the heartwarming m/m-romance version of a Dan Brown novel. Only I don't think I'd actually be capable of writing something that required showcasing my ignorance of Catholicism to quite the degree that a Dan Brown plot would require.

[carmarthen]

Fair enough! :-P

(OH GOD I NEVER WANT TO HEAR A JOURNALIST SAY "HUMILITY" AGAIN FFS.)

Only I don't think I'd actually be capable of writing something that required showcasing my ignorance of Catholicism to quite the degree that a Dan Brown plot would require.

Bahahaha. I just kind of love the idea of cyberpunk JVJ and dishy-and-snarky U.S. Marshal Javert, I won't lie. I mean, I'm not entirely convinced of it on an AU level, but characters based off them like they're based off Vidocq? A+.

[melannen]

I don't think I know enough about the Original Cypherpunks to write that either, but yeah, it works surprisingly well as a very-loose-adaptation version of them. I mean, Modern US AU!Valjean would almost have to have made his millions in the tech industry somewhere, and his sort of bitter anger about the system while being effortlessly able to manipulate it would totally have come out as computer crime if he'd had access to the internet at the right age.

(also epic social awkwardness, that also is relevant.)

And you could totally do it as J/VJ and leave the Bishop out entirely! I did mention that. :P Presumably in that case Valjean's the one in Witness Protection, and you've got one of the Twelve Basic Category Romance Plots right there!

[carmarthen]

I really just want someone else to write it. Epic modern AUs are not my thing. :-(

[brownbetty]

Can I have access to this? I'm curious, and enjoy good writing.

[melannen]

Added! Although no promises on the "good writing" bit.

[melannen]

Mine either. Although alas Les Mis is starting to trip my "but if I did it I could do it right!" button re: modern AUs.

(At least somebody's finally doing the modern!AU where Les Amis de l'ABC are violent terrorists, so that's off my list of things-that-should-get-written.)

[sophia_sol]

(Ooh, where would I find the Les-Amis-as-violent-terrorists fic? Because I agree that it's one of those things that should get written so I'd love to read it!)

[melannen]

Gnomon - it's currently at 1/?, but that 1 is over 9,000 words and a pretty complete storyline already. (Warnings for... well, what you'd expect in a story about international terrorists?)

[sophia_sol]

Sweet, thank you! I will look forward to reading it.

[tenlittlebullets]

Jumping on board the "would love to have access to this" bandwagon, and goddamn that dream sounds awesome.

[sylleptic]

That sounds like an awesome dream! And may I have access to read the tagging guide?