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Post by Lore on Jun 23, 2014 7:41:51 GMT -5
So what do you guys think of this site?
I was considering submitting something to them but I'm not so sure about the middle/high school audience that seems to frequent the site. I'm not so much worried about the content of any submission I may make but more with potential trolling. I know any site has potential trolls as that is an unfortunate side effect of the Internet but I read through the site's FAQs and the way it seems from reading those, trolling might be a frequent problem.
In fact, it even said that stories that are too long are frequently targeted by rude comments and users who adopt the whole "too long, didn't read" philosophy which is just unfortunate.
I understand that it is a short story site but if it is accepted for submission and it is so long that you do not want to read it then you should just move on without commenting. I'm sure a lot of people on here would agree with me in that regards.
So what do my fellow RAS fans think of this site? I'm looking for some personal opinions here, obviously so feel free to pour your heart out. Do you love it? Do you hate it? Or would you choose a neutral alignment?
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Post by Sargai on Jun 23, 2014 9:50:07 GMT -5
Are you referring to creepypasta.com? You didn't link. There are several venues available if you are interested in writing Creepypasta and worried about one in particular. Also, your Creepypasta doesn't even need to be affiliated with any of these sites. You could post to Tumblr with the appropriate tags and stand a good chance at getting your stuff out there. There is also, and I would normally never recommend this, Reddit, which despite being a hive of scum and villainy tends to foster supportive communities when it comes to these sorts of things.
As for what I think about these sites... I think they all need to stop with the dark background and white text so I can read without my eyes bleeding.
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Post by Lore on Jun 23, 2014 11:58:59 GMT -5
Are you referring to creepypasta.com? You didn't link. There are several venues available if you are interested in writing Creepypasta and worried about one in particular. Also, your Creepypasta doesn't even need to be affiliated with any of these sites. You could post to Tumblr with the appropriate tags and stand a good chance at getting your stuff out there. There is also, and I would normally never recommend this, Reddit, which despite being a hive of scum and villainy tends to foster supportive communities when it comes to these sorts of things. As for what I think about these sites... I think they all need to stop with the dark background and white text so I can read without my eyes bleeding. Yeah. I did mean creepypasta.com. I am relatively new to the 'creepy pasta' terminology so I didn't know that there were other sites out there not associated with that one. Heck, I only really found out who Slenderman was when that whole bit about those wacko girls hit the news. I don't have a Tumblr or a Reddit account and I don't really know anything about them. I don't really want to lose a hand so I might stay away from Reddit. P.S. Han shot first |
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Post by Sargai on Jun 23, 2014 16:06:13 GMT -5
Aside from creepypasta.com, there is also the Creepypasta Wiki, the Creepypasta Index, and the Creepypasta Network. No doubt DeviantArt also has its own communities, so if you went through that phase in high school you can dig up your old account and use it. I'd still suggest Tumblr. Sure, it might be for the young and hip but it isn't too hard to figure out. May take a bit of work though. Though I'm not certain that you can post there, the SCP Foundation has managed a consistency that the medium usually finds lacking and is creating a fascinating mythos. |
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Post by Lore on Jun 23, 2014 19:07:38 GMT -5
Are you calling me old Sargai? I feel like you're calling me old. Lol But I've never had a DeviantArt account either. This is the second time I have heard of this SCP Foundation. I'm going to have to check it out but what do you think of it? I'll also have to look at Tumblr but I've only ever known Tumblr to be about pictures similar to Pinterest. But I've never used it before so I have no experience with it. I'm really just looking for somewhere that will not post up just anything that someone submits such as fanfiction.net. Not that there is anything wrong with those places but I'm sort of looking to challenge myself in a way that involves impressing a particular party enough that they want to post what I've written. Call it an ego thing, I don't know. But I've been racking my brain in how to start (re-start, technically) my own blog and I have quite a few other aspirations concerning my writing but I'm so lost that I feel like I'm just blindly jumping around in the hopes of jumping in to an epiphany. |
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Post by Sargai on Jun 24, 2014 0:15:37 GMT -5
It was a while ago, but what entries I read of the SCP Foundation were interesting and prompted me to continue reading through their database. Given the nature of the stories--akin to a database of records and reports from a secret organization that includes elements of horror and science fiction--it probably shouldn't be counted as Creepypasta, but it is often lumped in with it. Who am I to argue? I'm hardly an expert. Tumblr is a blog platform that has been stripped down and optimized for sharing content not only within the platform but among social networks, which encourages community growth that other platforms lack. You can create and post the same content as you would on Blogger and Wordpress. Its popularity among fandoms and mobile users means that content is often shorter and easily digested and this is what people unfamiliar with the service are most likely to encounter first. However, content of any length has a home. This is what I suggest regarding the last bit: If you want to write Creepypasta, just write it and submit it or post it where you want. A good story will get readers and will get posted. The problem with these submission policies is they exist mostly as a filter to make sure stories are readable and don't retread or plagiarize. The people reading and approving submissions aren't making a living doing this and passion only goes so far when you have an unending inbox of stories that are some combination of the aforementioned. If you are interested in a challenge, in writing something that some group of people will want to post... forget about posting stories to some random site on the internet and just go for the gold. Or rather, a paying venue. Write, edit, polish, and start submitting to magazines, both online and off. But, if you aren't ready for that... A blog is easy to create, but difficult to maintain. You have to will yourself to keep going even if you don't have an audience and that is difficult. I've used pretty much every free one out there in the years since I took up the habit. Wordpress is your best option because they have some great designs, even some specifically for long-form writing, and because it isn't quite as finicky as the others. Tumblr is finicky, but it can be a powerful tool in the right hands. Blogger is crap. Well, OK, it isn't crap, but it is ugly as sin and it tends to mangle posts. Alternatively, you can try Medium if you are a Twitter user--it is meant for longer posts but is strictly no-frills. Great if you have readers on Twitter, perhaps not so much otherwise. You mention fanfiction.net, but did you know that it has a sister site? FictionPress may not be much of a step up, but it provides readers and reviews and though a great deal of those reviews might mean jack, just knowing that you have readers and people interested in reading more of what you write is a great feeling and encouraging. DeviantArt is much the same, with the added bonus of having some of us on there. Absolute Write is apparently awesome. I've been where you are, but it turns out that I could quit. |
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Post by midnightmirror on Jun 24, 2014 20:37:18 GMT -5
Pardon me for intruding. Another really good site for submission of one's original fiction is www.writers.org, and it also has a lot of resources for those looking for constructive feedback and even inspiration. The SCP Foundation series I think first started with one of the entries on the Creepypasta.Wiki and had since blossomed into the many files and stories all on their own. One can post a new file, but they have very strict criteria for any new entries. Other than the Slenderman mythos and the SCP, another interesting set of Creepypasta are "The Holders" which are more of the supernatural, ritual based stories centered on people seeking bizarre, often disturbing objects of power that eventually will curse the ones seeking them. The sheer amount of stories in "The Holders" series warranted them to also have a separate wiki. |
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Post by Sargai on Jun 24, 2014 21:09:59 GMT -5
No worries. We like intrusions, it breaks up the monotony of my rambling posts.
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Post by Lore on Jun 25, 2014 0:19:13 GMT -5
It was a while ago, but what entries I read of the SCP Foundation were interesting and prompted me to continue reading through their database. Given the nature of the stories--akin to a database of records and reports from a secret organization that includes elements of horror and science fiction--it probably shouldn't be counted as Creepypasta, but it is often lumped in with it. Who am I to argue? I'm hardly an expert. Tumblr is a blog platform that has been stripped down and optimized for sharing content not only within the platform but among social networks, which encourages community growth that other platforms lack. You can create and post the same content as you would on Blogger and Wordpress. Its popularity among fandoms and mobile users means that content is often shorter and easily digested and this is what people unfamiliar with the service are most likely to encounter first. However, content of any length has a home. This is what I suggest regarding the last bit: If you want to write Creepypasta, just write it and submit it or post it where you want. A good story will get readers and will get posted. The problem with these submission policies is they exist mostly as a filter to make sure stories are readable and don't retread or plagiarize. The people reading and approving submissions aren't making a living doing this and passion only goes so far when you have an unending inbox of stories that are some combination of the aforementioned. If you are interested in a challenge, in writing something that some group of people will want to post... forget about posting stories to some random site on the internet and just go for the gold. Or rather, a paying venue. Write, edit, polish, and start submitting to magazines, both online and off. But, if you aren't ready for that... A blog is easy to create, but difficult to maintain. You have to will yourself to keep going even if you don't have an audience and that is difficult. I've used pretty much every free one out there in the years since I took up the habit. Wordpress is your best option because they have some great designs, even some specifically for long-form writing, and because it isn't quite as finicky as the others. Tumblr is finicky, but it can be a powerful tool in the right hands. Blogger is crap. Well, OK, it isn't crap, but it is ugly as sin and it tends to mangle posts. Alternatively, you can try Medium if you are a Twitter user--it is meant for longer posts but is strictly no-frills. Great if you have readers on Twitter, perhaps not so much otherwise. You mention fanfiction.net, but did you know that it has a sister site? FictionPress may not be much of a step up, but it provides readers and reviews and though a great deal of those reviews might mean jack, just knowing that you have readers and people interested in reading more of what you write is a great feeling and encouraging. DeviantArt is much the same, with the added bonus of having some of us on there. Absolute Write is apparently awesome. I've been where you are, but it turns out that I could quit. Thanks for all of that Sargai! I've had a blog with Wordpress before and I really liked it. Wordpress that is, not my blog. It is definitely difficult to maintain but I did sort of walk in to it with little to no rhyme or reason. I was introduced to Wordpress through Phil Athans' blog Fantasy Author's Handbook. It is very helpful and very well organized. He even takes the time to answer questions (he's answered a few of my own). A lot of what I have been doing lately is in preparing myself to try to start another blog but to focus more on my own writing and writing in general. I've actually bought The Writer's Devotional by Amy Peters to try to help me with blogging subjects. I sometimes get the feeling that I'm a better editor than writer and while editing and critiquing is something that I enjoy, writing is my real passion. I have heard of FictionPress but I've never submitted anything to it or fanfiction.net. I don't really like fan fiction, reading it or writing it but my cousin turned me over to it and through that I learned about FictionPress. This was years ago though and so I believe I was actually thinking of FictionPress when I mentioned fanfic. And have you ever thought of writing again? You don't even have to try submitting anything. Maybe you should just try writing for yourself? And I would not worry about intruding midnightmirror. This is what a forum is for. Welcome to the site, by the way! Thank you for your input. I'll be checking out all of it. And if anybody has any suggestions about starting a blog or even about doing, well whatever it is I'm trying to do with my online writing then feel free to chime in. I'd appreciate (and certainly need) all the advice I can get. |
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Post by Sargai on Jun 25, 2014 23:41:38 GMT -5
WARNING: Significant Levels of Angst Detected
It'd be a lie if I said no. Yes, I've thought about writing again. Not a day goes by that I don't. However, when every attempt to write something in a five or six year span ends with you staring at a blinking cursor or writing the same horrible line over and over again with only the slightest change... well, one can only handle so much frustration.
I didn't have to worry about submitting things before. I knew I wasn't ready for that step and given that I was undisciplined, it would be a while before I got there. I did have readers though, who were there to catch the mistakes and problems that I missed for whatever reason--usually laziness, sometimes inexperience or ignorance.
So, here's the problem I have with writing for myself: I hate my writing. I was telling the stories that I wanted to tell, exploring genres, and experimenting with just about everything, but I hated my writing. Part of the reason why I wasn't ready to submit anything was because I hated my writing so much that I couldn't stand to go back and edit it. i developed a writing style that allowed me to edit as I wrote because there was no going back. For whatever reason, others enjoyed the crap I wrote and that's where I found my enjoyment: in entertaining others.
I did get around my writing problem for a few years by switching focus to writing reviews and opinion pieces, but even that faltered.
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Post by Lore on Jun 26, 2014 2:20:47 GMT -5
WARNING: Significant Levels of Angst Detected It'd be a lie if I said no. Yes, I've thought about writing again. Not a day goes by that I don't. However, when every attempt to write something in a five or six year span ends with you staring at a blinking cursor or writing the same horrible line over and over again with only the slightest change... well, one can only handle so much frustration. I didn't have to worry about submitting things before. I knew I wasn't ready for that step and given that I was undisciplined, it would be a while before I got there. I did have readers though, who were there to catch the mistakes and problems that I missed for whatever reason--usually laziness, sometimes inexperience or ignorance. So, here's the problem I have with writing for myself: I hate my writing. I was telling the stories that I wanted to tell, exploring genres, and experimenting with just about everything, but I hated my writing. Part of the reason why I wasn't ready to submit anything was because I hated my writing so much that I couldn't stand to go back and edit it. i developed a writing style that allowed me to edit as I wrote because there was no going back. For whatever reason, others enjoyed the crap I wrote and that's where I found my enjoyment: in entertaining others. I did get around my writing problem for a few years by switching focus to writing reviews and opinion pieces, but even that faltered. So stop reading what you write. You say you quit but if you are still thinking about it every day then you never really quit. You might have stopped actually writing things down but you never quit writing inside your head. I am willing to bet that you still come up with stories and characters in your head. You are still breathing life in to your creations. You're just not letting them out of their cerebral cage. You and I seem to have opposite (and yet similar) problems. I have been writing since I was in the 4th grade and I have yet to finish a single piece of fiction and so even if I did feel like my skill was at that point worthy of being submitted to anything, I would have nothing to give other than partially written ideas and a few action scenes. I'm 25 years old and I've been writing since grade school and yet I don't even know how good (or bad) I am. That is part of the reason why I've joined the forum's writing contest because I've never had a deadline for my writing before. I've never had someone on the other end expecting me to submit something at a certain time and I'm hoping that will give me the push I need to finish anything. As far as I'm concerned, editing is not a part of the writing process. I am positive that A LOT of people would disagree with me on that, especially those writers who do not have editors. But when you write for yourself, you don't need to edit anything because writing for yourself means living in that moment of creation and not worrying about what it looks like afterwards. That might be how the platypus came to be and would you really want to live in a world without the platypus simply because nature decided to go back and edit? I certainly wouldn't. Okay. So that was a horrible joke. Humor is how I deal with a lot of things. But I guess what I'm trying to say is that you're allowed to hate your own writing. In fact, I think it's healthy because that means that you will only be that much more determined to make sure that you hate the next thing you write just a little bit less. If you write something and show it to 100 people and only one of them enjoys it, then you should try to focus on how you brought joy to that one person. I highly recommend checking out Phil Athans' Blog as he offers a refreshingly honest look at what it is like to be a writer. In one of his entries he even offers up an absolute first draft of one of his already published novels so that we can see just how awful it really looks. He also talks about how embarrassed he was when one of his published Baldur's Gate novels turned out to contradict the actual source information and that to this day it is something that he is a little ashamed of. Reading his blog does not mean that you have to start writing again and even if it doesn't get you to start back up, it may make you feel better about quitting. |
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Post by Kaytin on Jun 28, 2014 1:54:09 GMT -5
These things managed to give me the worst nightmares as a kid. I was too young to actually realize they were fiction, so many sleepless nights were had.
Also, didn't the whole Majora's Mask "Ben Drowned" thing start on one of these sites? That thing still scares me. It's so well done.
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Post by Robillard on Jun 28, 2014 11:41:51 GMT -5
These things managed to give me the worst nightmares as a kid. I was too young to actually realize they were fiction, so many sleepless nights were had. Also, didn't the whole Majora's Mask "Ben Drowned" thing start on one of these sites? That thing still scares me. It's so well done. Oh god- the Majora's Mask thing... with the videos... Gave me the chills back in the day. |
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Post by Euphemism on Jul 1, 2014 9:14:17 GMT -5
I listen to creepypastas on YouTube while I play FFxiv. I enjoy the ones by creepsmcpasta the most. His voice is actually quite soothing.
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Post by midnightmirror on Jul 1, 2014 18:23:04 GMT -5
I listen to creepypastas on YouTube while I play FFxiv. I enjoy the ones by creepsmcpasta the most. His voice is actually quite soothing. I second that one. CreepsMcPasta is one of my favorites as well, though I also enjoy listening to Mr. Creepypasta as well. In fact it was his narration of 'Room Zero' that got me into listening to Creepypasta narrations at all. I find that if I really want to focus on anything, I have to either listen to spoken word (stand up comedy, narrations, audiobooks, etc) or instrumental music. I tend to go for creepypasta narrations usually. I find most of them are really inspiring. |
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