And The Moment You've Been Waiting For, Here Are The Prompts For The Week!

That I Did Always Love - a Wolfwren one-shot

A/N: Hello everyone! Here is a little birthday surprise from me to you all (that's not how birthday works but I don't care). Here is the beginning and the link to the rest of the story is at the end :)

Shin paced the alley she was stationed in, muttering to herself:

“Dar'tome… Mhi solus Dar’tome…”

She paused both her mumbling and her pacing as she forced her brain to recall the next sentence.

“Mhi solus… no. Mhi… me’dinui…”

“Shin? What are you mumbling about?”

Sabine’s voice in her earpiece sent such panic in her bones that Shin froze completely.

“Nothing… Just counting the time…”

She hadn’t realized her comms had been on. She thought she would have a few minutes of calm to practice her Mando’a.

“It’s been a while since the target has gone inside,” she said quickly, hoping to divert the conversation away from her.

“I still have a visual on her,” Sabine confirmed. “I’ll let you know when she’s out.”

“Copy that.”

Quiet fell, and Shin hoped her girlfriend had turned off her comms again. However, after a long minute, Sabine said:

“Something’s troubling you.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Force bond, remember? I can feel it. So, what is it?”

Shin bit her lower lip.

“Nothing. The mission is my priority. It always is.”

“Okay,” Sabine replied, though she sounded unconvinced.

Full Story Here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/52967668

Sweet Surprise - A foxxay fanfiction

A/N: Here’s an extract from my first AHS fanfiction, I’ll put a link to the whole thing at the bottom!

All the candles had been lit. They'd spent the afternoon in the greenhouse getting everything they needed for the ritual. Cordelia placed the last bluish egg at the edge of the black sand circle. Then, she looked up at Misty. Her wife was seated at the edge of their bed, her arms crossed, holding her shawl wrapped around her. Her eyes were focused on the circle they had drawn on the ground.

"Having second thoughts?" Cordelia asked softly.

Misty was quick to detach her eyes from the ground and look at her wife.

"Course not. It's just... what if it doesn't work? What if I mess something up and..."

Cordelia crossed the room quickly and sat on the bed beside her wife, wrapping her arms around her.

"You are not going to mess anything up."

The ritual needed two witches to work, now she knew, and she was certain that they could do it. She did not have a shadow of a doubt that together, they would be strong enough to create life.

"And if it doesn't work, well it's alright. We'll just go see a doctor."

"Yeah, but it won't be the same. I want her to be the perfect mix of us."

Cordelia smiled and pressed a kiss on Misty's temple.

"Me too."

They remained there, in each other's arms, for a while longer. Cordelia was the first to pull away, with somewhat difficulty. She asked:

"Are you ready?"

Misty took a deep breath and let her shawl fall off her shoulders, and onto the bed. She stood up, determined, and said:

"Alright, let's put a baby in me."

Full story: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23183611/chapters/55493797

Kiss the Hills for me, just once (then - I am ready to go) - A MaryShannon fic

A/N: Hey everyone! Here’s the beginning of my new short and bittersweet fic! It’s Mary and Shannon, it’s canon compliant, and it’s their last evening together... If you want to read the whole story the link is at the end!

Shannon was ten when she first entered a confessional booth, in preparation for her first communion. She had no great sin to confess but a great many questions about God and Jesus which her local priest, in his benevolent patience,was kind enough to answer as best as he could. When she asked him who he spoke to when he had to confess something, the voice on the other side of the screen had come as chuckle:

"Well, I speak to God quite often. I know that He will always be here to listen. But when I do need advice, I seek out one of my fellow priests."

Some fifteen years later, Shannon still thought about that conversation, as she finally came to empathise with the older man. Though she prayed often for guidance, she always seeked out Mary for advice. Which made it all the stranger when Shannon began to keep things to herself. Mother Superion could tell. The other sister warriors could tell. And most of all, Mary could tell.

She had tried all she could think of to breach the subject. Talking about it in public hadn't worked. Talking about it in private had made the Warrior Nun clam up even more. So Mary had given up, which was quite unlike her. Even Lilith had teased her about it. Mary had glared at her and explained that Shannon would talk once she was ready. She truly hoped it would be tonight.

For a few years now, they'd started a routine on every Thursday night. If they weren't out in the field, then the two of them disappeared on Mary's motorcycle for a few hours. All sorts of rumors had started swirling up from their little escapade. Some of the sisters thought they were wandering the streets, beating up bad guys like two vigilantes. Others thought they rented a motel room – or, more luxuriously a hotel room, or better yet they had their own small apartment – where they could have really hot and loud sex away from the convent. Mary couldn't blame the sisters for all these stupid rumors. She and Shannon were so tight-lipped about what they did that she understood their curiosity. But this was their special thing, a Mary and Shannon alone thing, and neither would ever reveal what they were up to.

That evening, as Mary leaned against her motorcycle, holding her helmet in her hands, she almost thought Shannon wasn't going to come. It wasn't like they had a set time when they should leave, but they never met more than a couple of minutes apart, as if they could sense the other's eagerness to leave. She checked her phone again for the time. Footsteps echoed on the pavement. She looked up and spotted Shannon coming toward her at a hurried pace.

"I was beginning to think you'd stood me up," Mary shouted at her, partly as a joke and partly to her release her own nervousness.

"I'm sorry. I was with Father Vincent and Mother Superion, putting the final touches on tomorrow's mission."

Mary was quick to brush the subject of the next day's mission aside. This was their special night, which meant no work-related talk.

"I'll forgive you only if we leave in the next minute and a half."

FULL STORY HERE: https://archiveofourown.org/works/46334560

The Letter - a RubyxChristina fanfiction

A/N: Hey guys! Here’s an extract from my new Ruby/Christina story, where Christina receives a letter from Ruby that wasn’t meant for her. If you want to read more the link to the full story will be at the end!

It all started with a letter, Christina would tell her. The moving crew was still bringing her living room out of the truck when she opened her mailbox. It was a warm late October day, considering the Chicago weather. Although she hadn't put her name on the mailbox yet, she went to check in case any ads and fliers had been slipped in. However, when she opened the box, there was only one letter, seating neatly at the bottom of the mailbox. Christina pulled it out and inspected it.

The letter had gone through the proper channels if the stamp was anything to go by. Apparently, the letter had been waiting there for almost a month. And it wasn't even for her. The address was correct, but the house on Hyde Park no longer belonged to one William Davenport, who had moved with his wife and children to who knew where some month and a half ago. Christina had bought it just two weeks ago.

As she walked back inside, dodging big sweaty men in jumpsuits carrying boxes and armchairs and chunks of furniture up the driveway, she flipped the letter over. There was a return address, fortunately. To Ruby Baptiste, though Christina later had to check a map to know the exact location of the building. The South Side, a medium-sized apartment complex near the highway. Christina left the letter on her kitchen counter and promptly forgot about it, busy as she was ordering the moving crew around. She would return it eventually, she thought.

That evening, as she sat down in her partially built living room, eating pizza and channel surfing, she remembered the letter. Or rather, she spotted it again when she went to get a glass and a bottle of wine in the kitchen. She picked it up and brought it back to the living room with her. She poured herself a large glass and stared at the letter. It had been sitting in her mailbox for a month. Whoever had sent it didn't know the previous owner had moved out. She certainly hoped it wasn't too pressing. Her leg began to bounce as curiosity slowly ate away at her decency. Finally, after five long, agonizing minutes, she broke. She opened the letter.

There were two sheets of paper inside, folded together. The bottom one seemed to be the results of a blood test. Christina didn't remember hearing the previous owner had been a doctor. Then, she read the other piece of paper, hand-written.

 I'm pregnant and you know it's yours. I don't care if you want it or not, but you better help or I'll talk to your wife.

Well, that explained the sudden move, Christina thought. Something told her the wife already knew he was having an affair. But they moved before they could learn about the child he had fathered behind her back. Christina sighed and folded the letter back in the envelope. It certainly wasn't addressed to her, or even her concern. She discarded the letter and turned back to the TV.

Still, she couldn't quite get the letter out of her mind. She couldn't help but think about this young woman who was still waiting for an answer. Would she eventually come knocking on Christina's door, only for Christina to have to break the truth to her? She really didn't want to have anyone crying on her front porch. The better thing would be to return the letter the next day. But would they even let her return an open letter? She sighed. She was supposed to meet with Tic anyway, she could take a small detour to bring the letter back. Break her the news, give her back the letter, and move on with her own problems.

Christina sipped some wine and leaned back on her leather couch. It sounded like a good plan.

Full story here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28403304/chapters/69596649

Thank you for all the Wolfwren fic. I’ve loved every single one of them. I am blown away by how you keep churning them out. Wishing you a wonderful holiday season and a very happy new year. 😊

Thank you very much <3 If I'm being honest I've also surprised myself a lot with how quickly and how many stories I've been able to write since I started but it has been a blast, and I'm really glad you've loved them as well :) Happy holidays to you as well!!

SO HERE IS THE WHOLE STORY (SO FAR).

I am on my knees begging you to reblog this post and to stop reblogging the original ones I sent out yesterday. This is the complete account with all the most recent info; the other one is just sending people down senselessly panicked avenues that no longer lead anywhere.

IN SHORT

Cliff Weitzman, CEO of Speechify and (aspiring?) voice actor, used AI to scrape thousands of popular, finished works off AO3 to list them on his own for-profit website and in his attached app. He did this without getting any kind of permission from the authors of said work or informing AO3. Obviously.

When fandom at large was made aware of his theft and started pushing back, Weitzman issued a non-apology on the original social media posts—using 

his dyslexia; 

his intent to implement a tip-system for the plagiarized authors; and 

a sudden willingness to take down the work of every author who saw my original social media posts and emailed him individually with a ‘valid’ claim,

as reasons we should allow him to continue monetizing fanwork for his own financial gain.

When we less-than-kindly refused, he took down his ‘apologies’ as well as his website (allegedly—it’s possible that our complaints to his web host, the deluge of emails he received or the unanticipated traffic brought it down, since there wasn’t any sort of official statement made about it), and when it came back up several hours later, all of the work formerly listed in the fan fiction category was no longer there. 

THE TAKEAWAYS

1. Cliff Weitzman (aka Ofek Weitzman) is a scumbag with no qualms about taking fanwork without permission, feeding it to AI and monetizing it for his own financial gain; 

2. Fandom can really get things done when it wants to, and 

3. Our fanworks appear to be hidden, but they’re NOT DELETED from Weitzman’s servers, and independently published, original works are still listed without the authors' permission. We need to hold this man responsible for his theft, keep an eye on both his current and future endeavors, and take action immediately when he crosses the line again. 

THE TIMELINE, THE DETAILS, THE SCREENSHOTS (behind the cut)

Sunday night, December 22nd 2024, I noticed an influx in visitors to my fic You & Me & Holiday Wine. When I searched the title online, hoping to find out where they came from, a new listing popped up (third one down, no less):

This listing is still up today, by the way, though now when you follow the link to word-stream, it just brings you to the main site. (Also, to be clear, this was not the cause for the influx of traffic to my fic; word-stream did not link back to the original work anywhere.)

I followed the link to word-stream, where to my horror Y&M&HW was listed in its entirety—though, beyond the first half of the first chapter, behind a paywall—along with a link promising to take me—through an app downloadable on the Apple Store—to an AI-narrated audiobook version. When I searched word-stream itself for my ao3 handle I found both of my multi-chapter fics were listed this way:

Because the tags on my fics (which included genres* and characters, but never the original IPs**) weren’t working, I put ‘Kara Danvers’ into the search bar and discovered that many more supercorp fics (Supergirl TV fandom, Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor pairing) were listed.

I went looking online for any mention of word-stream and AI plagiarism (the covers—as well as the ridiculously inflated number of reviews and ratings—made it immediately obvious that AI fuckery was involved), but found almost nothing: only one single Reddit post had been made, and it received (at that time) only a handful of upvotes and no advice. 

I decided to make a tumblr post to bring the supercorp fandom up to speed about the theft. I draw as well as write for fandom and I’ve only ever had to deal with art theft—which has a clear set of steps to take depending on where said art was reposted—and I was at a loss regarding where to start in this situation.

After my post went up I remembered Project Copy Knight, which is worth commending for the work they’ve done to get fic stolen from AO3 taken down from monetized AI 'audiobook’ YouTube accounts. I reached out to @echoekhi, asking if they’d heard of this site and whether they could advise me on how to get our works taken down.

While waiting for a reply I looked into Copy Knight’s methods and decided to contact OTW’s legal department:

And then I went to bed.

By morning, tumblr friends @makicarn and @fazedlight as well as a very helpful tumblr anon had seen my post and done some very productive sleuthing:

@echoekhi had also gotten back to me, advising me, as expected, to contact the OTW. So I decided to sit tight until I got a response from them.

That response came only an hour or so later: 

Which was 100% understandable, but still disappointing—I doubted a handful of individual takedown requests would accomplish much, and I wasn’t eager to share my given name and personal information with Cliff Weitzman himself, which is unavoidable if you want to file a DMCA.

I decided to take it to Reddit, hoping it would gain traction in the wider fanfic community, considering so many fandoms were affected. My Reddit posts (with the updates at the bottom as they were emerging) can be found here and here.

A helpful Reddit user posted a guide on how users could go about filing a DMCA against word-stream here (to wobbly-at-best results)

A different helpful Reddit user signed up to access insight into word-streams pricing. Comment is here.

Smells unbelievably scammy, right? In addition to those audacious prices—though in all fairness any amount of money would be audacious considering every work listed is accessible elsewhere for free—my dyscalculia is screaming silently at the sight of that completely unnecessary amount of intentionally obscured numbers.

Speaking of which! As soon as the post on r/AO3—and, as a result, my original tumblr post—began taking off properly, sometime around 1 pm, jumpscare! A notification that a tumblr account named @cliffweitzman had commented on my post, and I got a bit mad about the gist of his message :

Fortunately he caught plenty of flack in the comments from other users (truly you should check out the comment section, it is extremely gratifying and people are making tremendously good points), in response to which, of course, he first tried to both reiterate and renegotiate his point in a second, longer comment (which I didn’t screenshot in time so I’m sorry for the crappy notification email formatting):

which he then proceeded to also post to Reddit (this is another Reddit user’s screenshot, I didn’t see it at all, the notifications were moving too fast for me to follow by then)

... where he got a roughly equal amount of righteously furious replies. (Check downthread, they're still there, all the way at the bottom.)

After which Cliff went ahead & deleted his messages altogether. 

It’s not entirely clear whether his account was suspended by Reddit soon after or whether he deleted it himself, but considering his tumblr account is still intact, I assume it’s the former. He made a handful of sock puppet accounts to play around with for a while, both on Reddit and Tumblr, only one of which I have a screenshot of, but since they all say roughly the same thing, you’re not missing much:

And then word-stream started throwing a DNS error.

That lasted for a good number of hours, which was unfortunately right around the time that a lot of authors first heard about the situation and started asking me individually how to find out whether their work was stolen too. I do not have that information and I am unclear on the perimeters Weitzman set for his AI scraper, so this is all conjecture: it LOOKS like the fics that were lifted had three things in common:

They were completed works;

They had over several thousand kudos on AO3; and

They were written by authors who had actively posted or updated work over the past year.

If anyone knows more about these perimeters or has info that counters my observation, please let me know!

I finally thought to check/alert evil Twitter during this time, and found out that the news was doing the rounds there already. I made a quick thread summarizing everything that had happened just in case. You can find it here.

I went to Bluesky too, where fandom was doing all the heavy lifting for me already, so I just reskeeted, as you do, and carried on.

Sometime in the very early evening, word-stream went back up—but the fan fiction category was nowhere to be seen. Tentative joy and celebration!***

That’s when several users—the ones who had signed up for accounts to gain intel and had accessed their own fics that way—reported that their work could still be accessed through their history. Relevant Reddit post here.

Sooo—

We’re obviously not done. The fanwork that was stolen by Weitzman may be inaccessible through his website right now, but they aren’t actually gone. And the fact that Weitzman wasn’t willing to get rid of them altogether means he still has plans for them. 

This was my final edit on my Reddit post before turning off notifications, and it's pretty much where my head will be at for at least the foreseeable future:

Please feel free to add info in the comments, make your own posts, take whatever action you want to take to protect your work. I only beg you—seriously, I’m on my knees here—to not give up like I saw a handful of people express the urge to do. Keep sharing your creative work and remain vigilant and stay active to make sure we can continue to do so freely. Visit your favorite fics, and the ones you’ve kept in your ‘marked for later’ lists but never made time to read, and leave kudos, leave comments, support your fandom creatives, celebrate podficcers and support AO3. We created this place and it’s our responsibility to keep it alive and thriving for as long as we possibly can.

Also FUCK generative AI. It has NO place in fandom spaces.

THE 'SMALL' PRINT (some of it in all caps):

*Weitzman knew what he was doing and can NOT claim ignorance. One, it’s pretty basic kindergarten stuff that you don’t steal some other kid’s art project and present it as your own only to act surprised when they protest and then tell the victim that they should have told you sooner that they didn’t want their project stolen. And two, he was very careful never to list the IPs these fanworks were based on, so it’s clear he was at least familiar enough with the legalities to not get himself in hot water with corporate lawyers. Fucking over fans, though, he figured he could get away with that. 

**A note about the AI that Weitzman used to steal our work: it’s even greasier than it looks at first glance. It’s not just the method he used to lift works off AO3 and then regurgitate onto his own website and app. Looking beyond the untold horrors of his AI-generated cover ‘art’, in many cases these covers attempt to depict something from the fics in question that can’t be gleaned from their summaries alone. In addition, my fics (and I assume the others, as well) were listed with generated genres; tags that did not appear anywhere in or on my fic on AO3 and were sometimes scarily accurate and sometimes way off the mark. I remember You & Me & Holiday Wine had ‘found family’ (100% correct, but not tagged by me as such) and I believe The Shape of Soup was listed as, among others, ‘enemies to friends to lovers’ and ‘love triangle’ (both wildly inaccurate). Even worse, not all the fic listed (as authors on Reddit pointed out) came with their original summaries at all. Often the entire summary was AI-generated. All of these things make it very clear that it was an all-encompassing scrape—not only were our fics stolen, they were also fed word-for-word into the AI Weitzman used and then analyzed to suit Weitzman’s needs. This means our work was literally fed to this AI to basically do with whatever its other users want, including (one assumes) text generation. 

***Fan fiction appears to have been made (largely) inaccessible on word-stream at this time, but I’m hearing from several authors that their original, independently published work, which is listed at places like Kindle Unlimited, DOES still appear in word-stream’s search engine. This obviously hurts writers, especially independent ones, who depend on these works for income and, as a rule, don’t have a huge budget or a legal team with oceans of time to fight these battles for them. If you consider yourself an author in the broader sense, beyond merely existing online as a fandom author, beyond concerns that your own work is immediately at risk, DO NOT STOP MAKING NOISE ABOUT THIS.

Again, please, please PLEASE reblog this post instead of the one I sent originally. All the information is here, and it's driving me nuts to see the old ones are still passed around, sending people on wild goose chases.

Thank you all so much.

Reblogged from Writing About Writing Facebook page.

Hard Valentine's Day Night - a Wolfwren fanfiction

A/N: Hello everyone! I just posted a Valentine's Day special of our favorite ladies. It's a Modern AU where Sabine is a bounty hunter and Shin's a bouncer at a bar. Here is the beginning and if you want to read the whole story, the link will be at the end!

Sabine didn’t do Valentine’s Day. She had no one to celebrate it with, because she had work to do. So, on Valentine’s Days, she worked. She didn’t see a problem with that. It wasn’t pathetic, it was pragmatic. And it’s not like she was the only one. The bartender worked. The little band on the scene worked. The cute bouncer outside worked. There was no reason she couldn’t work either.

She finished her drink and turned to the man in the chair across from her. He wasn’t ogling her anymore, staring instead at a pair of young women near the bar. If she didn’t conclude their date swiftly, she might lose him. She leaned in her chair so her hand touched his thigh and, pretending to be drunker than she was – her cocktail looked like a strawberry daiquiri but it was nothing but sugar in liquid form – she shouted over the music:

“Do you want to get out of here?”

The man’s attention snapped back to her. He had the shadow of a beard that looked scratchier than her cat’s clawing post. He smirked and she held in the urge to roll her eyes.

“Sure, where do you want to go?”

“My car’s just outside.”

She stood up, taking his big sweaty hand in hers to drag him out of the bar. Thankfully, he complied. They left the pink balloons and romantic songs and walked outside into the fresh February air. There was still a short line to get inside, and the cute bouncer was still at the door. Sabine had never seen her before, either because she was new or because she didn’t work on Friday and Saturday nights when Sabine worked the most.

Her date grabbed her by the waist to pull her close, making her stumbles as her attention snapped away from the blonde with those sad green eyes and back to the man.

“Let’s go to my car instead,” he said, taking her toward the other direction.

She didn’t budge, planting her platform boots into the concrete. She tried to pull him toward her car once more.

“No, my car’s right over there. Come on.”

He chuckled, as if amused by her drunken antics.

“But you’re too drunk to drive. We’ll take my car.”

His grip on her hip became more insistent. Before he could bruise her, she leaned into him again.

“But we can’t take your car,” she said, dropping the slurring.

He didn’t notice right away. They never did.

“Why not?”

“Because it was impounded half an hour ago.”

Full Story Here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/53786719

Wolfwren headcanon that I don't know how to turn into a fanfiction:

Shin and Sabine are playing sabacc. Every round they lose, they have to take off a piece of clothing (like strip poker basically). First one naked loses.

Sabine thought she was going to win if she wore her armor.

Shin spent her entire childhood and teenage years around mercenaries, pilots, smugglers and the like. She is a beast at sabacc.

By the time Sabine is naked with only her helmet on, she finally admits defeat.

I’m a creator for the Marvel Trumps Hate 2020

Hey guys! I just registered as a creator for the Marvel Trumps Hate 2020 auction. If you don’t know what that is (I certainly didn’t when I woke up this morning) you should check out their website : https://www.marveltrumpshate.com/

Basically it’s a charity auction for fanworks related to the Marvel fandom, from the comics to the movies and more. I am offering to write a fanfiction for the highest bidder on my offer. I don’t keep the money from the auction, obviously, instead you give it to a charity of your choice that the MTH is partnered with. I looked at their list of partnered charities and they are all very interesting, either focused on environmental or social issues. Again, you should check out their website for more information.

I offered to either write a Captain Marvel story or a New Mutant story, depending on what the winner of the bid wants (I also offered a Mantis/Nebula fic because who knows?)

Bid previews start on October 11th and the auctions last a week, between the 18th and the 24th. Even if you’re not interested in what I do, I’m sure there are going to be tones of creators offering not just fanfictions but also arts and such, so you should definitely take the time to check it out!