And Another Thing....

[filkertom]

Goddammit, I know I'm not perfect in this myself, but I try -- really, I swear I try.

Is it too much to ask of fanfic writers to learn how to punctuate?

I mean, yeah, a lot of them are in their teens. I, and most everyone I know or know of, had learned punctuation by that time. Most of us started learning it about the time we started to read. That would be age three or four or five.

I can live with misspellings. (Although the number of times I see "loose" when the writer means "lose" makes me crazy.) But, holy frijoles, if you're going to present your epic AU, the least you can do is to either make it readable or put it in lolspeak so I have no expectations that you might be literate.

Sorry. Rant off.

So. Read any good fanfic lately?

Comments

[jmtorres]

Man, this is why I only read fic I find on delicious.com these days. I mean, it's not a guarantee of quality, but at least one reader had to like it to save a bookmark, presumably.

[ravenclaw-eric.livejournal.com]

One of my pet peeves is "you're" for "your" and vice-versa; I also can be driven mad by misspellings that show clearly that the writer relied exclusively on a spell-check program instead of going over her MS and knowing which spellings were correct.

As for good fanfic...you could try mine (I'm "Technomad" on ff.n) or the writings of "excessivelyperky," or the "Dangerverse" main storyline (available at several different sites; I don't know how to put links in here).

[celisnebula.livejournal.com]

I second excessivelyperky! Her stuff tends to be well written.

Midnight by the Weasley Watch is one of my favorite stories written by her.
http://www.fanfiction.net/s/1216035/1/Midnight_by_the_Weasley_Watch

Anything by copperbadge is worth the read, no matter what fandom. And I highly recommend ubiquirk.

[thistlethorn.livejournal.com]

I have no patience anymore with poor spelling/grammar/usage. None.

As for fanfiction, just off the top of my head:
indeedsir has countless excellent Jeeves/Wooster stories. Slash, mostly. I've got my Data/Tasha TNG novel (but, really, it was Pt 1 of an unfinished 2-volume piece, so that's a drawback) in PDF, WORD and MOBI files, crammed full of illos. Reply, I'll email or put it up at YouSendIt. (People seem to like it still, although my writing has improved since 1990.)

[debber5.livejournal.com]

Punctuation, grammar, math skills, etc. aren't being taught as they were "in our day". I've been at a fast food restaurant when the register wasn't working and the clerk was so overwhelmed that he/she didn't seem to have a clue how to figure out how much I owed. (Three items from the dollar menu plus 18 cents for tax.)

[ashkitty.livejournal.com]

"Loose" for "lose" is one that drives me mad as well. A little more obscure but also annoying is saying someone is 'unphased' when they mean 'unfazed'. If the character is 'unphased', they need to be time travelling or walking through a wall or something.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

[nods vigorously] Also "peaked", as in either "she peaked through the window" or, more likely, "her curiosity was peaked".

[unclelumpy.livejournal.com]

Read any good fanfic... Ever?

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

yes, actually, both MacGyver and Harry Potter. The former involving a trip to Ireland just at the end of the Troubles, and the latter involving an accident between Snape and Hermione and some polyjuice. The ending of the latter was a little soft, but the end of the former was fabulous, involving rescuing Mac from an Irish seisiun (pronounced "session", as in jam)...

speaking of which, I'm headed for one in about an hour. :)

[ruisseau.livejournal.com]

It was lo these many years ago that some random guy with a guitar turned me on to Harry Potter fanfic and somehow it consumed my life for years. I wonder who that could be? *pointed look*

Good fanfic? I really enjoy my friend mijan's Trek Reboot stories featuring Kirk and Bones in their academy years. Really well-written novel-length fics!

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Hee hee. And I still read it all the time, along with some A:TLA fic (mostly Zutara -- what can I say? I have a thing for non-canon ships).

[virtualvirtue.livejournal.com]

Yes, the ladies (and I think one gent) at "Letters of Mary", a fanfic yahoogroups mailing list for the Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes books by Laurie R. King. Literate and amazingly well-crafted fanfiction. The books my Ms King might even be considered published fanfic but I'm not sure.

[ladystarblade.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm seconding this; I love the Russell/Holmes books with a passion. I stumbled across the site called The Hive (http://kspot.org/russell/russell.htm), which includes a lot from the Letters of Mary group as well as some others.

[valarltd.livejournal.com]

I'm all a-wibble over a Sherlock Holmes medical fetish fic. I didn't even know it was my kink!
http://emungere.livejournal.com/248201.html

Me, I make my living off things that started as fanfic and evolved. Try a dieselpunk anthro story set in a traveling carnival on the eve of WWII. It started as a Star Wars/Persian Boy/UC:Undercover/Queer as Folk crossover, for which I blame Merle Haggard and fandomhigh. Then Arthur and Gordon became their own selves and things went action-y.

[alverant.livejournal.com]

The closest I've come is writing up my RPG sessions and emailing them to the group so the GM can remember what happened last time. I think it has improved the quality of my writing. For me the hardest thing isn't punctuation (which may or may not be very good), it's remembering to stay in the past tense.

(PS new monitor came today and it's freaking awesome!)

[drzarron.livejournal.com]

I'll add this. Sabrina is in the middle of ninth grade and seem to be making no effort whatsoever to rwach them grammer, punctuation or spelling. She knows more about Japanese grammer than she dies about English. Diana and I try to educate her when we can.

[textileowl.livejournal.com]

http://sam-storyteller.dreamwidth.org/

His works include Harry Potter (his early stuff), Torchwood and Doctor Who and many more with the most recent fandom being White Collar.

He is one of the few fanfic writers I will read anymore and I will read anything he posts since I know it will be good.

[ruisseau.livejournal.com]

Sam fans represent!

I have Stealing Harry up in a tab for the umpteenth re-read. :D

[wingus.livejournal.com]

I generally don't partake in reading fic. I scratch that itch by taking part in a text RPG.

[lemmozine.livejournal.com]

I call it "brain shred." People who write (intentionally or not) using bad grammar, punctuation and spelling - a typo here and there is forgivable; using "it's" for "its" is not - are brain-shredded zombies who are attempting to proliferate their brain-shredded condition by infecting others. Get the torches! BTW, the auto-correct on iPad automatically changes its to it's.

OW! OW! OW! OW! OW! OW! OW! OW! OW! OW! OW! OW! OW! OW! OW! OW! OW! OW! OW! OW! OW! OW! OW! OW! OW! OW! OW! OW! OW! OW! OW! OW! OW! OW! OW! OW! OW! OW!

[joyful.livejournal.com]

To be fair, you can understand the rules of grammar, and still type it's instead of its by accident, when you're typing fast. And since they're both words, spellcheck won't catch it. I make tons of these mistakes by accident because I type faster than I think, even though my grasp grammar doesn't suck. I'll still type except instead of accept by accident, and not catch it until the third or fourth read-through.

[cluegirl.livejournal.com]

Been a very long time since I've found a fanfic story better than this Firefly/Harry Potter crossover, Boss;

A Million Light Years From Home (http://www.unfitforsociety.net/musesfool/siriusonserenity.htm) by musefool.

Enjoy!

[rtred.livejournal.com]

You're complaining of the quality (or lack therof) of fanfic? Okay, my head is asploding...

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Hey, you have to learn how to write and tell stories somewhere. Among the successful authors who started with fanfic: Cassandra Clare, naominovik, and, oh yeah, our own sazettel, seanan_mcguire, shsilver, matociquala....

(At least, I'm pretty sure Sarah and Liz did. Steven, might've been fanzines. Help me out, guys. ;)

[dragonmakr.livejournal.com]

You expect people to be able to write correctly?? Good luck. My family is loaded with English teachers, and they've about given up.

I work with supposedly college educated people who can't put together a coherent sentence. (okay, I'm a little tippled tonight and am having trouble spelling. but I have an excuse (and a proof reading bf)!)

I've read some very good Farscape fanfic, but I've probably been very lucky in finding the cream of the crop (thanks to the good folks at TerraFirma!). There is an awful lot of crap out there to wade through, and I just don't have the patience.

[batyatoon]

There is some really good stuff out there. These days I tend to only read fic that's either written by or recommended by people I know and trust, or at least know and trust on a literary basis.

And on the rare occasions I do write fic (outside of the context of multifandom RP), I never ever let it see the light of day before it gets beta'd. (I really should start moving my stuff over to my AO3 account. All that's there right now is my fic from last year's purimgifts fic exchange.)

Here's one you might like: http://archiveofourown.org/works/143758. I didn't write it but I wish I had.

[ladysmith.livejournal.com]

Sherlock fandom. ANYTHING by wordstrings

[smoooom.livejournal.com]

In answer to your first question. Yes. People generally seem incapable of using grammar when writing. In email, fan-fic or other wise. I am reminded of a time long a go when Wayne and I ran a BBS. The grammar and spelling on the boards was horrid. Over the course of about six months we gently corrected it and to our surprise it improved. One Mom emailed us thanking us for our influence on her sons grammar and spelling. We tried to enforce a be polite and use good grammar rule. It worked.

As to reading fan fic? not usually. I don't have a high opinion of it. I haven't met much that I liked.

[kayshapero]

The usual problem is straining out the good stuff from the Sturgeon's Law mass of crud. Hence the utility of "what have you read lately" discussions. :)

[hbruton.livejournal.com]

Shudder and shutter are my biggest bugaboo.

[judifilksign.livejournal.com]

As an English teacher, this drives me crazy as well. I think that capitalization and punctuation have really gone downhill since texting became so prevalent.

[joyful.livejournal.com]

Yes actually. For the past few months I've been getting very deep into Glee fandom, both reading and writing, and I've primarily spedning time on Glum: The Glee Angst Meme. Because if you're not torturing the characters and making them cry, what's the point of it? (Just kidding)

Anyway. My altime favorite fanfiction ever is a Buffy fic written more than ten years ago, the summer before season 4 aired. http://www.dymphna.net/ucsl/archive/niccy-timemeansnothing.txt

Here's a crossover I love (Queer as Folk/House): http://web.archive.org/web/20070907110101/http://www.thelibertydiner.net/housecall.html

And more BtVS/Angel fic, one of my favorite BtVS authors doesn't really write Buffyfic anymore, but this stuff, from more than 10 years ago, is still really good, IMO:
http://www.mi-destino.net/imperfect/fiction_buffy.html


And I'll take a brief moment to pimp myself:
http://www.tthfanfic.org/AuthorStories-2049/Joyful.htm
http://archiveofourown.org/users/Joyful
I write in a fair few fandoms, and write a farly even blend of slash, het, femslash, gen, family-friendly and adult. I cross the boards a lot.

I will refrain from linking to my ff.net account where the really bad fic I wrote in my early days is posted. Wow have I improved. Not to say I'm amazing or anything--I don't use a bea after two incredibly bad experiences of betas trying to actually change my stories to suit their own whims, so I have a fair amount of typos in my fics, bu I don't think I'm awful. And I'm nearly thirty, so I'm not one of those starry-eyed 13-year-olds writing Mary Sue self-inserts. Anymore.

[wouldyoueva.livejournal.com]

I was amazed to read a post that was entirely a quotation but she decided to change all instances of "too" to "to" thus rendering it
"Time is to slow for those who wait, to swift for those who fear, to long for those who grieve, to short for those who rejoice, but for those who love, time is eternity. - Henry Van Dyke"

So I keep reading slow, swift, long, short as verbs instead of adjectives. Makes me crazy.

(Original at http://personalmuse.livejournal.com/10997.html)

[dornbeast.livejournal.com]

One of my dislikes in the misspelling line is "A treasure horde," or something similar.

Unless the treasure has been magically animated, and is now pillaging to add to its mass in a magical variation on the gray goo scenario, this does not make any sense...

[terriwells.livejournal.com]

That might make for an amusing scene in a fantasy, though.