22 December 2008

Also stop posting each chapter as a separate story, it's dumb.

Some tidbits for those of you posting on Fanfiction.net:

- If your story’s summary is misspelled and incoherent, I will not read it. After all, the story proper probably won’t be much better.

- If you threaten not to post any new chapters until you get reviews, I will not review. This is so immature it hurts. Art shouldn’t be about getting attention. Granted, fanfiction isn’t exactly high art (whatever that may be), but in the end you should always be writing for yourself. Attention is nice, but if it’s all you’re thinking about then there is something wrong.

- If, in the summary, you only say “This is my first/second/fiftieth story” and don’t tell me what the story is about, I will not read it. If you can’t be bothered to use the summary feature to actually give me a summary, then what can I really expect from you?

- If your story is a fanfic but your summary mentions all OCs and no canon characters, I will not read it. I’m here to read fanfiction, not original fiction with Goombas in it.

- If your story’s title steals a title or lyric from Evanescence or Linkin Park I will not read it. I don’t really care about using song lyrics as titles otherwise, since I do it too because coming up with titles is hard. But I promise you that if you use anything from those two bands, (a) you probably have the same title as about a hundred other fics and (b) statistically speaking, fics that use lyrics or titles from those two bands are godawful and therefore not worth reading. To date I’ve only found maybe one or two exceptions to this out of hundreds that I’ve seen.

- As a corollary to the previous, you absolutely must NOT title any story “My Immortal”.

- If your story is a fanfic and your summary starts with “A new girl comes to…”, I will not read it. Unless the new girl is a canon character, then I might. But that rarely seems to be the case.

- Saying, over and over, “NO FLAMES PLZ” makes me want to flame you so badly it hurts. Here’s an idea: stop caring so damn much. And like I’ve said in a previous post, a lot of what some kids call “flames” is actually constructive criticism. Get over yourself. If you put your work on the internet, you will attract both good and bad attention. This is normal and should be expected. Live with it.

That will be all.

3 comments:

MrsSoersdal said...

I'm not one to correct spelling but given the nature of your blog, it seems apropo.

Separate, as my 9th grade English teacher could. not. stop. reminding us, has "a rat" in it. S-e-p-a-r-a-t-e.

:D

Selan Pike said...

Ah!
The shame.
Firefox, your spell-check has failed me.

MrsSoersdal said...

LOL I forgive you. I have issues with unnecessary.