let's discuss!

[drasticbarbie.livejournal.com]

this if for those of you who read fanfic, which is hopefully most of you.

what are your fanfic pet peeves? is there a pairing or genre you won't read? do you hate mistakes in canon?

for me it's more about grammar. i get irritated with bad spelling (use spellcheck!), poor use of punctuation (besides commas because there are about 40 rules. you should know the basics), and capitalization. in posts i don't bother with caps. but when i publish i try to make it as correct as possible.

other things are the use of certain words. there/their/they're, we're/ were/where, bare/bear, lie/lay/laid etc., i/me, overuse of italics and bold. to me italics are good for emphasizing certain words that should be stressed, either in dialog or narration, sounds coming off the television/phone or written words read by the narrator or out loud in dialog, musical lyrics. it just makes it easier to understand that it isn't normal sounds. i only use bold in my author's note, disclaimer, and warnings.

also, i won't even read a fic that has all the text bunched up because someone didn't press enter. or something with only about 200 words.

also, when you address someone it should be like,   Person, blah blah. with the comma there. that just bugs me.

for specifically CM i won't read Morgan with anyone but Garcia. i don't know, i just think they belong together and i love that Garcia is one of very few average sized women on television. in spite of what hollywood wants us to think, most women are more Garcia's size than JJ's.

Comments

Re: Ode to the Hotel Mini Bar

[drasticbarbie.livejournal.com]

on that note, it's good to do research on things like that. you can find out quite a bit about the effects of drugs and alcohol, mental illness, and so forth on the net. for some things i recommend this.

but as far as drugs and alcohol go, i only write about what i've experienced personally. i've been super drunk and puked in public, even had black outs. not my proudest moments, but i can write about it believably. i haven't done heroin or meth, but have used other drugs. i don't recommend that at all! but if you haven't then you should find someone who has or do a bit of research on actual personal experience. that would go a long way in helping make it believable. you could even watch intervention.

i once read a fic where the writer kept referring to something as the drug. she never said if it was pills or something else. it was stupid. something like, "my mom turned the drug over in her hand." what?!

and i haven't had a child, but that's the sort of thing i've seen enough of and been around enough to sort of understand. usually i don't write from the pov of the woman giving birth. and i'm doing a fic where a character has an unplanned pregnancy. she won't be having an abortion because i can't imagine what that's like, though i've talked to people who have had them. it's just too much out of my range of experience to understand enough to write it believably.

Re: Ode to the Hotel Mini Bar

[kuriadalmatia.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I'm the same way about booze myself. I've been stupidly drunk, amazingly drunk, and WTF drunk. Yeah.

Research is important. This is one of the few fandoms I've encountered where research tends to be a major part of the writing besides knowing the canon. Heck, I've pestered the folks at little_details about bad DC area neighborhoods and who Rossi would cheer for, Jets or Giants.

There are times when I'll be deliberately vague about certain details, allowing readers to fill in what they want. But I do want to write something believable.

I started with Star Trek, which is the one of the few universes where "everything goes" when it comes to details. X-Men was more specific, because there was 40+ years canon. CM is an entity of itself, which makes it daunting. I want to do justice to the characters, even if I have them in a slash relationship or, in some cases, really pushing an issue.