God, Prufrock is good.

Really? Her stuff doesn't quite do it for me. It's a fun read, and I do read, but it never quite clicks.

Plus, she keeps insisting that John has a Southern accent, which...no.

I've wondered about that from a variety of authors. Lots of people talk about him drawling, but Flanigan sounds West Coast to me. Definitely not Texan, as I've seen crop up more than once.

Really? Her stuff doesn't quite do it for me.

I think she's really really funny. I enjoyed Boom Boom Room as an AU more than Hindsight, but I liked them both. She's just fun. I wouldn't mind seeing what she'd do with a plot that wasn't a farce/romantic comedy.

sounds West Coast to me. Definitely not Texan

Texans don't have the nasal Chicago A, and neither do southerners. (You don't have to be from Chicago to have that A, since I gather it's spread pretty far through the rust belt and beyond, but, that's not a southern accent.)

I will say, though, that I (and possibly many other people) say "drawl" when they mean "speak in a slow, drawn-out manner" -- not necessarily with an accent. The southern accent has slow vowels, so we say "southern drawl", but that means "drawling in a particularly southern way" rather than "all drawls are southern."

Somebody saying, coyly, "Well, I coooooould, buuuuuut, I'll keep you in suspense" is drawling, even if they're from Nova Scotia.

What Nutty said.

Sheppard has a drawl, but it's definitely a western/Plainsy drawl, maybe with some California in it. That having been said, I've seen more than one writer describe his accent as Southern, so I'm thinking that there are a lot of people who can't really differentiate between "a drawl" and "a Southern drawl."

Pru I mostly don't read, because I don't usually read WiPs, and *really* won't read a WiP by an author who has multiple WiPs going simultaneously. But when I've read her finished stuff, my reaction is Dana's.

(On a semi-related note, "Boom Boom Room" gets so much so very wrong about academia that I found it even harder to read than most academic AUs, which usually get stuff wrong. Astolat's recent badfic challenge response, though, with the bitching about where people's funding comes from? Perfect.)

I often find stories that were originally posted as WiPs tend to run on too long for my tastes, and not be as well-made, even when they're by authors whose stuff I really like. I wonder if that's just a necessary aftereffect of posting as you go. God knows, in my own writing, I'm all about the rewrite draft.

I'm thinking that there are a lot of people who can't really differentiate between "a drawl" and "a Southern drawl."

True. And with all the Canadian accents rolling around the galaxies out there, anybody from the lower 48 starts to sound positively -- still not southern. But the Chicago A is definitely non-Canadian sounding.

Huh. One of my fics just got nominated for an award. I'm flattered, but it's kind of hard to take fanfic awards all that seriously, especially when your fic is the only one nominated for a particular category. What really means something to me is having my fics recced and/or pimped by people whose taste and/or writing ability I admire.

People who think Sheppard has a southern accent have clearly never heard any real southern accents.