>crawdad cocktails

Those words IN NO WAY belong in proximity to one another.

True, the way to eat crawdads is boiled with spices and then gobble them up, finishing by sucking the heads. And mostly you want beer with that.

I did not write a Sternly Worded Comment, because it seemed uncharitable. Also, a friend of mine did the (entirely fabulous) art for the story, and I didn't want to embarrass her by association with my attitude.

But I'm still cranky.

Reading Against/Reading With: Mastering the Oppositional Discourse in Textual Healing. NuTrek, just about everyone.

Oh sweet merciful Jesus, that was FANTASTIC.

I finally had to retire my LOLita tagline, because this fic reduced me to whooping noises. Awesome.

I really need to quit staying up until 4 in the morning reading this damn kink meme, but it's coughed up some truly stellar fic and I don't want to miss any of it!

Pfeh, color me pissed off. I was reading a Big Bang story and it isn't actually finished. It ends on a huge twist, like a chapter-ending cliffhanger, and the writer's all "Hah hah, what a great twist!"--and apparently fails to understand that that isn't a complete story. She makes no effort to actually resolve any of the storylines, just stops the narrative cold.

Consuela, I read one of those too. At the end of it, the author wrote: "I realize that for many of you, this ending is less than satisfying. It should please you to know that there will be a sequel. At some point...in the future. I have a bunch of stuff to finish up first, but know that I have no plans to abandon the poor boys like this."

So very, very frustrating.

And Fay, I saw a historical J2 where the artwork is alnmost all atrociously naked manips and thought of your grumpy LJ rant about that very thing.

"I realize that for many of you, this ending is less than satisfying. It should please you to know that there will be a sequel. At some point...in the future. I have a bunch of stuff to finish up first, but know that I have no plans to abandon the poor boys like this."

Oh for fuck's sake.

Yeah, that was pretty much my reaction too. There's a reason I don't read WIPs.

Edit: I just realized that's grammatically incorrect, and should actually be WsIP. But there's no way I can imagine saying WsIP without sounding like I'm spitting.

I am totally happy to read a WIP, although I tend to do so only when I trust the writer to finish.

But a Big Bang challenge is by definition not for WIPs. That the story was incomplete and unfinished broke the implied contract with the reader.

And I don't know where she gets off thinking she's going to write a "sequel". You don't write a sequel to a story that you didn't finish to begin with. The story wasn't finished: it needs an ending, not a fucking sequel.

Huh, I totally will read WIPs. And fragments. And ideas that I know will never actually be written, much less finished. Though, granted, if I am reading those, it's likely because I am reading the author's lj and not a comm.

I do think Big Bang more than implies that the story is finished. Once I've committed to reading your 20K, I think I'd like it to actually have an ending.