Tell us, author, more about your personal experience with moisturizer and how it's okay for men to do it.

Ha! I just read this paragraph in the wild. It's tonally very weird with the rest of the story.

Where do you stand on correcting falsehoods in fic? Are you able to let "addictive marijuana" and "symptom free alcohol withdrawal" just wash over you?

If it's a good story with an author that seems nice, I'll suggest a correction because I think it will make a good story better if it's accurate.

But sometimes it's one of those "I've never known the touch of a man but I'd sure like to" romance writers and "i've never drunk alcohol" but will write in detail about chugging half a bottle of alcohol and symptom free alcohol withdrawal and life-ruining marijuana addictions (as opposed to dependencies) that develop in days.

Since I don't want to correct for *her* since I can't live her life nor do her research, it's a) an exercise in irritated ego, and b) hoping people read the comments and don't go away with what she presents as representative and factual.

I feel like shit for the latter urges, but sometimes I anon and try to politely do so. In the former, I absolutely use my own name.

(I do reasonably little of either, for the record)

I don't begrudge anyone from expressing themselves creatively, but man I wish A03 had something like a popup with the latest One Direction video that has to be voluntarily closed before one can hit the Post Story button.

Where do you stand on correcting falsehoods in fic? Are you able to let "addictive marijuana" and "symptom free alcohol withdrawal" just wash over you?

Honestly, it depends on how good the story is otherwise. An author in a wildly AU but amazingly engaging fic had a character "muted" by a standard physical process, but still able to scream, and moan. I PM'd her about it, and she confessed she knew it was physically wrong, but there were good reasons, so for her, fiction included some physical handwaving. It actually didn't affect the story, only my edge-squaring, detail-primping nature. But the ensuing discussion led to an ongoing friendly relationship, so it was worth the risk of being yelled at for being mean.

Another author, with amazing promise but not so adept at the writing, made the same mistake, having the vocal cords cut, and the character able to moan and laugh, but unable to whisper, which, come on! I went the PM (both of these on LJ, so PM was possible) route again, and from that (kindly and carefully worded!) first message, struck up a conversation, from which has grown a really lovely friendship and mutual critique arrangement.

But in a brief story I'm not really invested in, I usually handwave it, or close the doc and move on.

Oh, the brilliant story without the tools to pull it off. So sad.

I've been reading my collection of Stargate:Atlantis fic, and I'm struck by the pervasiveness of DADT and the damage that can be done to the military people's careers if their preferences got out. I wonder how many people reading old fic--if anyone is reading fics for old series--are utterly baffled by the whole concept.

I got that when crashing through tons of due South fic.

50 years from now, someone will have a really interesting thesis out of that fic.

I'm doing a Losers wallow at the moment, and because of the timing of the movie version (2010), there's a lot of DADT stuff and then post DADT stuff, and it has been fascinating. Little snapshot, especially the stuff written in 2011/12.

Long-abandoned fic: continue as if nothing has changed Real World, or accept that people have moved on no matter their initial enthusiasm and treat new stories as timestamps for a "finished" fic?

I have to admit that part of the reason for me abandoning a project is that I'm a shite writer and my betas were asking so many analytical questions that I didn't have the answers to (among them: "Is this a season 2 character or a season 5?" --Years later, I realized that my answer was "he's the amalgamation of all his seasons to be what I need for this story". Not that is really my beta's fault, but that I found myself painted into a corner of inadequacy, or that our writing methods didn't match up, and I still found myself feeling/being inadequate. The more I analyzed the story, and the less I wrote from the seat of my pants, the drier the inspiration got until I was completely flummoxed and frozen with indecision and hate for the process). And also that I had three stories in one with an arc that would probably, if actually written, top a tens of thousands of words (which, for the fic I like, is not much, except to me), which led to me wondering if I should distill it to one of the three to make it manageable, and then found that they truly were intertwined. For the difficult part of the plotting, I'm trying to get myself back into a "The Winslow Boy" headspace, where the story is "about a trial" but is totally not about a trial and only skirts around that in order to service the real story (and the story that most of my readers had really taken a shine to).

Ah, fuck a duck.