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.

Oh, shit, I did like me some Jensen/Cougar. That was one of the few movie fandoms I read in.

My sister is now thinking of giving up on Brokeback Mountain fic. But I found her some new ones on AO3!

Juliebird, I can only write that long a story because the story is there, knocking on the inside of my skull - not so much hoping someone will open the door but looking for a weak spot to break out of. I'd say, listen to what the story wants. If it feels like the end of tree limb that has broken off because it's already dead inside, then let it go. If it feels like it broke off due to trauma, and there is plenty of sap rising and little twigs starting to grow off the end because it is bursting with life - well you know what to do.

Feel free to tell me to shut it.

If it feels like it broke off due to trauma, and there is plenty of sap rising and little twigs starting to grow off the end because it is bursting with life - well you know what to do.

That's what I feel like with Career Change/Advancement. There's so much there, if I could just get rid of the barrier. I would count that a victory, if I could finish that.