Sorry, but there are no words for how exhausted I've been lately. Trust me, it'll all be better if I'm awake when I write it.

My bad, Victor, since I've gotten a sense of how hard you work, and totally understand how draining it can be. That was just a knee jerk Grrr.

My bad, Victor, since I've gotten a sense of how hard you work, and totally understand how draining it can be. That was just a knee jerk Grrr.

No worries. I started in on part two when I was on Day Two of the insomnia, and man, that sucked ass. No, I mean really. Not just unpublishable, it was unbearable. Got sleep last night, but am at work now, and need to be at the in-laws' at 10 a.m. So writing is unlikely.

Ah, insomnia AND too much work. That makes life even more fun, doesn't it?

I need to replace my old copy of TGB.

Hmm. And perhaps reclaim my Irish Folk Tales book from my SiL.

I've got a question that may or may not have been raised before. What do you all think of the practice of putting something like "WARNING: Character Death" in the summary of a fic? I'm of two minds on this, personally. Sometimes, I don't want to read something that's going to depress me. Other times, the shock of a character's death adds to the HSQ of the fic, and I know I would have enjoyed the story more if I hadn't been spoiled.

Ooh, I hate plot warnings of all kinds. It's the equivalent of putting "and at the end you find out that the ex-boyfriend did it" on the back cover of a mystery, and I rarely read stories that have them.

I'm weird about it. I'd rather the warning not be there--I'd rather get into the story and see what happens, accept that the death is a part of the story. But if there is a warning? More often than not I'll pass it by. It's not that I mind character death. I just usually don't want to be depressed as hell over a fic.

See, I'm not skipping those stories because I don't want to be depressed over the character death. I'm skipping them because there's a warning.

I won't read fanfic that doesn't have some sort of a blurb unless it comes recommended. Other than that... I sympathize with the authors who don't like to put up warnings, and I understand that there are some fandoms that get really nuts with what you have to warn for. (Is it true or apocryphal that there were required haircut warnings in Sentinel? I've never quite believed it, but I know I've seen that claimed.)

That said, when reading fanfic I do tend to prefer situations where I know basically where I'm getting into - for instance, I prefer to know a pairing ahead of time, because I tend to have very limited numbers of pairings I'm interested in reading about. I generally prefer to know whether I should expect sex or not. I don't actually feel the need to know whether or not a character dies, or whether there's a happy ending, anything like that.

Mostly I guess I like to have enough information to make a vaguely informed choice as to whether the story's likely to be enough to my taste at that moment to be worth reading. All that goes out the window once I've got an author I trust, though.

... and I should clarify, now that Katie's posted, that I'm making a distinction between a summary/blurb (which all stories should have, I think) and a warning (which is generally listed on a separate line that says "WARNING: CHARACTER DEATH. AND NO, IT'S NOT CONNOR." or the like).