heh...it just didn't sound like she used it right...like there's not really a "buggering hell", right?

there's not really a "buggering hell", right?

Well, I suppose it might be one of the subsets of Special Hell...

That sounds like she took a British swear-phrase, "bloody hell" and replaced half of it with a British swear-word, "bugger", and didn't know that... well, that nobody, not even Spike, says "buggering hell". "buggering selfish" the same-- "bloody selfish" could work in some contexts.

Either she's got a strange notion, or she had a beta who thought "bugger" was 'more Spike' or some such nonsense.

Part of the oddity is that they're in different parts of speech. Just because it's swearing doesn't mean the grammer's different.

I know...that's why red flags came out.

I've been known to say "bugering hell" on occasion. Also "buggering bloody hell", "buggering crap", "bloody buggering bollocks" etc. My grammar tends to get creative when I swear. Maybe it's an Irish thing.

Thanks for the input, Jars. Ok, ficcers, I made the mistake of showing my bro ff.net ( I thought he could tell the difference between me and "those people" but I think it backfired.) and there were fandoms on there that struck me as, well, sad.I'm not sure why...some of the shows were things I looked forward to very much as a girl, but somehow I stopped thinking about them as an adult. Or even Northern Exposure, which I can't wait to get on DVD one day..I loved it deeply but I don't hear their voices in my head anymore.(And the Sopranos is too perfect to fic..it'd be rewriting God)..what makes a show ficcable? And I don't really hear voices...it's just my best way to describe that thing that happens between writers and characters, and I'm dialogue's bitch anyway so it starts with speech, you know?

I think the real key thing for FF to work is a sense that there's stuff going on that we're not seeing. Which is why, in my head, fic for Sopranos or Carnivale, say, doesn't work so well as for (First thought) Harry Potter (just what are the adults doing during all this?) or Buffy, where there's always the assumption that there's porn monsters happening while we're not watching.

For me, fic is for when the characters voices are in my head. No matter how much I love Buffy, I don't internalize them. There has to be some connection for me.

And yeah, the more open doors the writers leave, the better. Although there's always AU, so it doesn't much affect the volume of stories I'll write...

This is what comes of not knowing the terms.

I learned it by different words, myself, in terms of the psychic distance ("narrative distance", "authorial distance") to the character in question: close, distant, etc. The central metaphor was a camera. Actually-- from one of my mother's old handouts, which I will inflict on you because I think it's cool:

A simple analogy for psychic distance is the lens of a movie camera. Imagine the opening sequence of a film: The first view is shot from a helicopter. We see a panoramic scene of hills, trees, houses. Zoom a little, and here is a particular house. Closer, through the window, a room with people in it. Closer, the camera identifies a single subject among the crowd: a young boy sitting on a braided rug. Closer, we see his face. We see his eyes. Now, we are seeing through his eyes.

One way a writer can control distance is though diction and a careful selection of detail. Summaries, abstractions, and generalizations tend to keep the reader at arm's length . Sharp details tend to pull the reader in. However, to say that specificity diminishes distance is a gross oversimplification. Distance is, primarily, a matter of tone.

The following example illustrates a scale of diminishing distance. Here are six ways to open the same story:

1. It was a sunny March morning after a long dark winter, and the town of Oleana, Indiana was gearing up for its annual rutabaga festival.
2. A large, raw-faced woman of twenty-seven stepped out of her bungalow and into the chilly sunlit morning.
3. Penelope Johnson squinted in the cold spring sunlight.
4. Penelope loved to feel the faint March sunshine on her face.
5. March sunshine made her want to dance.
6. Light again! Flooding past her clenched eyelids, warming her sun-starved soul.

Notice how the long view (1) creates a remote feeling, whereas the close-up (6) induces claustrophobia. Extreme closeness and extreme distance are sometimes disorienting for readers of narrative -- just as they can be to viewers of paintings, photos, or cinema.

The in-between examples above operate along the same continuum, adjusting the emotional climate of the story's introductory sentence without changing its basic facts. The potential number of gradations is, of course, infinite. Once you learn how to manipulate psychic distance you can micro-manage your story's mood.

...

and refers to "adolescent mellow drama" which I think is "Everwood" or something

ahahahaha.

That is all.

I kind of see FF.net like a big market place....sort of like a big junktique place where you go in trying to find something really cool and wonderful but you're pretty sure most of it's going to be junk. And sure enough there's a whole wall of crying Elvis velvet painting, or pet rocks. And the home crafts gone bad, such as the egg carton lampshade. And you just boggle and wonder why...why anyone would make somethign, why more than one person is making crying Elvis and why anyone would pay down good money for that.

Sometimes you find, buried away is something cool---Art Deco lamps, or a set of cool Martini glasses.

But mostly, you just go and stare in wonder (or horror) and all the weird crap people have made, sell, and buy. Because there's always someone walking around, proudly, with a crying Elvis they just proudly purchased.

Wow, cool analogy.And if it gives the gift of schadenfreude, that's a nice bonus. Though even the worst stories kind of touch me, cause that person is (usually) so proud of what they did and everything...has so much faith in it. Sometimes, they are deluded,though.