That's interesting, Am.

Bow before Google and my incessent curiosity. Fandom is always a learning experience. Okay, sometimes the lesson is "you have a knowledge addiction", but that doesn't seem to stop me coming back for more.

My favorite quirk of fanfiction is spellchecker-caused errors which are then missed by the beta. For example, when Voldemort throws a Cretaceous curse at someone.

Hey, Emily. I don't need it anymore (I was looking for it for a Super Seekrit Project), but I'm still curious...what's the alien cat story you're always talking about?

My favorite quirk of fanfiction is spellchecker-caused errors which are then missed by the beta. For example, when Voldemort throws a Cretaceous curse at someone.

And the one where Daniel used to live on Abodes with his wife Share? However, in my experience spelling-checker errors are worse going in what's effectively the opposite direction: my spell-checker dictionary now contains the word 'squick' as a viable one, but unfortunately that means that it doesn't pick up some 'spaces in the wrong place' typos, like "it' squick", or on one occassion (which luckily I caught myself before I showed it to anyone) a mis-spelling of 'squid'. (Which brings me to another unrelated point: try saying 'squicky squid slash' fast. The words sort of squash into each other.)

So.

... I appear to have finished a story I've been writing since, oh, 2001. Or so. Which is the finale of a series I've been working on since 1999.

t blinks

I feel like I should smoke a cigarette or something.

passes a lighter to Consuela

Congrats!

Catching up on BBF, they're having a conversation like we had in Natter the other day on grammar/spelling issues. Must be something in the air. But some of the stuff people are griping about - what are these people reading? Is it really that bad? Most but not all of what I read these days I find through various rec sites, so I'm coming at it with at least one layer of filtering, but good lord.

Here's one list of peevs that was posted:

1. Quotation marks (for dialogue) that start but don't close, or close but didn't start.

2. Character names misspelled or not capitalized appropriately.

3. No spacing between paragraphs. Worse still, entire chapters with no demarcation whatsoever, just one long 1500 word paragraph.

4. Wrong pronoun used for character referred to: Spike as a 'her', or Buffy as a 'he'

5. Tense changes within a sentence - 'Buffy walks down the street and decided to cut her hair' kind of thing

6. Starting a chapter or scene and then going back to set the stage with details that either don't matter or should have been incorporated earlier in the beginning. What I mean is that the dialogue and action have gone forward for awhile now, but then the author stops everythingto note that Buffy is wearing a yellow dress with little embroidered green flowers, brown sandals with a three inch heel and dark green pashmina, and left school early that day to visit her mom at the gallery so she was able to get here by four.....and now back to the middle of the argument she was having with Xander....

7. Overuse of adjectives in place of character names. I mean constantly using 'the redhead' or 'the witch' or 'the hacker' or 'the bleached blonde' instead of just saying Willow or Spike. A little of that goes a long way

And there were more, and worse, examples offered up.

Only the first and the last are things I would say I regularly encounter. Am I just lucky?

I would bitch about the tense thing,but it's been a long-term weakness of mine.

1. Quotation marks (for dialogue) that start but don't close, or close but didn't start.

Yeah, this one's annoying and pretty common w/ fanfic; now, SMG has a lovely voice, but having her read the entire narrative of the episode as part of her lines is a bit much.

What irks me is when it's painfully clear that the author has never heard of a) spell-checkers and b) betas.

I'm also pissed off by badly-written stories that have 500 comments, all along the lines of OMG!!! U rock! Rite more!!!!!!!1!!!!!eleventy-one!!!!