One concerted reading period later...

[Bob Schroeck]

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1) I'm surprised by how many of these I've read before.

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Yeah, I threw out a whole lot of possible links because I figured it was way too likely that you'd seen'em.

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2) I'm either getting way too picky, or way too spoiled by reading stuff the quality of Bob/Eyrie/Cat Tails, because I can't stand to read a lot of stuff I used to actually enjoy.

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Thank you; I'll let my college creative writing advisor know that her work wasn't in vain. I know what you mean -- I went back, dug up and reread the the Richard Lawson Nuku-Nuku fics from almost 10 years ago, which I thought were incredible when I first discovered them. They're still good, but the bar's been lifted since then -- my expectations are much higher now.

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3) My god, nothing turns me off more than bad spelling. Especially mistakes in the rogue/rouge line.

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Oh yeah. Although I do enjoy amusing myself by picturing all the boomers in those BGC fics with that very error as having big powdery red spots on their cheeks...
Sometimes I'll find a writer who has everything going for him but spelling -- and I'll struggle through his work. But bad spelling is the number two flag for me of a mediocre to bad writer. I can't remember how many of them on the FFML didn't even care to hear that they should fix that up. Their attitude was along the lines of "you got a story out of me, you should be satisfied with it". I keep trying to make the analogy between words and the tools of a craftsman, but so few people want to bother. They're just too caught up in the insufferable Kewlness of being able to put a few semicoherent sentences together and publish it on the web. Like that makes you a writer.

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4) Except for maybe horrible unreadable formatting.

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That's my number one bad fic sign. If it's all one paragraph, forget it.
Also bad: chapters that are five paragraphs long, with author's notes that say, "sorry I took six months to write this."
The only thing I can figure is that these people are trying to write without ever having read first.



-- Bob
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There's no wrong way to eat a Rhesus.