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Messages - THETA

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31
Author Craft / Re: For guys and clever women.... help
« on: March 25, 2008, 10:16:51 PM »
Well, i'll just be severe on my own sex.  I see so many girls do this it's insane. 

-Getting too personal too quick.  Guys really don't want to hear about how your sister's having problems with your mom's new boyfriend who she recently found out has been in a gay relationship. 

Man, i can't stand when other girls whine to me and i'm sure most guys don't either unless you get one of those "need to be needed" guys.

32
Author Craft / Re: For aspiring writers...
« on: March 25, 2008, 10:05:53 PM »
Be honest, how bad are some of the stuff you get or, on the flip side, how good is it?  I'm curious as to the capacity of this generation of asipring writers.

33
Author Craft / Re: Fanfic richer or poorer?
« on: March 20, 2008, 06:41:43 AM »
Sorry for sounding ignorant, but what is slash?

Be thankful for your naivety.  However, i would love to awake you from your Matrix (thank you Morraeon for the reference), so here.  Slash is either A, random pairings between characters that are not canon (already established in the story's universe) and then involving them in some kind of romantic liason (usually in a rather provocative fashion).  For example if i were to take the Harry Potter series and be like, "OMFG Hermoine/Draco forever!!!!1111".  Slash's second skin is B, gay relationships between characters, so keeping with the Harry Potter theme here, slash B would be along the lines of Harry/Draco, Remus/Sirius, ect.  Revel or cringe in your newfound knowledge.

Theta, it doesn't surprise me at all about writing skills in regular English classes.. try having a class of 8th graders just write me a simple observation and I end up with at least half of the class not forming complete thoughts... and I am not going anywhere near handwriting problems.. 


Lol, thankfully when i was an eigth grader all three years ago, i was in a GATE english class, so by that time we were writing essays on To Kill a Mockingbird and The Giver (how good they were, i have no idea).  Well, Matthew D, here's to hoping that in the next few years laptops will replace notebooks and all you'll ever have to see is typed nonsense.

34
Author Craft / Re: How graphic do you like yours?
« on: March 19, 2008, 09:15:57 PM »
Uhh, i prefer classy graphic.  Richelle Mead is a pretty good example.  The sex is definitely there, but the description is a little vaguer.  Instead of "I felt his cock" it turns into "I felt him."  You know, small stuff like that make the difference between a harlequin and an actual literary novel.

35
Author Craft / Re: Fanfic richer or poorer?
« on: March 19, 2008, 09:09:06 PM »
No, creativity can't be taught, but it can be encouraged.  I think any advanced placement (AP, IB, college prep, ect) classes are pretty good about working with sentence structure and analytical skills as well as sentence coherency and paragraph cohesion.  Normal classes on the other hand scares me.  Every other week or so my english teacher has us revise the papers from his normal classes and it is just aweful.  Okay, regular 9th graders who use "I was happy, lol." i could almost stand, but with some of those 12th grade papers i was glad to find someone who could have a complete sentence, much less one that actually had an understandable thesis.  Bleck. 

36
Author Craft / Re: Fanfic richer or poorer?
« on: March 19, 2008, 09:22:40 AM »
*gags*

Eww.  Anyways, i apologize for my age group Yeratel.  Most of their shit does indeed blow.  God, you would think that if they're already using someone else's characters, universe, and basic storyline they could at least bust out something half descent.  I blame the school system's lack in bolstering creative writing in english classes.  For god's sake, we're expected to explicate poems and analyze the existential ideas portrayed in works by Camus for months on end, but they can't just hand us a piece a paper and say write a short story for one bloody week?  And again, i blame TV.  Television and movies are not a prime example of good writing.  Literature is.  GAH, anger.

37
Author Craft / Re: Fanfic richer or poorer?
« on: March 19, 2008, 04:29:21 AM »
1) Fanfiction, i think to a certain degree can be healthy for aspiring writers.  I view fanfiction as a kind of writing exercise.  There are plenty of creative writing prompts that will provide a little back story and characters that you are expected to extrapolate from.  Fanfiction is a similar concept.  You can never appreciate, as a writer, how difficult it is to command the sheer amount of creativity it takes to create a successful novel.  Fanfiction is a way to cushion an aspiring writer into the world of authoring on a smaller scape.  You "borrow" (this is a euphemism, dear children) someone else's brilliance and merely work in your own.  In a sense, fanfiction has challenges that normal fiction doesn't, because if you are " borrowing" such beloved characters and stories then it is your responsibility to live up to the great craftsmanship of the works you've taken a free ride from.

Of course, many abuse these privileges.  There should be like, rules to posting fanficiton.

1) No, you and your friends may not pose as the 10th, 11th, and 12th walkers of the fellowship.
2) No, you may not indulge in written fantasies of falling in love with any of the fellowship members.
3) Get your f*ckin' homophones right.  Its/it's, their/there/they're, too/to ect.
4) Get your spelling right.  I don't care if english isn't your first language or if you're just a retard.  When you write crap like "He was sihlent" for silent, somewhere someone dies.
5) No, you may not marry Harry Potter
6) And no, you may not have sex with Harry Potter either.

*shudders*  Horrible, horrible people.  But, also, you've got to accept that many of these would-be writers are quite young, probably high school level or even jr. high level in some cases.  They don't know how to write more than just the books they read or a lot of the time their attempts at writing are diluted by their illusions of good writing from television and movie scripting.  Someday in college or later on, they very well may learn to write better and understand more about character achetypes and story development rather than just resulting to shoddy plagiarism.  We shouldn't begrudge fanfic people of their writing development...even if it does make us want to impale someone.

2) Slash, i dunno if you mean male/male kind of slash or just the whole "I'M GONNA PAIR ALL THE CHARACTERS IN THE BOOKS IN RANDOM AND DISGUSTING PAIRINGS".  I'll try and address both.

Gay relationship slash:  Many fanfic writers are females*.  Many women have the "wishing for a gay friend" thing.  The psychology of this phenomenon in brief is that females like the idea that in a gay relationship, one of the males have to fulfill a submissive role much the same way all females face in a relationship.  I'm not just talking sexually here.  Women like the idea that a male would have to go through the same problems they do in a relationship.  Women crave for a man to have some sort of vulnerability, which is why women go for that whole "mysterious stranger" stereotype because a man with secrets makes him vulnerable.

But anyways, the reason why people like making unlikely pairings or random pairings or going off already existing pairings is because the fanfic author or the audience that person is addressing are all craving for a wider range of emotions that the book or movie or whatever provides.  In other words, they want love angst.  They crave for that whole hurt/comfort blah blah blah romance kind of stuff with character they love, but perhaps cannot wholly be satisfied with because of the kind of story they're in. 
Take for example, Lord of the Rings, a story now riddled by fanfiction (although some of it is quite good).  In LOTR, romance was a kind of subplot.  The Aragorn and Arwen thing was mainly explained in the appendix and vaguely in the story.  Oh and for all those Aragorn/Legolas shippers, many were curious as to where the two had met and just how intimate of a friendship they had.  Aragorn/Boromir people too were like, "DID ARAGORN KNOW HIM WHILE HE WAS STATIONED IN GOnDOR?!!!! squeee".  People are just trying to fill in that hole.

*On male to female ratio on fanfic writers.  I know a lot of guys, instead of fanfiction just write really bad "creative" fiction that mind as well be fanfiction.  They seem to think that by changing the names of the characters and planets, they have something new and innovative instead of another rewrite of Star Wars.

38
Author Craft / Re: A Writer who can't Write
« on: March 19, 2008, 03:54:00 AM »
I carry around either A, a flimsy pocket notebook for my purse or bag for school or work environments or B, a larger, more durable leather notebook for writing on personal time.  Record anything, dialogue, ideas, thoughts and remember to write an explanation to go along with it.  Don't take your ideas for granted, thinking you'll never forget the moment of brilliancy.  I've done that a lot, where i've abandoned story ideas because i hated them at the time, but as time progresses and you grow less frustrated with one of your works you try going back to it remembering you had all these clever ideas, but forgetting crucial parts of it.  Explanations are full developments of your thoughts are important. 

39
Author Craft / Re: Succubus Blues
« on: March 01, 2008, 02:10:45 AM »
Great book.  It definately satisfied my sexual frustration at not having any kind of romantic attachment right now.  Witty dialogue and well developed plot to go along with the romance.  One problem i did have was with the resolution of the latest book "Succubus on Top".  It was somewhat anti-climatic for such a long build-up.  The denounment concerning the stripping was BRILLIANT however.  Also, i feel that Seth is too much of a perfect character.  He needs some flaws.  People like Batman better than Superman cause he's something people can relate to more.  Seth doesn't seem to have any obvious or outright flaws (other than being mortal).  Darcy was proud, Lysander and Demetrius' love failed under fairy enchantments, Mr. Knightely had big brother lecturing tendencies, and Colonel Brandon had problems with self-confidence concerning his age.  Other than that, lovely, amazing series. 

40
Author Craft / Re: Don't Write Your Book On Company Time
« on: January 06, 2008, 10:16:00 PM »
Tough luck.  Unless your occupation officially reads AUTHOR/WRITER then you should only work on your writing at home.  At work you can always just daydream.  As far as i know, a company can't control your thoughts.  It isn't 1984 yet.  ;)

41
Author Craft / Re: The first line
« on: January 01, 2008, 10:16:19 PM »
Lines 3 and 4 are wonderful, but 5 is really cliche.  Cliche in the bad way too, not classic, but overused in a sense that too many crap writers use it, thus making it something less than desirable for an audience even if it is a good writer.

For the one story i've been actually developing is...

"Kill them!"


42
DF Books / Re: Did you discover the books because of the TV Show?
« on: March 21, 2007, 06:24:50 AM »
To my infinite shame i only started when tentative previews had been put up.  Of course, i had devoured the first four books before the first episode came out.  It's really hard for me to pick up any fantasy or sci-fi book without recomendations from a friend, peer, or teacher with good taste because I find myself dissapointed more often than not when trying to pick at random.  What better recomendation is it than to have a TV shore or movie made for it?  However, i could not just wait for the show.  I needed to be fully informed in order to properly criticize what i was watching and to make sure the reason for a TV show wasn't a crappy one like, the book is mindlessly popular.

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