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Because C&C does not mean "Compliment & Clamp yourself to the author's backside like an amorous leech" ... recent archives:
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and now, we interrupt this rant for an important message Pitas has been quirky lately, so the grandiose verbosity rants are delayed. (No, that was not the important message.) A good friend of mine has begun posting fics on ffnet. I was alarmed by this news because I love her poetry, but find her fiction painful. She did not like how I C&C'd and stopped asking me to be her beta reader. I should have done myself a favor and not peeked at the fics she posted unbeta'd. My dear, never write a sex scene that has the seme's fingers in the uke's ass in one paragraph, and, in the following paragraph, has the seme seductively sucking those same fingers. NEVER NEVER NEVER Never--unless there is at least one sentence in between which mentions the seme going into the bathroom and spending a good five minutes with the anti-bacterial soap and a nail brush. I thought I would retch right there on the keyboard at work. There is nothing romantic about e. coli. There is a reason for those "Employees Must Wash Hands" signs in fast food restaurants. Your seme, besides getting a nasty taste in his mouth, has a good chance of spending his morning-after puking his guts out--that rather ruins any nice morning cuddles, don't you think? I know that as a yaoi fan, most of the sex scenes that I read will be written by people who are unequipped for any first-hand knowledge of gay sex. I also know that I will encounter many sex scenes obviously written by virgins. Nonetheless, anyone old enough to write knows what hole shit comes out of. Sex is a messy business, and anal sex even more so. Yes, I know there are some fetishists out there. I don't believe that anyone with that particular fetish would be reading yaoi fanfics, though. I suspect they would go straight to the hardcore gay erotica. (Go straight to gay erotica... what an oxymoron.) Yes, I know that one can clean one's self out pretty well to prepare for some of the less hygienic sexual activities. Few people, however, include a nice enema as part of the middle of their work day, just in case the chance for some hot office action comes along. At least, not where I work... (Also, to the fangirls who write rimming scenes: that odor is not a "nice, musky scent." It would be best if you avoided any taste or scent descriptions in those scenes.) Why am I ranting about this? Because, for me, yaoi's appeal--even at its most angsty or kinky extremes--is romance and fantasy. Yes, I hope it is smutty and sexy, but I don't want to stumble across sex scenes that remind me of how ridiculous and gross sex can be when you are not all caught up in the passion of the moment. 04:57 a.m., Saturday, January 12, 2002 ~Seiji collapsing under a morass of Grandiose Verbosity's soft-spoken cousin is Mundane Verbosity. Neither cousin will shut up, but you won't want to snap Mundane's neck as often. There may even be moments when you actively seek her out, she's a good cure for insomnia. Some fics aren't bad; they are just boring. It's hard to get mad at these fics, but it's also hard not to get frustrated wading through all the "eh... not awful" fics to find the "ooo... intriguing" ones--especially if you've already spent hours weeding out the incredibly awful ones. Unless I am putting off doing something fairly unpleasant, I do not read more than the first two paragraphs of a fic in my inbox before I decide whether I am deleting it or not. Yes, I probably do miss some good ones that way. No, I don't think that I am missing very many good ones. I was delaying phoning my mother when I read all of a Gravitation fic that showed up in my box on the 2nd. I'll include the first quarter of the fic because it is a good example of mundane verbosity. -~-~-~-~- Yuki took his hand off the mouse and looked around his work area, brow creasing ever so slightly in frustration. He cast an eye back toward the monitor--he'd hit a particularly nasty snag in his story, couldn't figure out what to write next; the main character's girlfriend had just had her house broken into, and he couldn't decide whether she should be messily stabbed or not. That was frustrating enough in itself; but lately it was happening a lot more often, so he'd made it a point to keep some cigarettes lying around. Last he'd checked, he'd had at least four. He hadn't smoked them, Shuuichi certainly hadn't smoked them, and they hadn't grown legs and walked off themselves. So where the hell *were* they? He growled and bent low to look in his drawers. Paper, paper, rubber bands, a pick--He picked that last item up and inspected it. One eyebrow crept up his forehead. It had teethmarks in it; so it was probably Shuuichi's, since he tended to chew on random things when he got bored. How it had gotten stuffed in his desk, mixed in among paper and ink and pencils, he didn't really want to know. Yuki tossed it back in the desk and closed it with a satisfying bang. His desk shook. He stood up, pushed his chair away from him with his foot, and wandered into the kitchen for a beer. He picked up a saltine cracker along the way and was munching on that when he opened the refrigerator door. He blinked, then looked harder to make sure his vision hadn't blurred or something. But no, his eyes were fine; there was just no beer in his fridge. Yuki swallowed the cracker with a loud noise, and slammed the refrigerator door shut with an even louder noise. He cursed pungently and threw the package of crackers into the trash. Yuki was an intelligent man, not to mention a naturally suspicious one, and it wasn't that long ago that *he'd* been nineteen (going on twenty, as Shuuichi reminded him so often). So it didn't really take that much figuring to guess what was going on here. His doctor had been telling him for weeks that he should give up cigarettes and beer, but by now it was more of a reflex than anything, since he knew Yuki wouldn't. Taking the prescription, that was about the limit of what he'd do for himself. He'd been stupid enough to take Shuuichi with him on his last appointment. He'd thought Shuuichi had been dozing near the end of it, but apparently not; Shuuichi had probably heard the doctor, realized that Yuki was not going to do what the doctor told him to, and taken matters into his own hands. He was long past the point of really analyzing why he put up with Shuuichi's crap anymore, but the thought did pass his mind. Yuki realized he was chewing his fingernail, and took his finger out of his mouth with a grimace. *That* was one habit he definitely didn't want to cultivate. So. He didn't have beer, and he didn't have cigarettes, and the only person who knew where they had gotten off to wasn't going to be home for another ten or so hours. Yuki considered his choices. Stay inside and work on the story without beer and cigarettes, or go outside into freezing weather, scrape ice and snow off his car, and drive to a general store. He ground his teeth and went to find his keys. Okay, this is not stellar writing, but it isn't as pungent as some. (Not as pungent as Yuki's breath must be to make him able to curse "pungently"...) There are a lot of things that I could comment on here--such as how much I hate it when characters suddenly "realize" something that they are doing, whether it be gnawing on their fingers or wanking off or whatever--but the main problem here is mundanity. There are a few nice bits in the fic where Yuki is thinking about the plot of his story and how his interactions with Shuuichi are reflected in his writing. The sex scene isn't bad, either. What's bad is that we have to wade through Yuki gnawing his hangnail, Yuki staring at the fridge, Yuki--hell, what's really bad is that this isn't even Yuki. That's not Yuki standing in front of the fridge thinking vapid thoughts; that is the fic's author. I'm not saying that this is a self-insert or a Mary Sue, but Yuki in those vapid, mundane moments is indiscernible from the fic's author and ninety-nine percent of the fic's audience. Would we be online looking for fics to read if we thought that the most piddlin' little, commonplace details of our lives were fascinating enough to warrant their own fics? No. Would we want to waste our precious time reading a fic when we could be absorbed in the scintillating beauty that is our well-organized sock drawer or the lithe dance that is tooth flossing? (Does this remind anyone of Rimmer from Red Dwarf?) No. We read fiction because we want to be entertained. We want to see something more interesting than our own empty refrigerator. The more mundane the topic of your writing, the more brilliant your writing needs to be. And brilliance is not derived from your thesaurus, it comes from genius when suddenly a saltine cracker is the key to unlocking the hidden depths of character, revealing something riveting, something remarkable, or at least something we haven't seen in a hundred other fics. I know I expect too much... but I still hope... 12:07 p.m., Wednesday, January 9, 2002 ~Seiji collapsing under a morass of grandiose verbosity and other pitfalls Today's title is taken from Mrs. Giggles' review of "A Kiss at Midnight." Yes, when I am cranky after a fruitless search for good new fanfics, I often peruse Mrs. Giggles archives--her reviews calm me. (I'm strange like that.) Here is the closing of Mrs. Giggles' review: Many of the fics that I find in my searches are simply awful, but some fics inflict a special form of pain. Those are the promising stories that have been made inexcusably exhausting. I will drag out some prime examples of grandiose verbosity in the next couple days--it's a slow week at work--but first I want to comment on some of the smaller hindrances to enjoying even the best fics. Unless we are lucky enough to own a really nice laptop and a good comfy chair, reading fics online can get old fast. Either that, or I'm becoming quite an impatient old bitch. (If that's the case, at least I know I am not alone--there's a lot of impatient old bitches online.) Writers are aware that reading is not necessarily something that people yet feel comfortable doing online. The online reader sits with hand on mouse while scanning text on a monitor that's at an uncomfortable distance away. Don't take too long to make your point, the reader says, or I'll move on. We want to enjoy what we read. Your fic readers will take plenty of time to thoroughly savor your writing if you make it worth their time. Show us that you value the time that we spend at your site. Make it as simple as possible to get from your front page to your fics. The more times I have to click on a link to get to your fic, the more your first paragraph has to be absolutely brilliant in order to get me to finish the fic or ever return to your site. Along the same lines, don't make me spend too long puzzling out what your cute little link names mean. If all your best buddies understand, that's fine, don't expect anyone else to appreciate it, though. (And, please, if you are writing fics in English only, do us the favor of a main site menu in English.) Do I even need to say this? Don't expect your visitors to jump through stupid little hoops for your own amusement. We are not here for your entertainment. We are not your little trained dogs. Quit it with the fake entrances already. Either password protect your yaoi and lemons or be bold and unapologetic about your site's content. That takes care of some of the impatient bitches' peeves. Here's one for the old bitches: We don't all have the best eyes or the best monitors. Here's an unusual idea: why not try to make your fics readable by as many people as possible? Bishonenink girls, I love your fics. The backgrounds are pretty, but some of them are not very easy on the eyes. Trust me, your writing is so enjoyable, you would lose no visitors if you switched to plain backgrounds. Wiggle, I enjoy your fics, too. I do not enjoy the tiny white-on-turquoise font. I continue to squint and highlight your text in order to read it... I guess that shows how desperate I am for a good read. Everyone else, unless you come very highly reccommended, I am not going to bother to squint and strain my eyes for you. I think that is enough ranting for now... just thinking about the examples of grandiose verbosity that I have in mind for later this week is giving me a headache. 01:44 p.m., Tuesday, January 8, 2002 ~Seiji a bitch's dilemma 11:46 p.m., Monday, January 7, 2002 ~Seiji |