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Read Victoria. She's sooo cool. She says everything I'm thinking but so much better. I should just surrender to the Blog Goddess that Victoria is. If she isn't already on your blog rounds, she ought to be.

Victoria says:

The thing is this - I do try to give authors a second and third chance. I do read a few stories by people before I make my determination.

And there are authors on my autodelete list by whom I'll occasionally open up a story, just to see if things have gotten better.

Usually, they haven't.

Yup. I tend to be masochistic and read the same authors over and over again, hoping against hope that they have improved. It's worse when you see the talent there but they a) simply don't care enough to spell/grammar check or b) do weird, horrible, awful things to the characters that the Angst Bunny simply wouldn't approve of or c) they keep repeating the same storylines over and over again. Blech.

And yet, I do read, because I just think, "Okay, this time they're going to get it right." Yeah, I'm naiive and gullible.

I have come to the conclusion that some of these people are solitary writers. They don't have betas, they don't have friends, etc. Maybe they belong to an incestuous mailing list of some kind, but for the most part, they are just out there, producing, and not really talking about what they're doing with anyone at all.

I know that I got better exponentially when I met Liz and she told me, "You have a problem with redundancy and you keep forgetting where you put people." And when I got bold enough to post to ASC, the haven for some of the best writers in Trek, some of the BNFs were kind enough to help me out there. And as such, improvement... (I hope).

But these other people... I get the feeling they write in a vacuum. It's almost impossible to distinguish one story from another with them and it's like, "Okay, didn't you write this the last time you posted?" Other times, the story is incoherent - the great ideas are there, the spark of genius is there, yet, incoherence. And to be honest, this kind of fic irks me more than badly edited fics, because these are the people who could be good if they wanted to be.

Victoria again:

Don't you see that the punctuation goes INSIDE the quotation marks on dialogue? (For American readers/writers. I understand that things are done differently in Britain and Australia and possibly even in Canada, and I make exceptions for that.) But god, open up a book, people. LOOK at the formatting, the grammar, the punctuation. These are the basics, and if you haven't mastered the simple art of putting commas inside the quotes and before the "he said" portion by your third story, you're just not trying. And don't get me started on formatting issues. How freaking hard is it to insert a blank line between paragraphs? It's hitting the enter key twice. And yet, I still get fic in my inbox that isn't formatted to be readable on a computer screen.

I love the book idea. I use it myself all the time when I'm not sure of something. I've given up on ever mastering the use of a comma, but I definitely go to the books to look at other things. Mind you, books aren't always right either, but I think if you're using something other than Sweet Valley High you're probably on the right track.

It's common adage that in order to write better, you should read more. Read a lot. Different styles, different genres, different authors. Believe it or not, Danielle Steel has a lot to teach you on how to get from point A to point B (it's a start, folks). Amy Tan shows you how to write pointed, double-speak dialogue. John Grisham knows how to pace a story. Jane Austen is wonderful at irony. Jean Plaidy and Margaret George do a terrific job of weaving history with fact. And if you're lucky enough to belong to a fandom with profic (BtVS, X-Files, Trek etc), then read some of those. You get the idea of how a story ought to be done.

Victoria talked about weariness too. Yeah, know that feeling. I don't know what the cure for weariness is, sorry, Vic, but I do know what it feels like. It means you've been in fandom too long in some cases and in other cases, it means you've done everything you set out to do in the first place. I feel like I've done the latter - y'all might disagree or say "Good riddance!" but when weariness sets in, there's not much you can do about it.

You can only talk about fanfic for so long before you realize it occupies every spare moment of your life and you're not necessarily happy with that. You can only join so many mailing lists before you realize that too much is too much. You realize that you're grouchy, cranky and just plain unforgiving when it comes to certain things. Grammar errors set you off and thing that never bothered you before are now amplified. Blech. It's not BOFQ syndrome, but something else.

Burn out.

Plain and simple.

I started writing in the fall of 1997. My reasons for writing fic then and my reasons now are very different. Back then, DS9 provided an escape from reality. RL hurt too much in the fall of '97. I can't even begin to explain what that was like, but I can tell you that my friends are wonderful and that they got me through that time period. But writing about the Dominion War to me was purely escapist - it was something I could deal with, it was something that was happening on the pixels of my television screen. It wasn't real and I wanted to be some place where the enemy wasn't inside my head and heart, but rather somewhere I could see it, where I could fight it.

So I wrote fanfic.

Now, I think I write because I'm trying to prove something. I think I'm trying to escape my badfic days. Or maybe those aren't so bad - maybe they are, to borrow Victoria's phrase, pedantic, and badly plotted. But there they are, and I refuse to take them down, because weirdly enough, people do read them and send me FB on those stories. But I think I write to see if I can get somewhere else other than where I am. I also like to do things that people say can't be done.

But I'm also not drawn to writing like I was a few months ago. I don't feel the need to churn something out that often, maybe it's because I spend way too much talking about fic these days. Maybe it's because not a single minute of Trek airs in these here parts and no other show draws me to it like Trek did Maybe I'm just too involved in fandom and I need to take a step back.

And maybe it's because I've finally achieved everything that I've ever wanted to achieve in fanfic and I simply have no stories left to tell. But, you can never count a good Angst Bunny out.