General Fandom Meta

mtgat - Feedback, Critique, and That Entitlement Thing - Everyone who has ever posted a story to the internet has a little counter, either on the site or in her head, and it tallies up the number of comments received for a particular piece. There's "Enough," for personal values of "enough," and there's "WTF? Am I chopped liver?" Writers will write, because writers do write. But if enough stories posted to a particular site land in the "chopped liver" category, writers will stop posting there, in favor of archives with better comment ratios. It's not entitlement, although for some people it might look the same. It's common sense.

peasant_ - A Suggestion - time to take back our fandom - As a writer I get so frustrated by not knowing what I am doing wrong. And equally frustrated by the confusion that arises from only being told I am good but then observing how little my stories are read. And I feel that the prevailing attitude that 'brilliant' is adequate feedback is only contributing to this. Now I know I am as guilty of 'brilliant'ing as the next person - 'brilliant' is easy, it is safe, it discharges our sense of obligation to the author at no cost to ourselves, but in the long run it is counter-productive. Fandom thrives on communication. If we cannot communicate our full opinion of a fic then we quite frankly need to learn how.

kita0610 - Things that make me go hmmm - I am of the school of thought that your beta reader should be a better writer than you. That you should have more than one beta reader, because not all writers/editors share the same skills. That you haven't been properly beta'd until you cry blood tears. That once you post a story, people have the right to do with it whatever they want, which includes mocking it publically in equal amounts to sleeping with it under their pillows. // So don't get me wrong. I have nothing against concrit. But I'm not sure I believe that getting 10 or 10 thousand pieces of concrit about an already completed work is going to make me, or anyone else, a better writer. When I'm done with a piece, dude, I am *done*.

cathexys - Newsletters...How Public Are Public Posts? - So one of the fundamental problems is whether it's OK to link to other things online, whom to share this information with, and how public or private LJ entries really are. Because here's the thing: LJ is on this bizarre verge of being both, neither totally one nor totally the other. Some folks don't have robot and spider block so that you can google their public entries; some flock part of their stuff, others most or all. Some change settings continually, keeping posts public for a few days or going through fits of changing filters [...] // And how we regard our own journal, how much info we share in public and private posts, how open we think of our posts will obviously affect how we view other journals.

Fandom-Specific Meta( cut for possible spoilers in the following fandoms - Stargate: Atlantis, Smallville )

Reading/Writing/Creating

cjk1701 - On languages and their usage in fandom - People need languages in fiction and use it, often going to great lengths to find the information they need. And I'm sitting here, with three languages at my disposal, and only use English and some basic HTML, mostly ignoring the richess at my own doorstep. Not only me, either - a lot of polyglots do. // Why? [Poll & Discussion]

cursescar - Girl bits and all. - There is this whole collective self-consciousness women have with using any kind of girl bit terminology - we have no problem saying "dripping cock" but "dripping cunt," oh no. That's embarrassing, or too dirty, or it sounds silly. We shy away because we have clits and cunts, but since we don't have cocks and balls, we can write about them all day long and find it hot as hell instead of it hitting too close to home or being embarrassing. [Poll & Discussion]

kennahijja - writing/reading your own smut scenes - A question to those of you who write porn: when you write/read your own sex scenes, to they 'work' for you? As in 'do you find them arousing'?

todeskun - Dark!fic redux - Or, essentially, the difference as I see it between dark!fic and non-dark!fic is this: dark!fic is pretty much over-burdened with despair, such that at the end of the fic you know that nothing good is going to come, just more hurt; non-dark!fic may be mostly about the despair, but at the end of the fic there's a wee ray of hope that things could get better. Maybe not too much better, but better -- like Rick and Louis at the end of "Casablanca"; Rick may have lost The Great Love of his Life, but he's regained the spark, the reason for living

Miscellany

faramir_boromir - More on RSS feeds - [Information on a patch to control your journal's level of participation in RSS feeds]