General
the_senjou - LJ - Blessing or Curse? - My personal philosophy regards writing has always been that I want to entertain people with it. LJ has given me a comfortable way to do that. My only fear is that my addictive personality will bind me to LJ to the detriment of my original stuff.

scribbulus_ink - Snape FQF - It was jarring to come to HP and find nothing that was equivalent to what I'd known; to get the same kind of centralization and intimacy, especially now, it takes settling in a particular niche. Even still, there might be subdivision, with one pairing having 3-4 different communities.

rotpunkt - Discussion: Attack on Slash (Help!) - This man writes (in German, so all mistakes in grammar and expression are mine, but I´m sure I have the content right), that he thinks slash could be classified as a disguised form of homophobia, and in general discriminates against and devalues all three groups: the women, the heterosexual men and the gay men.

kaiz - Dead Canon, Zombie Canon, So Fresh It's Still Kickin' Canon - I discovered that for me, I really love the fannish interaction of a Live canon show...where there is a ton of discussion following a newly aired ep and speculation about next week's ep. Writing in a Live show (missing scenes, longer stories) is still fun and I don't mind getting Jossed. But then, a Dead canon can have lots of appeal too. Less so for the fannish interaction, but mainly because of the fiction writing possibilities--since so many things are already *settled*. Zombie canon can drive me nuts in a fannish discourse way, because eventually, the discussion can wear thin for me because...just gimmie the next installment, damn it! But writing in a Zombie canon is still tons of fun.

peasant_ - Cult of High Standards: My Current Creed - As the current upsurge of the cult of nice kerfuffle sinks down I find myself wishing to set down just what my current opinion is. Partly to clear my mind, partly to clarify for anyone interested and partly because it will be interesting to have a checkpoint to refer back to at a later date.

fabularasa - Here's Why I Suck. Why Do You Suck? - In my secret heart of hearts, I want to travel to every single MFA program in Writing on the face of the globe, and shut them down. Seriously, I want to say, go home, all of you, because all you really need is a fast internet connect, a livejournal, and a couple of kick-ass betas to jerk your tether every so often (or, okay, really really often.)

nardasarmy - Fic:Feedback::Icons:Comments - Now in fandom is this subculture of new fen who don't write fanfic, don't maintain sites, or join in the big discussion groups. All they do is fandom graphics, and I'm not talking fan art. I'm talking icons, headers, and wallpapers made by simple manipulations of screen caps. That's it.

aubrem - I'd cite sociobiology except we're unlikely to, you know, breed with each other - It seems to me that friending DOES matter very much and that there is nothing wrong with that. It is human and natural. When someone friends you it means there is something in your journal they want to read - your journal has value to them. When they defriend you it means your journal does not have enough value to outweigh the downside of keeping it on their f'list. That IS rejection. Saying it's not is just disingenuous. The thing is, it's up to you as to what emotional impact friending and defriending has on you.

profshallowness - First there was bemusement, now there are thoughts - So there have been changes from being all public access to being more, if not completely friends-locked in at least two comms of which I'm a member, the one I want to talk about being darkangelfic which has some new rules , and to put it really briefly, some of which have put some writers off from posting there and a lot of which were pretty new.

Fandom-Specific
( Cut for possible spoilers in Firefly, Supernatural and Harry Potter fandoms. )

On Creating and Criticism
scribbulus_ink - Hook, Line, and Sinker: On Creating Titles - The short version is this: I hate trying to come up with a title.

monanotlisa - Life's too short... - As you know, I'm all for unconventional pairings and reading alternate universes. I'd go as far as to say that anyone who doesn't is in danger of missing some of the best stories out there, especially in the Jossverse, Alias, and SGA, but the whole idea of fan fiction is that your versions of the characters, no matter how and with whom you pair them up, have to at least originate in canon, have to be both reasonable and credible extrapolations yadda yadda yadda.

app1e_pi - Fanfic of fanfic: How would that work? - If a fanfic author wanted to write a story set in another fanfic writer's -verse, would she need permission?

app1e_pi - Conclusions and Dissenting Opinions: Sharing a Fandom, Sharing a -Verse - Yesterday I asked the question If a fanfic author wanted to write a story set in another fanfic writer's -verse, would she need permission? The ensuing discussion was fascinating. I know it's not the first time this question has been asked in fandom, but I had a great time reading and responding. I've put together the common conclusions. These aren't necessarily my opinions, they're just the more common ones that popped up again and again.

invisionary - Cut! Bring in the double! - So the other day I was surfing around checking out random fics, and I came across what I thought was a rather interesting piece of feedback. It basically said "I hate the character A/character B pairing, but I loved this story. I just pretended that character A was character C the whole time I was reading."

Polls, Questions, Other
celandineb - Does fanfic reflect RL in name changes for females? - I began to wonder whether writers who portray female characters in fanfic as married (or permanently partnered) are more or less likely to have those characters keep their original names than is the case in real life. I'm also curious about whether the choice is likely to reflect the writer's own decisions.

questionable537 in fanthropology - - If it's bad to plagiarize someone else's fanfiction, how is it that songfics and fanfiction in general are acceptable?

lobelia321 - nuts and bolts writing of longfic - Now: if you write longfic, do you tend to write it in longhand first? And once on your computer, do you store it all on the same document, or on different ones? And how do you keep track of them all, especially of the different versions and drafts? Do you print them out? Do you write out the whole thing in linear chronology, and later shuffle it round? Or do you start out with a flashback-whatever structure?

ella_bane - Friending/Defriending - I started thinking about friending policies when someone on my flist mentioned she would do things differently if she could start fresh.