If you've never heard of them before, $10 words are words that are rarely used and which many (maybe even most) readers won't know the definition of. For example, say, "verdigris". Verdigris is a fine word and it describes a very particular color (namely the greenish color that copper turns when it oxidizes (i.e., rusts)). Used appropriately, it ( Read more... )

Today I finally went ahead and deleted all of my Fanfiction.net bookmarks. It was a bit of a pang to do so, since I've found some great fics on that site over the years. Unfortunately, the number of good stories was massively, *massively* overwhelmed by the utter crap that I found there (the crap to quality ratio of FF.net remains the worst of ( Read more... )

Just some things that have been bugging me of late:

1. Is there any author out there who uses some or all of a canonical character's name as a handle that doesn't suck?

2. Have you ever seen any variation of "or so he thought" in a summary or story and have the story not be a grammatical disaster?

3. Has there ever been any clause in any sentence ever ( Read more... )

Today I'm doing my semi-weekly fanfic trawl and download (though I've been less regular lately since I'm going through the *longest fic slump ever*.  Either my standards have really raised or I'm having terrible luck lately, because it's been ages since I've found something I liked enough to rec) and stumbled across no less than 7 Merlin fics in a ( Read more... )

I just finished a DADT fic that, like most of the genre, was about the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell (the rest of the genre, meanwhile, seems to be based around how much DADT made a gay soldier's life utter hell and tend to be depressing; I rarely read those).  It was a pretty good fic and I might have recced it, except for one thing: the author ( Read more... )

I just finished a story that ended with major character death and was about to add it to the "unwarned for character death" list when I went back to the beginning of the story and found that there was a warning, only that the warning was buried in the middle of the author's notes.  Meanwhile, the character death warning provided by the archive ( ( Read more... )

I tried to submit this through the appropriate feedback/suggestions section of the site and got a 500 error. Twice. Thus, I post it here, in the hopes that someone with influence will see it (or someone without influence will pass it on to someone who has it ( Read more... )

Recently found in a story that shall not be named:

Chapter 1(rewritten, because for some reason everyone is assuming that Sarah is going to be the DADA teacher for Hogwarts… which she ISN'T! and Plus, these chapters were redone by my coughgreatcough beta… kinda crappily…)

Wow.  Just... wow.  I'm not going to claim that every beta on earth is a ( Read more... )

Apparently AO3 now has an advanced search function (yay!), albeit one they aren't promoting very well.  What that search function doesn't have?  A way to search by fandom.  (WTF?!)

Then again, I can't figure out how the function works at all, since using "<1 month" and ">1 month" produces almost exactly the same set of results (featuring the same ( Read more... )

The number one feature I'd most like to see on Archive of Our Own: an option in my profile to filter out all WIPs when I'm logged in (so that my searches only ever turn up completed stories).

A very close second: the ability to filter by word count (though I understand this one is very difficult to program).