writing about writing

[flambeau]

I used to have a bunch of essays up on my site on various fannish topics, but I took them down when I redesigned, because I just wasn't sure how I felt about them any more. Most of them were written in the late 90s, and I called them rants at one point, but they really weren't; I don't rant well. I've been thinking about making annotated versions,

Comments

[ratcreature]

Recently I've started tagging for both tense and POV (because a post by seperis made me curious) and multiple POVs seem indeed very uncommon in recent fic, though present tense has almost equal showing with past. Like I haven't been keeping track of this long, less than two months I think, but of 147 stories I tagged for POV only 13 had multiple POVs in them. 89 were in past and 59 in present though a few stories have both and use a different tense for flashbacks or something.

[flambeau]

Stats! ILU. It's nice to have at least limited confirmation that I'm not sitting here making things up. *g* What fandoms are those stories in?

[ratcreature]

SGA and SPN mostly, though some are crossovers and a handful of other fandoms, but in those mostly one or two stories, if that, for SGA and SPN it breaks down like this.
SGA: 35 past tense, 25 present tense, 5 POV 1st, 1 POV 2nd, 51 POV 3rd, and 4 with multiple POV characters
SPN: 52 past tense, 36 present tense, 2 POV 1st, 3 POV 2nd, 85 POV 3rd, and 9 with multiple POV characters

[flambeau]

That's a lot more present tense than I would have guessed; I think present tense has become common enough that it's transparent to me in most cases, and so I don't even think about it, or at least I obviously didn't think about it when I was annotating this. Very cool, thank you so much!

[ratcreature]

Yeah, I think present tense has become very common. I don't notice it at all anymore. I mean I usually have to check which tense a story actually was in when I tag it after reading, because I don't notice either way.