Ihr braucht mich allgemein nicht um Erlaubnis zu fragen, wenn ihr Charaktere, Schauplätze oder andere Elemente aus meinen Geschichten, Originalen wie Fanfictions, verwendet. Ich bin Mitglied der OTW und selber Fanfictionautorin, daher halte ich solche Werke jeder Art für absolut legitim. Ich verlange nur, dass ihr bei euren Werken angebt, welche Teile meiner Werke ihr übernommen habt. Wenn ihr also eine Geschichte schreibt, die als Fortsetzung zu einer meiner Geschichten gedacht ist oder die einen meiner OCs enthält, müsst ihr das zu Beginn der Geschichte in einem Vorwort klarstellen (vorzugsweise mit Link). Um das Ganze noch weiter aufzudröseln und jeglichen Missverständnissen vorzubeugen:

( Genaueres hinter dem Cut: )

Zu guter Letzt möchte ich euch darum bitten, mir Bescheid zu geben, wenn ihr ein solches Werk hochladet. Das ist kein Muss, ihr müsst auch definitiv nicht um Erlaubnis fragen oder Angst haben, dass ich euch im Nachhinein irgendwas verbiete, ich bin einfach nur neugierig, was mit meinen Werken passiert.

☞ My Yuletide beta (I had to write to a second person, who actually answered) promised me she would be done by Monday or Tuesday, so I am now glancing anxiously at the mail symbol of my browser every few minutes while I wait for the weekly party downstairs to quiet down a bit. I'm really nervous because I still have to look for a Britpicker and won't be in LE for a few days. My mother and I are visiting the relative of a relative of a relative in Göttingen for a few days and I don't think my mother will book a hotel with internet access.

☞ In other news: Chuck ate my brain. I only watched it because I was a bit bored, it stared Adam Baldwin and because I caught an episode on TV a while ago. I love it. Chuck is adorable and Casey is like Jayne only more clever; I like Sarah and Ellie and Morgan and Captain Awesome. Also: Awesome likes to run around half naked. Overall, the show is sweet and funny, even though it hits my embarrassment squick sometimes.

☞ I actually found a decent story on ff.de. Weird things do happen. Half of the stories that I have to look at as an OP are Mary Sue stories or stories with canon characters as Sues, though. No idea why people over there think the fandoms are overrun by slash. Do het fans have a persecution complex? Is everything about 15% slash more than acceptable?

Does it really make me mean and elitist that I think that Sturgeon's Law applies to fanfiction? Even my own? Because it's wrong and insults the average fanfic writer by calling them incompetent (which, btw, I didn't, I was talking about stories, but apparently story = author).

I really, really should stay away from the internet for a while, or at least certain parts of it. It's just making things worse for me at the moment. Because whatever I try, if I'm feeling even remotely positive about it someone else comes and tears it completely apart.

The only problem is: I don't have anything better to do at the moment.

*whiny post is whiny*

☞ Please remind me to never try an old fandom ever again. I just finished the Hornblower TV series and was desperate for fic. Well, I looked and found a number of promising rec lists, an archive and a very long list of stories. The very long list of stories, unfortunately, contained no useful information beyond title and author. The archive had no fics that interested me, but at least it wasn't frozen in 2002 and about the rec lists ... at least half the links were dead. The others led to stories that I had no interest in. It's especially sad because the first link I clicked on seemed to be exactly the kind of story I was looking for. The author seems to have deleted all her fics, of course. I tried ff.net too, but the Sues put an end to that. *sigh* Never again.

☞ PS: Has anybody any idea how the ancient file size label translates to word count?

☞ Why the translation exchange post on ff.de is doomed to fail: People offer to translate from English to German and authors offer stories to be translated from German to English.

☞ I'm officially tired of kink meme fics. Am I the only one? Am I weird? I see everywhere at the moment, and I'm really longing for plotty fic with romance and non-explicit sex scenes. Or no sex scenes at all! I think I overdosed or something.

☞ I really hope ficathon_de will decide for DW. I decided not to post fic on LJ anymore (my stupid principles tend to be very persistent), so I wouldn't participate on LJ and I don't think using both would work.

☞ Rec: Captive Prince by freece. Summary: Damen is the true heir to the throne, but when his half brother seizes power, Damen is captured, stripped of his identity and sent to serve the Prince of a rival nation as a pleasure slave. It doesn't sound like much, but I am very much in love with the story. So I rec in, even though it has been recced a lot already.

Yesterday, someone posted a rant on fanficrants. The ranter's point was that a) the fandom doesn't need fanzines anymore and that b) the prices on them are very unreasonable, especially considering that you can post/read fanfic online for free. This post is the tl;dr version of my not very organized thoughts on the post and the discussion:

I am rather new school when it comes to fandom, but that doesn't mean I don't understand the appeal of zines (even though I don't own a single one). In fact, I wish I had the money to buy them, because zines have some advantages. Fanfic on the internet disappears very fast, compared to non-net standards. Give it five years and many URLs will be invalid, the authors decided the fics were crap, or the fandom suffered from a wave of cease and desist letters. When you buy a zine, you get to choose how long you want to keep it, not the person hosting and/or publishing the stuff.

( Cut for length )

First of all: This is all lian's fault. And the fault of the anonymous person who so generously gifted me with two months of paid time (&hearts). This is also a follow-up post to my last post about fandom and language, in a way. It's also my first poll, so please tell me what I could have done better.

Note: For the purpose of this poll, I won't define "fandom" or "(language) fandom". I'll leave that up to you.

( On to the very long poll— )

PS: I would appreciate it if you would pimp this poll.

The topic of this post is one that has been on my mind for years, and this certainly isn’t the first attempt to write it all down. This post is about my very subjective experience in fandom, which, I believe, is not quite normal. I suppose all of you who are multifannish know at least to some degree what I am talking about, because essentially, I am talking about being in two fandoms at once. But while most people experience two fandoms as two different things they’re interested in, for me, it is the same thing, in two languages.

So I suppose this is where I should introduce myself: I am a German and German is my first language. I didn’t really start learning English until I was ten (so I am not really bilingual). I started writing fanfiction when I was seven. I discovered fandom when I started reading the AnimaniA when I was fourteen. I doubt more than a few of you ever touched that magazine, but I loved it. Buying the new issue was more fun than Christmas. I discovered online fandom when I was nineteen, googling Harry Potter and finding Animexx. A few months later, somebody posted the translation of this really great Harry Potter fanfic (or so I thought at the time – it was the Draco Trilogy), and I started reading it in English.

( That was five years ago, and since then, I spent time in English and in German fandom. )

Okay, I think I found my topic for today's meta (I'm keeping my schedule, see?): long stories.

Not stories that are long, mind you. Stories that feel long (not necessarily the same thing). A good story should make you forget time. It should suck you into its world until you wish the story would never end. I've read quite a few stories like these, and I love them. But there are other stories too. Stories that promise to be these amazing stories that you wish would never end, and then ... they just don't. They get longer and longer, full of stuff that is totally unnecessary, that deters from the purpose that is just plain boring to read. These are stories that I wish were betaed by those competent people who know when a story might be better off being shorter. I know I told an author once to cut a few scenes. Am I just an exception or do other people really not mind these stories?

Anyway, I will list a few stories that felt too long for me, and why:

( List under the cut )

I'd like to know about your experiences and theories about this as well, because I don't think I'm the only one who hates feeling that reading a story becomes some sort of chore that I only keep doing because I really used to love them. And is there any way to tactfully tell the authors that their beloved hydras really aren't as lovely as they seem to think?

Note: This is probably not very well thought out (I'm running on caffeine). I also apologize if linking these examples hurts the authors. I will take out the links if it does, just leave me a comment.

Ich bin jetzt schon eine ganze Weile auf fanfiktion.de. Seit Herbst 2004, um genau zu sein, also anderthalb Jahre nachdem ich das Fandom über Animexx entdeckt habe. Über lange Zeit war es nicht mein Hauptarchiv, aber seit ich einige meiner Sachen nicht mehr auf Animexx posten konnte und ich es dort generell nicht mehr so gut fand (aber das wäre ein Thema für einen anderen Post), ist ff.de quasi mein Hauptarchiv. ff.net taugt schließlich nicht wirklich als Alternative für Deutschsprachiges und mit anderen Seiten konnte ich mich auch nicht anfreunden. Findet außer mir noch irgendwer, dass myfanfiction.de vom Layout her zu myspacig ist?. Außerdem ist „Depression“ kein Genre, und es ist auch mit Sicherheit nicht das, was sie im Blurb angeben.

Aber nun zum Thema. Die Punkte sind nicht vollkommen durchdacht und wahrscheinlich würde mir noch mehr einfallen, wenn ich etwas länger darüber nachdenken würde:

( 8 Kritikpunkte zu ff.de, ohne besondere Reihenfolge )

Wahrscheinlich bin ich einfach zu verwöhnt durch InsaneJournal, LiveJournal und meine eigene Webseite, bei denen ich (größtenteils) machen kann was ich will und mich nicht mit dämlichen Beschränkungen herumärgern muss. Außerdem zeigt das OTW-Archiv, dass diese Optionen durchaus technisch umzusetzen sind.