IYFG & Reviews
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/iyfanguild/
After hearing about it for months I finally tracked down how to join the Inuyasha Fan Guild. They are a group dedicated to recognizing and encouraging writers of Inuyasha fanfic who really care and work hard to produce good stories.
For each quarter they give out awards in a number of categories. Any one of the more than 1500 members can nominate a story from the quarter currently under consideration. A story has to be seconded and thirded in order to make the voting ballot with a week for each. Each member can only nominate one story per category and either second or third one story in each category. Furthermore any one member can nominate the same story for no more than 3 categories. This leads to a great diversity of stories under consideration even at this point when we are well into the thirding period and a number of the stories that were originally nominated have dropped out of the running.
In addition to not getting seconded or thirded stories are dropped if a member requests a review by the Challenge committee as to whether or not the story meets minimum quality standards.
Unfortunately, if an author has three friends who are willing to work together it is possible to get a story onto the ballot that never should have been. Stories with bad grammar, spelling, and other obvious flaws have gotten as far as seconding before being disqualified. Some that are borderline have made it to the vote in the past.
This means that reading the nominations in preparation for voting is a chancy thing. Many of the stories will be a good read, some will be truly excellent but there are plenty of clunkers scattered throughout to provoke howls of laughter or pain. I've started posting some quotes at WASIF in the Bad Writing thread for others to marvel at.
Some of the stories just cry out for MSTing, or sporking as it's becoming known and I feel the urge to oblige them. So after giving it a lot of thought I've decided that I'm going to start posting reviews of stuff that I really like or really hate here and not just fanfic. If it moves me enough to want to share my feelings about it one way or the other I'll probably post something here.
I had to give it a lot of thought because while I know that if I rip apart something really awful that's a movie or a published book that it's a risk free endeavor. It's not like Stephen King will show up all hurt that I think the opening pages of his book about the creatures attacking the airport were so painful that I never got to chapter two but fanfic is a whole 'nuther game. There are people writing fanfic, some even over the age of 15, who don't even bother to run their masterpiece through spell check before posting it but scream about how they are being flamed by the haters if you gently suggest that doing so would be a good idea. No, really I'm not exaggerating, or at least not by much.
So if I post some negative reviews, or even go so far as to spork something so bad that Joel and the Robots would have wet dreams about it, then I run the risk of attracting some flames myself and some of these people are not sane. In fact there is a really wonderful site whose entire purpose is to report on the insane behavior of some of the people in fandom. There is a reason that at a site devoted to ripping bad stories to shreds in a humorous way not one of the team uses his or her real name or known handle.
But I'm going to risk it because I don't want to start a flame war at the two forums I visit where it would be marginally on topic and I can't keep it inside much longer. The badfic hurts and I need to strike back.
And maybe I can lure more of my friends into reading the good stuff or watching a movie they might not have watched otherwise.
After hearing about it for months I finally tracked down how to join the Inuyasha Fan Guild. They are a group dedicated to recognizing and encouraging writers of Inuyasha fanfic who really care and work hard to produce good stories.
For each quarter they give out awards in a number of categories. Any one of the more than 1500 members can nominate a story from the quarter currently under consideration. A story has to be seconded and thirded in order to make the voting ballot with a week for each. Each member can only nominate one story per category and either second or third one story in each category. Furthermore any one member can nominate the same story for no more than 3 categories. This leads to a great diversity of stories under consideration even at this point when we are well into the thirding period and a number of the stories that were originally nominated have dropped out of the running.
In addition to not getting seconded or thirded stories are dropped if a member requests a review by the Challenge committee as to whether or not the story meets minimum quality standards.
Unfortunately, if an author has three friends who are willing to work together it is possible to get a story onto the ballot that never should have been. Stories with bad grammar, spelling, and other obvious flaws have gotten as far as seconding before being disqualified. Some that are borderline have made it to the vote in the past.
This means that reading the nominations in preparation for voting is a chancy thing. Many of the stories will be a good read, some will be truly excellent but there are plenty of clunkers scattered throughout to provoke howls of laughter or pain. I've started posting some quotes at WASIF in the Bad Writing thread for others to marvel at.
Some of the stories just cry out for MSTing, or sporking as it's becoming known and I feel the urge to oblige them. So after giving it a lot of thought I've decided that I'm going to start posting reviews of stuff that I really like or really hate here and not just fanfic. If it moves me enough to want to share my feelings about it one way or the other I'll probably post something here.
I had to give it a lot of thought because while I know that if I rip apart something really awful that's a movie or a published book that it's a risk free endeavor. It's not like Stephen King will show up all hurt that I think the opening pages of his book about the creatures attacking the airport were so painful that I never got to chapter two but fanfic is a whole 'nuther game. There are people writing fanfic, some even over the age of 15, who don't even bother to run their masterpiece through spell check before posting it but scream about how they are being flamed by the haters if you gently suggest that doing so would be a good idea. No, really I'm not exaggerating, or at least not by much.
So if I post some negative reviews, or even go so far as to spork something so bad that Joel and the Robots would have wet dreams about it, then I run the risk of attracting some flames myself and some of these people are not sane. In fact there is a really wonderful site whose entire purpose is to report on the insane behavior of some of the people in fandom. There is a reason that at a site devoted to ripping bad stories to shreds in a humorous way not one of the team uses his or her real name or known handle.
But I'm going to risk it because I don't want to start a flame war at the two forums I visit where it would be marginally on topic and I can't keep it inside much longer. The badfic hurts and I need to strike back.
And maybe I can lure more of my friends into reading the good stuff or watching a movie they might not have watched otherwise.
posted by Ranuel | 10:19 AM
2 Comments:
Hi! Empatheia here, I somehow just noticed that you thirded me over at Inuyasha Fanguild. Thank you very much! I really appreciate it. ^_^
Do you also write fanfiction?
Love,
Empatheia
You are welcome! And thank you for checking out my blog.
I'm really enjoying your take on Izayoi and Inupapa. For her I like that despite everything she's still a fighter. For him I really like the reasons given when he finally decides to pursue her.
I don't remember if I left a review or not but if I haven't I'll try to get to it. I was trying to read as much as possible before thirding was over so I let my manners lapse a bit.
I haven't written any completed fanfic outside my head. Yet. I keep TELLING the blasted plot bunnies that I really, really need to get the module written for our next RPG session and I especially need to work on the next chapter of the book I'm working on but eventually one of them will get me in a weak moment. It's mostly a time and energy thing not anything against writing fanfic.
On the other hand I read a LOT of fanfic. Probably more fanfic than professional fiction at this point. It's got two great advantages in that it's free and I can easily search for stories about specific things I'd like to read about instead of hoping that the art on the cover of a paperback has anything at all to do with what's inside. I can even read it on the go by downloading stuff to my PDA.
I've written a few short stories and poems and gotten a poem and a book review published but for most of my life I've been too obsessed about how perfect it had to be that I've abandoned stories before they were at a point that I would be willing to show them to anyone.
I'm working on that with the help of my friends at WASIF and this blog. You'd be more than welcome to stop by, the link is down on the left somewhere.
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