Summer Reading

Ah, the glorious month of June. Home to the beginning of summer, the anniversary of D-Day, the Glorious First of June and at my local library the beginning of Summer Reading Programs. This year's theme, rather lamely, is BANK ON YOUR LIBRARY, just to hammer home to the rest of the community who hasn't heard about their budget troubles. I think it needs to be given a rest, but hey, I go to the library at least once a week, so maybe it just seems like overkill to me.

Anyway, I've made several goals for this summer -- one of them is to finish summer reading, another is to learn how to roll sushi, and the third is to read the last three Stephanie Meyer books. So, yesterday, with great trepidation, I spent a good five minutes in front of the bookshelf at the library contemplating why it was again I wanted to bring these books home. My sister walks up, looks from me to the bookshelf and back again, and says "No. Don't do it."

Not even kidding. That's my sister -- always looking out for me and my continued mental stability. I respond "Well, I know they're terrible...but if I read it then I'll have something to write a blog post about!"

I could just feel the awful leaking out of the book as I went to go check it out.  I'd make a big deal of blogging how bad it is, but someone else is doing that -- if you haven't already heard about it, go check out Alex Reads Twilight, an absolutely hilarious series of YouTube videos done by Alex Day where he reads Twilight and makes fun of how bad it is. (The rate of posts on this subject on his YouTube Channel is a testament to just how difficult Twilight is to get through when you don't want to read it.)

Maybe the little sister and I will watch the Twilight movies and make fun of them while we're at it. Dunno if that will happen, though... To give you some idea of the movies we enjoy, right now we're in the middle of a cracking PBS series called Colonial House. It's reality TV as only PBS and your history teacher can provide, and it's wonderful!

New Moon is sitting next to me as I write this blog post, so obviously it did make it home, but I realized something about reading and books when I put my library books away.

If you need to rationalize why you're getting the book, chances are it's not a good choice for you at the moment.

Check Your Flamethrowers at the Door -- a few thoughts on Flaming.

I know I've been talking a lot about the Percy Jackson people on this blog lately, but it's really interesting watching this community work and evolve. It's like I'm turning into the Jane Goodall of fanfiction. It's kind of scary and kind of cool at the same time.

And lately, I've been thinking a lot about flames.

I've been seeing this kind of notice in story summaries for years, but I haven't started thinking about it until now -- it's the kind of hopeless, feeble attempt at saving face you could only find on the internet. "Plz don't flame! first fic!!!!!" the newbie writers cry plaintively from their summary boxes.

First of all, if you think your story is worth flaming, chances are you might be right, which means that you ought to go back and change it, get a second opinion from someone you trust and whose writing you admire...something else besides putting a note in your summary that might only attract more flamers.

I understand why people put the notes there. They're scared. They're venturing out onto the ice for the first time and they don't want to end up at the bottom of the lake with ten-thousand pounds of icy pressure drowning them in the sentiment that their writing sucks. And after a lot of further thought about this, I realized that not only does flaming hurt the recipient, but in the long run hurts the writer of the flame and the community as well.

A lot of you may be sitting in your desks going "Really now? Flaming doesn't hurt the flamers." But it does. Allow me to explain.

The reasons behind how flaming hurts the recipients is easy enough to understand. It's almost a form of cyberbullying, a senseless barrage into why the story is terrible and, in tandem, why the authors as people are terrible as well. Without face-to-face interaction, critiques against the material become critiques of the author themselves. (And often, flames bite into an author's personal character, asking why they'd be such a terrible person to put this up in the first place.) Flames also hurt recipients because they do nothing to solve the problems that started the flame. If flamers are truly anti-bad writing, they should begin by telling people (personally, not just in a blanket statement on their profile page) what it is they need to fix.

Now, on to the tough sell -- how flaming hurts the flamers.

The best writers (as Nancy Atwell, writer-workshop teacher extraordinaire, tells us in "Writing from the Inside Out") are the self-reflective ones, the ones who in addition to reading extensively THINK about what they're reading, why they like it, and what they can incorporate from that writing style to better their own work. I experienced this firsthand last semester when my Writing Essays professor asked us to read several essays by Annie Dillard (AMAZING!) and incorporate something from her writing that we admired (her sentence structure, her format, etc) into our next essay.  Flaming as a practice does nothing to encourage this reflection -- because flamers don't stop to identify problems as well as possible solutions, their own writing doesn't benefit from the give-and-take process of attempting to mentor another writer.

When you attempt to explain what you would do differently, you're mentally problem-solving for something that you yourself might have to do in the future.  When writers begin to work collaboratively and mentor each other's work, they gain an increased understanding of what they themselves need to change in order to become better at what they do. I know I've become very mindful of the critiques I give others and make sure that I'm following my own advice when I post my own stories.

Flaming is also hurtful to the flamers for another reason -- by starting blogs like Flamespots, (a collection of the worst PJO fanfics on the web) writers are drawing attention to the terrible examples of writing, which beginning writers see ALL THE TIME.  Instead, attention should be given to the exemplary pieces  in the collection, which serve as models for newer writers to emulate (like Annie Dillard in the example above.)

Now, I know what the hard-core flamers are thinking -- We haven't got time for all this hold-your-hand-and-talk-you-through-it nonsense! The world's a tough place. Deal with it. And I realize that in some cases, this very well might be true and there may not be much time for mentoring. If that's the case, then go with my mom's Golden Rule --

IF YOU CAN'T FIND ANYTHING NICE TO SAY, DON'T SAY ANYTHING AT ALL. 

This works in fanfiction almost as well as it works in life. A lack of reviews says volumes to a new writer. It says "No one likes this enough to take the time to tell me; I need to change something." Just like attention-seeking children, sometimes giving them the cold shoulder is the best thing to change behavior.

In addition to all of this, flaming is hurtful because it doesn't foster a sense of community or networking, only fear.  (And as we all know, fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to suffering and suffering  leads to the Dark Side.) Who's going to want to begin writing if they know their first efforts are going to be knocked over like so many passers-by in a police chase? Heck, even I was scared to post my first PJO fic, and I'm a senior in college! People respond much better to the sentiments of a helping hand up --  "Well, I didn't loooove  it, but if you changed this it could be really good -- keep working at it!" than a stomp in the face suggested by "You have got to be kidding. Seriously? Is your conscience clean after you posted this piece of sh*t? It can't be. It just can't." How can you expect the quality of writing to improve if you don't offer any suggestions on where to start?

Flamers only network with other flamers. Constructive Critics network with new writers and become mentors, sounding boards, and beta readers.  Mentoring means that you hold yourself to a higher standard because you know someone's looking up to you for advice and direction. (This is also great practice if you want to teach English and/or writing some day like I'm doing this summer, but that's a small side-note.)

Constructive Critics also get emails like this in thier inboxes (received after five lengthy and at points kind of harsh reviews were sent to the same author) "Thanks for your in-depth reviews. Nobody apart from my beta has given me such CC before. I really feel as though I can improve this story with your help!"


That's much better than a flamewar, methinks.

All Systems Go!

An update on my summer plans. I've been officially rostered on to the schedule of events for Teens at the Glen Ellyn Public Library  -- my writing workshop has been given the green light and I'm going to be teaching a (hopefully largish) group of teens how to improve their writing the last week in June and the first three weeks of July!

I don't have words for how excited I am!


I've also got some of my freinds lined up to make some short YouTube videos on what they're now doing as writers in College. I've got a comm major who's also in my book arts class now and one of my other English major friends who is involved in our poetry club and our school newspaper! (By the way, if you're an English major friend of mine and you're reading this, email me to talk about doing one of these videos, too!)

We're winding down to our last week of the semester here at CSB; several of my friends have just returned from London where they were studying abroad. It's hard to believe I've been home from Ireland for a whole semester now -- one of my freinds brought back a a whole lot of Digestives, which I practically lived on last semester, and they really brought me back.

Today I learned two new book bindings, one of which I'm going to be using for my final book project, which is going to be printed saturday and bound sunday. Tomorrow I'm turning in a semester's worth of writing prompts and four finished essays for my Writing Essays class. Sometime between now and next Wednesday I'm writing five lesson plans for a unit I just finished timelining this morning. I had no idea how good it feels to have at least a vague idea of how you're going to fill two and a half weeks of classes. And I have a really awesome final project planned!

There hasn't been a lot of time for free writing during all of this -- I posted my one and only Percy Jackson fic to great acclaim last week and I think it's been nominated for an award. I really hope it wins -- I've never been nominated for an online award before. Work is still progressing bit by bit on my Life of Godfrey piece, and I'm hoping I have some time in the carride on the way home to brainstorm a little bit.

Not Without Ambition -- Summer Plans take shape

It has been a very productive last two weeks. Since my last blog post, I've curated a book (put all the pages together in the right order, bound and covered the whole thing) typed my last essay for my Writing Essays course, have almost finished my portfolio for Writing Essays, sent a belated birthday package half-way around the world, and helped work a triathalon. I've sent in  all my paperwork for one summer job (camp counselor's assist at my local Park District) sent an email asking for another job (summer term rush at the bookstore) and am now planning another caper.

I'm going to try and host a writing workshop this summer.
 

Yeah, I know, ambitious. I haven't really got any credentials to be doing this kind of thing, but I figure three years as a literature/education student and seven years as a participant in online communities should be to my advantage. Where did I get this crazy idea? Well, the dinner we hold for the English majors every year brings one of our alumni back as a guest speaker, and this year's was a woman who since graduation from Saint Ben's has worked on a children's lit mag, New Moon Girls, become a freelance copy editor and is now working as a young adult librarian.

Basically, she's where I want to be in ten years.

So after this, as well as the extended study of the Percy Jackson fanfiction, I thought it would be really cool to get together a group of beginning fanfic writers and talk to them, face to face, about how to create better stories online. Online critique is some of the worst to write and to read, and most of the time it's the hardest to get anything helpful out of, too. Beginning writers are either good from the get-go or really downhearted that the only thing people are saying about their stories is "This sucks; go do something else for a hobby, you loony." It doesn't have to start like that, but the advice given to these beginning writers is all the same, and it doesn't mean a terrible lot unless someone in real life affirms that yes, this would make the story easier to read or more interesting or what have you.

And I'd like that affirming person to be me. Now I realize I can't get a group of fanfictioneers exclusively, so I've expanded my criteria to beginning writers (6th through 12th graders) of varying ages to impart some lessons I've learned over the years. I began drafting a one day workshop.

After talking to several people (two professors included) it's morphed into a four session seminar. Here are the basic topics we'll be covering at each meeting.


Week One -- I'm a Writer: Who are You?( And what are you writing about my story?) -- introductions, goals,  and how to leave good reviews
Week Two -- Before the Pen Hits the Page: Prewriting your Way to Good Product -- timelining, research, narrative decision-making
Week Three -- Creatures of Habit: Developing a Writing Process and a Revision Process
Week Four -- So, What Happens Now?  On getting published, online communities to join before that happens,  and how to get more help doing what you love

Thoughts, suggestions... strong hints I go get a new hobby? I'm open to anything.

Before The Pen Hits The Page -- Pre-Writing Your Way to Good Product

Yesterday in Pedagogy we began our unit on Writing Instruction, a process that my whole class (all eleven of us) has agreed is nuanced and complicated and definitely intertwined with reading. If you want good writers, it's been decided, you have to make them good readers first, and if you want them to be better readers, you have to get them to reflect on their reading activities by writing. Creating this kind of classroom, with the constant stimulus of new reading material and the constant expectation to have to think about it later, allows for the most development of a student's personal voice and taste when it comes to their own books, which will hopefully encourage them to read more later.

I've been reading voraciously for years. That is why I know what I enjoy reading and what I don't enjoy reading. I have a hard time explaining to people that I put the book down because I don't like the way the author structures sentences. Some people get it; some people don't. It's also why after three years, my mom can read this blog at home and hear my voice coming out of the computer. Constant practice is making it easier to put my narrative voice into type.

The first step of the writing process in the classroom should begin with Pre-Writing, a brainstorming process where the student puts down a lot of thoughts on paper first and then goes back to organize and further distill those thoughts. One process is webbing, where a central idea (the big question of the paper) is placed in the middle and offshoot thoughts are added to form a thought web. Another is questioning, a method where a question is asked by the teacher, the paragraph answer is written down and then four or more questions are asked to further shape your answers and finely tune your paragraph. This second method is a freewrite, where your brainstorm takes place in complete sentences and may form part of your finished work.

And while we were learning all of this, I began thinking about prewriting in fanfiction. The PJO people (I love them dearly, but they are really quite young) are showing more and more stories about "How to Write A Better Fanfic" and it saddens me that pre-writing never seems to show up on their lists.

So I've created some interrogative prewriting questions for fanfic. When I defined Fanfiction for my Linguistics paper (boy, was that a while ago...) I decided this brand of writing comes down to this:

Fanfiction. N., fan(atic), one who admires or follows + fiction, a work of writing not based in fact. A story written by a fan of a particular existing work in which the writer re-examines the work and attempts to answer a question the work has raised. Also the entire body of said works. May also be clipped to 'fanfic.'

Questions in fanfic are things like "What event or series of events was Jack Sparrow talking about when he said 'Clearly, you've never been to Singapore'?" or "What happens to Elizabeth and Darcy AFTER the happily ever after?"  The first prewriting question an author should ask themselves is


1. What question in the Narrative am I trying to answer?

I just started a fanfic recently to answer a question I have about the character Godfrey in Kingdom of Heaven -- "What was Godfrey like before he came to the Holy Land?" We'll use that for example purposes here.

The second question is harder for younger writers because we don't teach them to look at both sides of an argument.

2. What possible answers can I find in the Narrative already? Am I creating this story because I don't like those answers?

This question is especially important because we need to see what preconceptions people already bring to our fanfic when they read it. If the book says that Percy and Annabeth end up together, it's going to be harder for you to make the case that Percy should really be with Rachel. You can do it, and you should do it, because fanfiction is meant to be subversive, but know that you're going to be talking to a tough crowd if you do. Come to the fight armed.

If the answer to the second part of that question is "Yes, of course!" you're going to have to work harder to answer some of these other questions. For the Godfrey question, I have to look at what other characters say about him; Tiberias and Baldwin IV both describe him as a friend, Baldwin recounts the episode where Godfrey determines he has leprosy, his brother in the extended edition talks about how his brother took the Cross. In this case, I don't need to answer the second part because I like the answers and I want to reveal more of them. The second part becomes important when creating stories around the premise of an alternate romance than the one the Narrative offers.

3. What answer did I want to find when I was reading?

I'd call this question the 'I could have been chasing ghosts' evaluation. Regardless of what it is we read, we bring to that text a list of assumptions and world views that shape what we read and what we pass over in a text. I'm going to use religion for this question because it's a bigger example (and I can make a pun!) I read the Gospel accounts of the Last Supper and relate it to the Eucharist because I'm Catholic and that's what my theology teaches me. Judaic scholars read the same accounts and recognize that Jesus celebrates the Passover wrong because it's their tradition and they're trained to notice that. Catholics pass over the Passover part, and Jews pass over the 'Jesus is trying to be divine here' part of the story.  (Passover, pass over...see, there's my pun. I didn't say it was going to be good.)

If we read to look for evidence, we often skip the parts that could form a counterargument. This is bad, because in those counterarguments we could find (or create, as in Question 5) more evidence towards our goal.


4. What answer do I want to create?
Hopefully you already answered this question when you created what question it was you were trying to answer, but if not, now's the time to do so. Recognizing here that you're going against the Narrative is important -- if you are, it means you have to work harder than those canonically leaning fanfic folks to sell your case.

5. What, if anything, can I use from the Narrative to create my case?
Return to the evidence you collected or recalled in question 2 and see if there's anything there you can use. With Godfrey, I realized I could include his brother, his friendship with Tiberias and Baldwin, and his 28 year stint in the Holy Land as building blocks in my narrative. His brother's the reason he leaves in the first place, one of the first people he meets is a sixteen year old Raymond of Tiberias, and the story takes place over a good 28 year chunk of time. I'm also using the image of his house at Ibelin and Godfrey's flashbacks from the beginning of the movie.

6. What additions to the world of the narrative will I have to create in order for this story to work? How or where can I find help creating them?

Since very little is said about Godfrey in KoH, I needed to create his parents, where he was from in France, his hobbies, and perhaps most importantly, his history in love. To do this, since I had little Narrative scaffolding to work on, I turned to my Medieval Life sources about life in Frankish towns and cities during the 1150s, SCA name lists and chivalric code books.

In my Rose ReWrite, I needed to create the domestic sphere within Gondor -- what the women do when they're not looking pretty in the narrative. For help on this, I returned to Tolkien and looked at points in the narrative where women are involved in Rohan and in Gondor as well as researching what life was like in medieval cities and castles. Armed with these facts, I'm working on the less war-like side of life in Gondor during the War of the Ring.


When I was discussing the  'cyberbullying incident' of several weeks ago with my Pedagogy teacher, she seemed to think researching the links between home literacy and school literacy and the links that exist (or don't exist) between the would make a great senior thesis. Why do fanfiction writers shy away from teaching influences online? Why aren't they using tools they learned in school and applying them to their productions outside of school? Do we need to give them more tools they can use outside of the classroom? Is there a way to bring products like fanfiction into the classroom for instructional use?

It would be a fascinating study, I think.

One Big Fishbowl

When teachers need some kind of observable assessment process to see if their students are learning (or have learned) something, we are told we can facilitate the type of discussion known as The Fishbowl, a technique where a small group sits in the midst of a larger group and are told to hold thier own discussion sans teacher guidance or outside class imput. The first two minutes of such a technique are agony for the students who haven't done their homework, as everyone is now watching them fail, which in my mind makes this a very strong motivator.

I've come to realize that my subscription to the "New Stories" thread in the Percy Jackson fandom on ff.net is exactly like me being on the outside of the fishbowl circle looking in.

This story is the third or fourth that I've come across there and it's fascinating to read. I say it's interesting because it's not a story at all, which means that as a violation of site rules that link will probably be broken soon. Rather, it's an open letter to members of the community who are behaving in an anti-community building way (flamers, writers of less than quality fanfic.)

After I discussed the question posed in my last post with a friend of mine, also an education student interested in young adult literature-- (I'm wondering if this narrow-mindness with the Canon is due to the relative youth of the fandom itself or the relative youth of the fans themselves) -- we decided that the PJO participants' adherance to Canon comes from a lack of confidence in thier own creative abilities due to their relative newness to the process of writing fanfiction and participating in the fanfiction community. Harry Potter, being a fandom that recieved a lot of traffic both from younger readers as well as older ones who had grown up with the series (like myself,) produces a different milieu of fanfiction because of the wide spectrum of ages and the length of time the participents have had to grow into the fandom and the writing process.

When in the case of PJO you have such a concentrated body (over 4000 fics) of young, inexperienced writers, it makes sense that from that group there will emerge several slightly more experienced writers who serve as flamers, reviewers who never have anything nice to say but always refrain from saying nothing. I think this happens when a fandom experiences a large growth spurt -- the 'old growth' writers in fandoms like LOTR (which got new life after the movies came out) become resentful of both the movies and the writers inspired by them who don't love the same fandom for the same reasons and so turn to flaming.

The most common response to flamers by young authors like this is to post passionate pleas asking them to stop or refrain from commenting in the first place. It's an ineffective tactic at best -- flamers pick the worst of the worst fanfics, usually the writers who are just starting out, and bully thier  tenuous hold on their new craft into a complete lack of confidence. Asking them to stop won't do anything. (I got lucky in my beginning years as a writer -- I was adopted by a wonderful group of older writers who gave me confidence when I did get hurtful reviews, and...well, I never got many very hurtful reviews.)

This writer, however, takes a remarkably adept approach. In the first part of her essay (that's what we'll call it; diatribe's too strong a word) she speaks to people who flame, but in the second part, she addresses the authors themselves, saying this is a two way street and if they are getting flamed, they have only themselves to blame. I don't know of any beginning writers who have taken that approach before, and I must commend this young person on being so open to the idea that the problem of flames is two sided -- I created something you didn't like, but you didn't give me the help I wanted to make it better. She (or he) offers little in the way of specific improvement strategies, which in this fandom can usually start with "Find someone to teach you how to punctuate your sentences, and learn what a run-on sentence is and how not to write one." Nevertheless, a good effort.

Her/His style is very elementary, jumping from viewpoint to viewpoint with a lot of hopeless-to-follow mess in between coherant points (a style I believe might come from watching cartoons; it bears some resemblence) but her/his intent is admirable. A little beta polishing and a better place to post this would do wonders.

At the very least, it's teaching this writer-teacher once more that observing what your students produce outside of class may be the very best way to direct your instruction inside of class.

Grammar, here we come.

Welcome to the Time Capsule: Spring Cleaning and a Trip Down Amnesia Lane.

"Thank you, gentlemen, for that trip down Amnesia Lane. Burn that." -- John Keating, Dead Poet's Society, after looking at his senior year Welton Academy yearbook.

Learning to live in a 12 by 15 foot space for six months of the year on a carload of clothes, a 2 foot tall fridge, and standard set furniture teaches a person a lot of things. It teaches you to set schedules because your mother is not there to do it for you. It teaches you to clean up after yourself, because there is no cleaner place for you to run to. It teaches you to put things away, becuase otherwise you will rapidly run out of functioning space. It also teaches you that there are many things in your room at home that you do perfectly fine without when you're up at school in your dorm.

This valuable piece of information was why the first thing I did on Saturday morning when I got home after an 8 hour drive was clean my room. It wasn't really a clean -- I didn't sweep and I didn't vacuum -- it was more of a purge. I went through every ounce of paper I had and recycled two large paper bags full of back issues of Merc's Life and National Geographic. And a lot of that paper brought me back a few years, to when I first started writing. I had old drafts, slips of paper I had written down ideas on that never got used, notebooks filled with now-useless conversations between characters I grudgingly remembered I had written.

And to put this quite bluntly, it was scary. I thought I was hot stuff back then, writing the next Hugo Award-winner or something. (For those of you that don't know, the Hugo Award is given for the best of the best in the Science-Fiction genre) And the writing! Man, the writing was just bad. And I'm trying to decide what I've learned from this.

A few of my friends have started rewrites of stories they started five, six years ago, stories that made them famous. (Really, I do mean famous. These were like 'toast of the Internet' stories. I have never written one of those.) It makes me jealous because, as I just mentioned, I have never written a toast of the internet story. But it also makes me wonder, because I don't have enough pride in anything I wrote five years ago to attempt a re-write. Meaning and Mystery of the Rose? I wrote that because I was a raving Sean Bean fangirl. Now my fangirly heart is bestowed on about five other actors. That was my magnum opus back then, and now I look at it and chuckle fondly. People thought it was so good! I thought it was so good!

People also thought I was in college then, because that's what I told them, and they believed me, so I'm not so sure now how much we should trust 'people.'

I'm reading a story written by a girl my age on ff.net now, and let me be the first to tell you, it's not the greatest. I'm the only one who's reviewing it, which should give you an indication of how bad it is, because I feel bad and it's in my token category right now. And I'm having a hard time finding the right words to tell this author that everyone has to start at the bottom and work up. Sure, you may have been writing stories that only you can read for years and years, but it's the critique from having them out on a public forum, whether that's in a classroom or online, that makes you grow as a writer and recognize your mistakes. I'm a grammar Nazi now because online writers HATE people who can't spell correctly or be bothered to proof their text before posting it. I'm a better writer now because people shot me down a lot when I was younger. They boosted me up a lot, too, but they shot me down more.

So I guess the point I'm making is this -- Tari.Tinuviel, AurelliaFramboise, and anyone else on ff.net that I may or may not have written less than complimentary reviews for, I'm not doing it out of spite. I'm doing it because that's what I wanted when I started writing. I wanted someone to tell me what went wrong and try and help me fix it. Please accept my apologies for any down days I may have caused and let me be that person for you.

Crisis

In the past four hours, I've left three reviews on two stories on ff.net. None of these reviews were particularly complimentary -- in fact, all of them had several items the author needed to fix. And now, after having left these three reviews, I'm feeling a little...full of myself. Haughty. Mean. Egotistical. What gives me the right to tell someone "I don't think the way you're writing a story is the right way?" What gives me the right to say "You're making a lot of the same mistakes many beginning writers do" to a girl from Jordan who's been on the site for all of a month and probably doesn't speak English as her first language? What authority do I have that could possibly allow either of these girls to take my criticism seriously?

I liked the first story. Really, I did. It was a fairly well constructed and clearly well planned Horatio Hornblower fanfic. Finding one of those (especially after the A&E miniseries came out) was impossible -- book canon went out the window. Mary-Sues were rampant. This story had all the promise of not being a Mary-Sue, or at least of keeping the Mary-Sue as a supporting character, a stock image for the background to annoy Hornblower and keep a female presence in the room. She even acknowledged that she had read the books, which I gave her due credit for. But I spent a whole paragraph in my reivew explaining the vagaries of the Duke of Wellington's title to her and why "Wellington" is not a name we can apply to Barbara Wellesley, the Iron Duke's fictional sister and Horatio's wife. What gives me the right?

The second story was the one written by the girl from Jordan. I wanted to read it because her author's note was afraid she wouldn't get any "good reviews" because her main character was a Muslim. I wanted to show her that the religious orientation of her character shouldn't be a grounds for flaming. (And we all know how I feel about multifaith dialogue fics...) I wanted to give her a 'good review'. Sadly, that didn't happen. The story was written in a very elementary style, introducing superfluous details about the character in the first paragraph that could only come from an author trying too hard to make it look like they spent time thinking about who thier main character was. I thought the concept was great, but the execution needs a lot of help. I don't know if I can give that help. I'm not qualified to teach English yet! Heck, I can't even explain my own grammar to other English speakers! What gives me the right to tell this girl "You're making a lot of the mistakes beginning writers make, but it's okay, practice makes perfect!" I'm still learning how to write myself! I'm not perfect. I'm not even particularly good at what I do.

Obviously I haven't reviewed anything (seriously reviewed anything) in a while. And clearly I'm having a little bit of a crisis of authority now.

Taking Writing Seriously

Today I have to give a presentation of my linguistics research on fanfiction, and over the past twenty four hours when I've been composing my little speech I've presented it to several different people (My furniture got bits and pieces of it for several hours last night.) Reactions were varied, mainly because either my audience knew lots about fanfiction or nothing at all. In fact, one of the more knowledgable audiences, Mallory, said something I've never even considered before --

"Wow, you really take your fanfiction seriously, don't you?"

I realized then that writing fanfiction for me was never a question of taking it un-seriously. I've treated my work as worthy of research, worthy of investing in books I may never read and will probably not be able to use outside of my appropriative linguistic endeavors. (How many people do you know get excited over a book with a title like "What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew"? Exactly.)

So I have a bit of advice, not specifically about writing but about whatever your hobbies may be. Take them seriously. Even if you're not very good at them (and heaven knows there are better writers than me in the world) your being committed to your hobby says something about you to other people. Maybe you collect bottle caps or you make cut and paste collages from old calendars, but if you're committed to it, if you treat it seriously, then I think people have a little bit of respect for it.

And if they don't? Personally, I think that means they're jealous.

Keys to Writing Good Historical Fiction

Okay, we've covered how to write a good review. Now we have to get down to the writing task, and I'm going to talk about something that I know a little bit about: Writing good Historical Fiction.

Now obviously the best people who write about historical things are the people who were there. No one, repeat, NO ONE, will write the Regency like Jane Austen and William Makepeace Thackaray did, because -- big surprise here -- they lived it. C.S. Forester and Patrick O'Brien will draw close seconds, but no one can compare to the originals.

But we love writing historical fiction. I love reading it. I'm not just talking about novels, I'm talking about fanfiction, too. Jane Austen fanfics get published all the time. And there are some things to consider when we consider those fanfics and our humble little offerings.

There are two things standing between the Jane Austen section at ff.net and the publishing house at Scholastic.

One is volume of content.

The other is research. Yes, research, ladies and gentlemen, that lovely word that sends college students scurrying to their corners and high school teenagers screaming to their teachers about how hard the class is. Nothing ruins a historical peice faster than to find that someone has not done their research-

I hate to rain on an otherwise very promising and enjoyable passage, but paper bags weren't invented (or in wide use, sources seem to differ) until the early 1850s. Their pastries would have simply been wrapped in paper and then placed in a basket one of the woman probably had brought. Ah, the good old days before the epic paper or plastic bag decision. Anyway, small note, doubt anyone else besides me noticed, still a very cute passage.

Yes, that is an actual review by me, and yes, I did actually go and look up when paper bags were invented because it bugged me. And I'm not the only one. So here are a few things to consider when writing in a historical context.

• MONEY- It will make a big difference to your story whether people are carrying around Bank of England notes or gold bezants. Find out what people were using for money -- a 'gold coin' isn't going to impress your readers as much as florins, guiders, and guineas are. Especially if you can find how they convert to today's money.
  
• MODES OF TRAVEL- Nothing breaks up a good history more than "The hero left town, and using his horse, traveled across all of England to arrive with his battalion the next night on the opposite coast."A horse does not travel that fast. Find out how people are going from point A to point B, and how long it's going to take to get there. Edith Wharton makes a big to-do about the Brown Coupe people take home from the Opera, and John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath wouldn't be the same without the beat-up car they drive around in. Transportation is everything.
• CLOTHES. A skirt is de rigeur attire for women from William of Normandy to the D-Day invasion of Normandy, but skirts have changed a lot in that time frame. Find out what your people are wearing, down to their shoes and underwear! (This just in -- people did not always have Hanes.) This is the fun part, because you, the author, get to look at lots of pictures! You can watch movies, too, but any period film before, say...the advent of Technicolor film is bound to be a little iffy on period accuracy. The more recent (and big budgeted) the film, the more accurate the costumes will PROBABLY be. There are no guarantees. Your best bet is still books. This is also a really good way to immerse yourself in the culture -- how women and men are dressing will tell you a lot about acceptable behavior. For instance, you can't run in a floor length skirt. Believe me on this one -- I've tried.
  
• MUSIC- Find out what the favorite tunes were. The mood alters significantly if you're playing Flo-Rida as opposed to Frederic Chopin. If you can find it, listen to it while your writing. I'm in the middle of a story about the Crusades and I've been listening to Gregorian Chant, Provencal chansons, and the Kingdom of Heaven Soundtrack until my headphones were tired. Music is evocative -- use it and muse it.
• PASTIMES -- People did not always have monopoly for rainy days. When you were bored, you could not always pull up a game of solitaire on your computer. Chess is a good standby, but there are other games. Cards have been popular since the 1400s, but Poker and Go Fish were not always the games of choice. Find out what people did when they weren't talking to each other and moving the plot along. Who knows -- they could do this activity AND move the plot.
  
• RANK AND POSITION WITHIN SOCIETY. Believe it or not, doctors were not always as respected as they are today. In the 1700s, for instance, many 'doctors' (or physicians, as they were then called, were quacks and the real medical know-how came from men called barber surgeons. Find out who's who, and why.
• FORMS OF SPEECH AND DEPORTMENT. Somehow I can't see Mr. Darcy greeting Charles Bingley in a ballroom with a hearty "Yo, Whaddup, dawg?" and pounding it like some young men would do today. It's just not done, to use the Wharton phrase. People today do not talk the way people did hundreds of years ago -- you need to remember this and implement it. If you use a phrase with your friends, chances are you DON'T want to use it with your characters. If you have trouble with this, go to the original source. Maybe you don't know how people talked during the Civil War, but I'm certain Mr. Mark Twain does.
• POLITICAL STRUCTURES. It makes a big difference in a story if there's a monarchy or a democracy or a communist Soviet in place. Find out who was ruling who (and how they were doing at it) before you begin writing.
  
• CURRENT EVENTS. Nothing warms my heart more than to see small and often stupid references to things that would have been going on in the world at the time. If you're character is in a bar during the 1910s, how's the war going? (Props if you asked yourself which one.) Have we whooped the Kaiser yet? How are the Bolshies doing? Have those darned Irish stopped making a fuss about independence already? (Those were the three conflicts I can think of from 1910-1920, anyway.) If it's set in the 1830s, are your characters discussing how wrong they think it is that a woman (Victoria) is in line for the throne and will probably get it? Things like this really set the scene for the rest of what's happening, and they set the tone of your characters actions.

Finally, and very importantly, that Elephant in the Room,

• GENDER ROLES. We live in a very different world from the heroines of Charlotte Bronte, Edith Wharton, even Sylvia Plath, and unfortunately, women have not always been able to run around in combat zones (they're still not really, actually) and run businesses and represent people in Congress. Additionally, men were once upon a time very concerned with how they dressed and being 'fashionable' and caring about exactly how you looked was not always considered 'gay' as it sometimes seems to be labeled nowadays. Find out how people were expected to behave. Were women allowed to read at this point in history? Were men allowed to date a girl without asking her dad first?
  

Hopefully this list has given you some ideas to think about, perhaps not for a first copy of a story, but maybe for a revision or editing of a previously published work. This is what separates the published authors from the unpublished ones. It's called Research, and it is hard work.