sometimes you just know it's going to be long and rambly

What does WIP Closet Day/Amnesty Day mean, exactly? Declaring a commenting amnesty in an APA, say, means renouncing any obligation to try to catch up on comment backlog and starting afresh. Is WIP Amnesty Day a chance to show off all the bits of things you've declared dead? Or is it, like, an amnesty on your neglect of them, such that it's no longer the case that they've been abandoned for ages?

And how do people decide when to pronounce WIP death? Do you need a concurring opinion? What if it's not quite dead? What if it's getting better? How bad does something have to be before you'd abandon it, or is it just a matter of whether you care about it anymore?

(And sometimes you're wrong, because LJ claims you have bad unicode or something in your post. Um, no?)

long and rambly part the second

Teresa Nielsen Hayden (an editor at Tor) wrote a blog essay about slush and rejection letters, including a list of reasons manuscripts get rejected, from most to least obvious: {{which I don't seem to be able to post because of "bad unicode inputs" or something, although god only knows how something copied into and out of a plain text file could have bad unicode in it}}

In the ensuing discussion, someone inevitably made a slushpile - fanfic archive analogy. (I suppose in fanfic the equivalent of "buying the book" is recommending the story? Or maybe 11-14 just don't apply in fanfic and 11a is just "good story").

And you have to ask yourself - at least I had to ask myself - just where does my fic fall? The reassuring bulk of 1-6 insulates me nicely from the bottom. I'd like to think my 7s never make it as far as getting finished. The 8s... I suppose one would have to file porn written to one's own taste there, the beauty of fandom being that with enough writers, someone else might share it, and one man's 8 is another man's good PWP ::grin::. (Forestalls argument: yesI'veactuallyreadsomereallyamazingwritinginPWPs anddon'tthinkeroticwritingis inherentlylowerqualityoranythinglikethat.Give me some credit, people.)The 9s... I've written that story. The 10s... hey, I'm probably *proud* of writing that story.

I feel less sure I know what differentiates the 11s and 12s and 13s. Arcane editorial matters such as what there's a market for, maybe. Market is interesting. Between the fic I've written For people, and the stuff I've written just for myself, well, okay, I don't really have the data to make a proper comparison. But I think I've gotten more reader response from stories that were written for someone, such that I suspect when I write with the intent to please one particular person it has the effect of making the story more generally pleasing to people in general. Some combination of the inclusion of Crowd-Pleasing Elements (such as being less weird and depressing - is it any coincidence that my possible favorite of all of my nsync stories is the one where none of them get taken in the Rapture and Lance and Chris are going to Hell and nobody else ever has ever liked this story) and a higher standard of clarity and such.

So there's a question - how do I decide if I want to try to write a given story with the reader in mind (by having a particular reader in mind) or if I just want to write it for myself? If I'm gonna care about it at a 9, how many of those stories, and which ones, have the potential to get pushed on into the 11s and 12s? I'm sure the real writers try to make all their stories Good for reasons of writerly ambition and drive which I, realistically, lack. I'm not trying to sell this stuff. Just entertain myself and occasionally others.

(And then there's glorious 14itude. I don't delude myself that I could sell fiction in the actual publishing world, but I've had a couple things recommended or archived or given feedback that made me go eeeeee, dude! So, you know, that is pretty 14y in my book.)

(no subject)

More Teresa Nielsen Hayden quote that probably won't paste but is a brilliant and fascinating observation:

It's a funny thing. People who can't do advanced math, or play classical piano concertos, or pitch a no-hitter in the major leagues, generally know they can't do it. People who don't have an intimate relationship with language are far less aware of their condition, and for them the written world can be a very frustrating place. Near as we can make out, they literally can't tell that their rejected writing isn't like the writing that does get published.

Those of you who've hung out in Usenet newsgroups for any length of time will have seen the phenomenon of a tone-deaf poster exploding in fury and frustration because all he can tell is that he's somehow being left out of some part of the conversation, and that for no reason that he can see, his posts don't get the same reactions that other people's do.

I wonder if the "literally can't tell" thing has something to do with reading being such a mental experience (okay, yes, that did say "such an interior experience" until I went back and changed it, I still have *some* shame), that people can confuse the stream of consciousness they had while reading a book with what the book actually was, and so a stream of consciousness looks like "a book".

I feel like this must happen all over in fandom, people wondering why their stories get the reactions they get, and don't get the reactions they don't get. I wonder how deliberately some of the "big" stories go about being "big" stories - like whether authors consider the optimum length of time between posting chapters (not too fast, because you want to let anticipation build, but not too slow, or people will fear that you're not still working on it, and you won't acquire as many new readers). How actively they think about fandom presence as a publicity campaign. (Which, disclaim disclaim, I have absolutely no problem with - I'm their fan, after all ::grin::.)