On 1/5/99 at 12:07 PM, Rob Barba <ashita@rocketmail.com> wrote:

Time to throw my hat into the ring....

And the follow-up to this, and a personal annoyance of mine, is the
other numerous 'fanfic-conventions' that you never find in normal
fiction.  Flashback indicators aside, there's the large number of
dialogue/thought indicators: asteriks, tildas, etc... Personally, I
can't think of a single novel I've read that does so.

That's because most books use an italics format, which is not capable
of translation intot he text format.

Although you should note that a number of readers and writers regard
italics as crutches; I've seen it pointed out as a beginner's writing
mistake on more than one writing discussion group.

There are other little nitpicks: things like situating the story,
giving pages of force-fed introductory details, for instance.  Is
it really necessary to say: this story takes place after v.32, but
before v.34, though the Googlesmash hyper-blast mongotechnique
hasn't been learnt yet?  If the reader is familiar with the series
(and that, as far as I can tell, is the greatest inherent benefit
of fanfiction) then he/she will figure it out pretty quickly.  If
one sees Ranma walking into the schoolyard as Akane beats up hordes
of guys, we'll probably assume it's day one; if he launches a Hiryu
Shotenha, we know its later; if  there's a mention of Saffron, we
know it's after v.38.

Again, something I agree on.  The reader should already be aware to a
degree of the timelines of the fiction, and where it stands with the
canon timeline.  This is, again, another failure to effectively
describe, this time temporal details that serve to give the sense of
place within the series.  

One caveat here: Remember that many manga series have *not* been fully
translated yet. I think it's reasonable for authors writing 'fics set in
currently untranslated chapters to include at least some simple context on
the situation, for those of us who are limited to the Viz/Dark Horse/etc.
US domestic releases.

Of course, the "v.38 et al" references are just as bad from this
perspective -- while I'd say a fair number of 'domestic readers' know
something about the untranslated work, to the extent of knowing that v.38
was the last volume of the Ranma manga (and perhaps having a reasonable
idea what the story's about), bare references like this are just about as
useless to 'domestic readers' as no reference at all.