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.

No, but there are a lot that use bold face, italics, or perhaps a
different font.  Things that we can't do in the preferred medium 
(ASCII).

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    Josh Green, aka Pi -- SORT@BUCKET.UALR.EDU
       http://bucket.ualr.edu/~sort/fanfic/
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