On Tue, 5 Jan 1999, Nightman wrote:

Actually, I was pondering this situation lately--I remember some
disagreement about the convention in some recent c&c. In some formal
prose, conscious thoughts are treated as quoted dialog and in others the
words are italicized, usually without quotes (sometimes both). Since you
can't underline text, the closest approximation is to _underscore the
words_ to mark the beginning and end of an underlined/italicized
passage; sometimes *asterisks* mark the emphasis but that's
trickier--some people read that as to denote boldfaced type. In the
works of Mercedes Lacky, where there is a great deal of telepathic
conversation, such passages are enclosed with colons and italicized.
Personally I think it looks ugly but it works in print.

So to summarize, actually it's not a fanfic convention, but an
adaptation of a valid literary technique which is widely, but not
exclusively, used.

	Yup.  Me wrong.  Though telepathic conversation is one of the few
things I'd concede that for.  Although I remember a sci-fi novel by Jack
Chalker that had lots of telepathy, and he got by just with using italics.
	I don't know.  If you end up assigning too many text indicators
unecessarily, than you lose a lot of the tools necessary to deftly and
subtly manipulate the language.  Irony, anger, sarcasm, specific emotions
that are expressed better through carefully use of punctuation and text,
than by clumsy narrative (ie. saying, "Yeah, right, you are better than
me," he said sarcastically.)
 

One thing that I do that seems very fanfic-y may annoy you: I use scene
headers where appropriate, and I use them to show flashbacks by
including the date/time. You know, as you often see in the opening parts
of tense action movies: "An abandoned airforce base at Krovjeck,
Bylorussia, five years ago." I do this because I have multiple threads
and I jump around between them a lot. If I stopped to redescribe the
scene every time, it'd get boring, and if my story were being *watched*
it'd be immediately obvious that the scene shift had occurred. My
current story in progress has a header on *every scene* and my
pre-readers told me that it 1) made it seem like a tv episode 2) read
fast and 3) didn't annoy them at all.

	Doesn't annoy me at all.  Plenty of novelists use it, and its a
normal tool, I think, in stories that are very plot-and-action-oriented.
Crighton does it -- a number of perfectly fine authors do.  In a story
that jumps around a lot (physical and/or temporal location), it grounds
the plot quickly, att he beginning of each chapter.

	What doesn't work (slightly different topic) which I've seen in
some fics, and even in some published works (just another indication, in
my opinion, that you really don't have to be all that good at writing to
get published), is the long prologue that situates you with a deluge of
chronological details.  You know, the kind that goes:
	The year is 2154.  The Omnicron Megacorp, emerging victorious from
the show-wars of 2003, rules supreme in this modern landscape of
horizon-to-horizon strip malls.  The Nike-Addidas merger ensured their
victory; and in the aftermath of the bloody conflict, in the
foam-and-latex strewn political arena that followed, none dared oppose
them.  Thus they passed the basketball legislation on an unsuspecting
public, making the sport a global activity and required playing.  An
unfortunate side affect was the 2150 corrolorary that enforced the killing
of anyone under six feet tall.  Since very few babies indeed were born at
the height, the world population dwindled.  A few scattered rebels,
calling themselves 'Shorties' and wearing shoes of a
name-which-can-not-be-mentioned, fight against impossible odds to restore
sanity to a world gone mad.
	And so on, and so on...

	Right, goofiness aside (I got a bit distracted), stuff like this
get put out, and, for me, few things (not even SI) ensure an immediate
deletion.  Having all this background data is great -- just feed it in
through the peripheries, throughout the story.  Readers are a fairly smart
bunch, they'll figure out what's going on (and sci-fi/fantasy readers are
even more intuitive, they'll fill in the gaps and get what you're getting
at quickly...)
 
	Wow, I'm in a conversational mood.  This is the most I've sent to
the FFML in, what, eight months?
	Anyway, just my two euros.  (What's that in Canadian funds, I
wonder?)

	-Mike Noakes