Ah HA!

[blamebrampton]

FANFICCERS!

Worried about lack of reviews?

Sad that everyone is reading everyone who is not you?

Depressed to see teenagers who don't know how to spell frottage and cannot accurately gauge the bendability of the average penis with thousands of ffnet reviews while your finely crafted and beautifully edited masterpieces are lucky to garner 23?

FRET NO LONGER!

THE SECRET IS REVEALED!

''People say it isn't good quality but you have to remember Fifty Shades started as fan fiction and as fan fiction you have to have action,'' Hayward says. ''You have to have a sex scene in every chapter because that's how you get your reviews. The amount of people who review per chapter shows popularity, that's how your ratings get up. In fan fiction every chapter has to give you something to keep you reading it.''
(From an SMH interview with Amanda Hayward, the really rather brilliant publisher of the not as brilliant book.)

So there you go! You lot who've been telling me to porn it up were right all along! (I mean, obviously I'm not going to, but that's for the best. The Bad Sex Awards longlist is already inches thick.)

I thoroughly recommend the article, which is interesting and respectfully written, without being actually nice about bad writing. It includes this gem from The London Review of Books' Andrew O'Hagan, which I had previously missed: ''It's not that Fifty Shades of Grey and E.L. James's other tie-me-up-tie-me-down spankbusters read as if feminism never happened: they read as if women never even got the vote.''

Comments

[blamebrampton.livejournal.com]

The ereader issue is a real thing: I find myself reading more and more books on mine, but not fanfic because I know I will forget to go back and comment -- which would be fine if I then read the fanfic on my laptop instead of adding it to my horrendously long queue and then reading a book on my Kindle …

Maybe I should just stick it all on and then do a regular rec post? There was a time when I was good at that sort of thing, before work went lupinesque.

And Jack and Gwen? NOOOOOOOOOO! That's just wrong! Ianto is always fine in my head because I stopped watching at an episode in which he was and refuse to go past it.

(I'm SO tempted to try the Fragrantwoods Solution next time I am stuck for how to end a section or chapter :-))

[excentric397.livejournal.com]

After thinking it over, I can see a problem with 'and then they had sex.' We don't actually get to read about the sex, just that they had it. Nooooo. The internet is for porn. And smut. And all that other good stuff. Although, there are some sex scenes I've read that just made me laugh and wonder if the person who wrote them was...I don't know...fourteen? ;)