Newsflash: Bad fic bad for health

[ladyvyola]

I've got a vicious summer cold: sneezing, stuffy nose, runny nose, chills, sweats -- the works. So I've been dosing myself with cold tablets, hot tea, and fic. I was doing pretty well, managing to ignore my symptoms and wallow in the love lives of my pretty SV boys until...

::cue cheesy ominous organ chords::

...I hit the bad fic.

"Great Gadsby" [sic]

Dom Periong [sic]

One sentence-long paragraphs inexplicably interrupted by dense, almost illegible paragraphs full of unimportant, unnecessary and badly written exposition. Shifting tenses -- within sentences. Faulty and inconsistant punctuation. Turgid, juvenile, pretentious, purple, purple, purple prose.

Whoooomp! Back came every ache and pain, the sinus headache, the disgusting reliance on Kleenex products. I feel twice as ill as I did before.

Make the bad writing stop, mommy!

On the other hand, I could have actually paid to read tripe. Check out ari_'s post on if Barbara Cartland wrote m/m... It'll make you appreciate the vast majority of fanfic writers out there.

Comments

[hackthis.livejournal.com]

you know i had this experience the other day, and well, it made me itch. violently. for no reason.

but what i learned from it was that there are certain things that i won't do in my fic. bad fic can be a good learning lesson for a writer, you know, a big flashing don't do this. EVER

[ladyvyola.livejournal.com]

I realize that life is an on-going learning process but sometimes it's just cruel to be forced to read some of this stuff. I've learned my lesson, I promise!

And it just hit me -- in ... honor ...of the bad fic, I really should have announced that I had a "viscous" cold.