What a long, sad trip it's been

What's a girl gotta do for some nice, quick, gratuitous, gen Dean-Cas h/c fic? Any suggestions? I'll take any hurt -- fevers, curses, gunshots, flus, you name it. Preferably Dean's the hurting one. But that's kinda screwed if Cas is still an angel, because he can just cure it. Hmmm. Sigh.

I've decided that I only have one thing on my S7 wishlist: I want Dean and Cas to hug. Just once, but with feeling. For heaven's sake. Isn't it about time? Hug it out, ya pretty bastards!

You know, when I read some other people's fanfic kinks, I realize that mine are...I don't even think they make it up to vanilla. They're more like 2% lowfat milk. I've got 2% lowfat kinks.

I noticed that I've built up a little backlog of unanswered comments on some of my fics and I want all the commenters to know that while I turn off e-mail notification on my fics (due to their length) I do go back and check to see if there are new comments from time to time and I do intend to answer all of them. In the meantime, a great big thank you to anyone who's taken the time to comment, even on an older story. I am not ignoring you! :)

ETA: Same message for unanswered comments on SPN episode posts!

Do you find that present tense is nearly ubiquitous in SPN and J2 fanfic? I can't tell you how many fics I click on that are in present tense. So much so that it's almost rare to find one written in past tense. Why is that?

Also: cryptic summaries. I don't get it. That snippet of an old folk tune, Bible verse or bit of Proust is no doubt fascinating and very meaningful for you but it doesn't tell me anything about your story. Is it really that hard to come up with a descriptive sentence or two? I'll take "Jensen pines away while Jared plans his wedding," over "Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments," any day. (Note: This is a totally fictitious example, as far as I know.)

Speaking of which, where the hell are all the great fics about Jensen pining away while Jared plans his wedding? Or fics about impediments to the marriage of true minds, for that matter?

Does anyone else feel frustrated by the ratings and warnings required on fanfiction?

In a practical sense, I understand their necessity. There's a ton of fanfiction out there and there has to be some way to sift and sort the the things we want to read. Plus it seems like a matter of courtesy to inform people upfront what they're getting into.

But this is a "courtesy," or at least a safeguard that we don't expect from published fiction -- which frankly, is a costlier prospect since we're usually paying hard currency for it, and by the time we find out it's "not our bag" it's probably too late to return for a refund. When we buy a book, we usually have nothing to go on besides a vague description on a book jacket and possibly a critical review or a friend's recommendation. It's not even something we get from movies. While movies are rated, they don't come with advance notice of who'll be hooking up with whom (unless that's something that's a given, like with Brokeback Mountain). Why do we require such safeguards be built into fanfiction when it's free for the taking, and if you discover that you don't like it, you can just click right off it without having some $29.95 doorstop hanging around your house?

If you're writing a romantic story that revolves around a "will they or won't they" plot, doesn't it kill your story to have to plant that rating/pairing notice right up on top of your fic? E.g...you're writing Dean/Castiel, and you label it as Dean/Castiel and then rate it NC-17. Well, that pretty much tells everyone they will doesn't it? So it not only destroys the tension of your story but it'll probably have a lot of readers skipping over most of your story to get to the part where "they will!"...and do, most likely in explicit detail if the rating is accurate. And then you never know if people liked your story or just responded to the sex. On the other hand, if you label your story Dean/Castiel and then rate it PG-13 or even R, people know there's nothing explicit in there, so that even with that forward-slash, it might not be what some people consider a "real" Dean/Castiel story.

Has anyone found any clever ways to get around this?

The latest issue of Time magazine has an article about how the boundaries of "published fiction" are expanding to include works such as the once highly disparaged self-published novels, internet-published fiction and even novels published strictly for cell phones (in Japan, where else?). They give one heck of a shout-out to fanfiction, calling it, and I quote, "a literary form in its own right."

I know that those of us who read and write fanfiction have felt like this for years and have long thought that fanfiction, for all the scorn people heap upon it, is closer to the natural tradition of storytelling than a lot of the stuff that actually makes it onto bookstore shelves. It's really interesting now to see fanfiction being included -- with no snark, overt or implied -- in a serious article on the evolution of publishing. I always knew we were onto something!

The article goes on to discuss the role that editors will play in the new world of publishing and mentions that "unpaid amateur editors have already hit the world of fan fiction, where they're called beta readers." I love this description of beta readers "already" having hit the world of fan fiction, as if this were some new trend and not something we've all been doing for years. I also love that the term "beta readers" actually needs a definition. It reminds me that the vast majority of people out there don't know anything at all about this world that so many of us are so passionate about, are so ignorant of it that they need a commonplace term like "beta reader" explained to them. Wow...street cred and a feeling of exclusivity from one article. Not bad, Time. Not bad.

Read the whole article.