More Life

*hearts you*

endings can still suck it, though. >(

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np! any time!

Yeah, endings DO suck it. One of my steady betas called me the other day on always ending things in the middle of a sex scene whenever I thought I had a line I could just get away with ending on. And...she was totally correct. Tragically. But I think you're gold if we have like two more paragraphs there! They're just paragraphs I don't envy you for having to write...b/c they sound hard.

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I may be guilty of just tacking on something ending-y and posting it because I wanted it to just END ALREADY. And, yeah, they're staying married...justification is for ~~people who aren't me~~ losers, apparently. But I can totally see Ten just being like "Yeah, we'll take care of it after this - oh, shit, is that a Dalek over there? Wait, okay, after that, then..." and just never getting around to it. I just hope that I communicated that in a non-sucky way.

Also, what's your opinion on using British spellings, just out of curiosity?

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Also, what's your opinion on using British spellings, just out of curiosity?

...Is 'traveling' spelled 'travelling' if you come from the other side of the pond? Am I a moron who just now got that? /dammit/.

Generally: I don't bother to Brit-standardize my spelling anymore than it already is from reading an excess of British books as a kid, and I let spell check catch even most of that.

To me unless it's a glaring mistake like some American-dialect thing creeping in, it doesn't ever throw me off as a reader, and it would almost seem a bit like appropriation to me to go to great lengths to seem as if I were English with spelling, rather than that I was in fact writing characters who speak with English dialect and thus say words I wouldn't?

In the end,

draegonhawke and I were talking it over and she made the astute point that when writing fic, "They're aliens. Not British. I have very little obligation to make them sound unequivocally British."

To be fair, the show itself does weird things with accent and dialect: Jack speaks British English with an American accent, as did Peri, and their American accents are 1) atemporal, a la someone in the South in War Games seeming to think they were in the 1930s or 2) occasionally terrible, especially when they try for a region, a la New York or the Amorphous South in Daleks in Manhattan ("Ah kame uhp throo Mee-sore-ugh!" my callipygous ass, I have NEVER heard my state pronounced like Eliza Doolittle was trying to mouth it around marbles of condescension to quite such effect).

I'm not saying 'and so my fic spelling will suxs0r to get revenge, muahahahaha!' but, TLDR, I don't think British spellings are necessary.

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Yeah, it is, but you only caught it once (or else I only used it once). Fun fact: Word actually auto-corrects most British spellings (I'm not sure if "travelling" is one of them), so I spend a good deal of time telling it that I don't want it to do that. Let me use s instead of z! It's more aesthetically pleasing!

I think my tendency to use British spellings comes from the time I spent in HP fandom, when the BNFs were ridiculously anal about having EVERYTHING be properly British. For me, using British spellings in a British fandom makes sense - but I've also noticed that nobody really does it (except for the Brits). I think it sort of helps me get into the right frame of mind for proper syntax and whatnot. I try to make it British because the show sounds British - it's part of how I hear the characters in my head.

Someone needs to tell them to hire American actors to play Americans, kthxbai. Jack can stay, but my ears kind of bleed every other time there's an "American" on the show (case in point, genius boy from last week's episode). And, God, Peri. WTF were you thinking, BBC?

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pinkfriction.livejournal.com

When I am writing Queer as Folk fic I make a conscious effort to switch on my American spell-check. However, if I am reading British set fic it doesn't really get to me unless it is a word a Brit would obviously not say.

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Mm, yeah, IAWTC, a wrongly-set /word/ would bug the crap out of me, but I wouldn't necessarily be bugged by a spelling thing? I might not even really notice it.

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When Peri says "do a bunk," I'm pretty sure a random state just falls off. Rhode Island, maybe, has anyone checked on that lately? Do we know it's still there?

Okay, I'll buy you on spelling leading naturally into the syntax. That's a really good point, actually. I mean I don't necessarily approve of anal BNFs mocking a lack of u's, but I can totally get behind adding Brit spellings s part of a gestalt character voice.

I /have/ caught Word trying to pull that bullshit! wtf, word, can't you have a pluralistic dictionary that accounts for variant spellings of words within languages? I shudder to think of how you deal with continental vs. new world Spanishes if you can't even get your act together re: theater vs theatre.

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When I write tight third person like I do (or I think I do, anyway), it just feels right to add the spellings in. Oh, and speaking of pet peeves - English professors who maintain that if you're writing in a tight third person, you really might as well just be writing in first person. Fuck you, it's different to me - even if I just need the third-person pronouns to separate me from the characters.

Well, I guess it assumes that if you're going to be writing in British English, you'll have the spellchecker/dictionary set to British English. (The same goes for the different dialects of Spanish?) Though you'd think it would be simple enough to account for dialectic differences like that.

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if you're writing in a tight third person, you really might as well just be writing in first person.

PFFFT. Honestly? who /says/ that? Eugh! There's an obvious difference of narrative effect (voice of narration, narrator reliability, ability to have a slightly-detached view of the narrator without committing to omniscient third head jumping or first-person putting blinders on, etc.), and the narrative's saturation level in that character shifts when that observed person assumes the burden of narration. Wow. Also are they plugging writing in first over writing in close third? Um. why?

Yeah, I just wan a pan-English dictionary that lets me use British and American words and spelling with impunity. Word is always all up on my case for British wordchoice too, and I don't feel like dictionary-hopping just b/c in like, original fic or something I wanted a British word or two despite writing story with generally American spelling/words.

So yeah: I guess I want the American option, the British option and the Pan-English option, which sounds anal, but surely just /layering/ the dictionaries on top of each other or something can't be impossible?

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You know, my writing's gotten better in leaps and bounds over the past four years, but I'm not sure how much of that can actually be attributed to the Knox creative writing department. And I believe they were plugging writing in omniscient third over close third, but I'm not sure - I obviously tried to block it out, and it was a few years ago. I know that I almost exclusively write in close third because I'm a characterization girl, and it gives me a comfortable place in the narrator's head - I don't think that first person allows me the level of observation I prefer, and I don't think my stories would be the same if I just changed the pronouns to "I".

Yet another reason why I don't write original fiction, I guess. *sigh* Nobody ever tells me to change my point of view when I write nonfiction. (And I think my fic wound up being so damn long just to secretly prove to my portfolio professor that I can do well in longer pieces, not that she'll ever see it.)

You'd think it wouldn't be too difficult - even just combining them should be perfectly feasible, though I'm admittedly not a computer programmer. I don't see why they wouldn't program Word to load more than one dictionary at the same time, anyway. What if you're writing in two languages? I mean, okay, so the vast majority of people using it don't, but how hard could it be to tack the added functionality on?

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Wtf? Can't those people make up their minds?! When I was in school, it was all "Ooo, third person omniscient is wrong-bad, and if you do it your ears will rot off and you will FAIL. LIMITED ONLY!" Which I also thought was jackass.

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I mean not that you're jackass for using it, but the idea that it's the only way anyone is allowed to write is.

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No, I have the same experience wherein I keep getting told third omniscient is diiiirty diiiiiirty head-jumping and that I should never ever do it again.

I even get fic readers who are like, 'lulz I hate third omniscient 4eva, why are you writing in it?' And okay, so if there's a big chunk that's confusing, I can work on /that/ or fix it? But is it just me or is it entirely invalid to negate an entire perspective choice? I really don't think I can/don't want to write in anything but om-3rd: it just does more work for me, I want in everybody at all times, both as a reader and a writer.

No dis to Megan's limited third, it really IS great for characterization, I'm just not in love with it for a /long/ narrative? Esp. if the genre is romance or something of that nature, wherein you need all parties emotions both to fill up the story or to give depth to both sides of the story. Otherwise you've written Jane Eyre. And I love that book, but there's been like, a century. Things happen with opaque characterization in that which you'd get called on today. Move the fuck on, lit establishment.

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It does seem pretty dumb to reject an entire perspective. After all, if it were all that useless, it wouldn't exist in the first place, now would it? Just because the going fad is away from this or that doesn't mean that it's wrong.

I've seen those POV complaints myself, and they're hilarious! I've gotten "OMG 1st person is inherently unreadable!" and "3rd person is boring and lame and it's impossible to do anything new or good with it," and "2nd person = HATE," (granted I find it the hardest to work with, but I've seen good work done in it). At a certain point, you wonder if it's actually possible to write in any POV at all, or if they're all useless crap. ;)

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You know, I always did best in my lit classes when I rejected all common sense and ran with the crack. I think the profs must get tired of hearing the same old thing, because they even liked it toward the end when I totally threw in the towel and started writing papers that were thinly veiled slasher's manifestos.

But romantic comedy taught me that marriage is awesome because it eradicates your personality and turns you into a faceless part of a dual entity who has no individual hobbies, space, or opinions! What possible harm can that do?

Aw, Shakespeare, you so nihilistic!

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because they even liked it toward the end when I totally threw in the towel and started writing papers that were thinly veiled slasher's manifestos.

Oh man, the other day in class, covering Crime and Punishment:

Prof: "Class: do you read Sexual Tension between Svidrigailov's wife and Dunya?"
Class: *uncomfortable silence*
Me: *hand shooting up* "While we're queer reading, Razuminkin is displacing his man-love for Raskolnikov onto Dunya, and Dostoevsky knows it."
Her: Holla! Thus all the textual parallels between Rodya and Dunya!
Me: And Svidriagialov? SO pulling the reverse and shifting from Dunya to Rodya in an effort to eroticize their status as dopplegangers!
Her: Word! He's such a sexual predator, listening in to that thing between Rodya and Sonia.
Me: Shades of Vautrin in Pere Goirot, right?!
Her: Totally! You should read The Double, lulz.
Class: *horrified*
Her: Um.
Me: Er.
Her: ...yeah, so, er, Crime and Punishment...

But romantic comedy taught me that marriage is awesome because it eradicates your personality and turns you into a faceless part of a dual entity who has no individual hobbies, space, or opinions! What possible harm can that do?

That's what love IS. *nod* You're just going to have to accept self-abnegation via the love object or wind up a pathetic spinster. Also the story ends when you get married. I hope you didn't want like, a narrative beyond that, b/c too damn bad, sukkah...

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