Web page rants. Yep, I'm about to whine about the very thing I'm doing at this moment. About folks who use the anonymity of the web to write essays where they attack anyone and anything that has pissed them off.

(To my own credit, I invite feedback, should anyone read my essays. I also don't have a personal web page that's full of cheap shots* at folks who don't like my stories, barely disguised innuendo* about other authors who haven't treated me nicely, or maliciously gleeful reprintings of messages I've received from folks who have attacked poor, little me with no justification.)

*Okay, there are a few cheap shots and a little innuendo, but I don't know any of these authors and they don't know me, so there's nothing personal about it. When I scoff at their stories or pages, I'm doing it based on nothing more than what I've learned about them *from* their pages and stories. I've never corresponded with any of these people.

I'm fascinated by people who put up web pages full of their personal woes, advertising to the world how badly they've been treated. They quote from their detractors at length, dwelling with morbid sadness on every nasty word someone has said to them.

And how about those poor babies who are, "trust me, get to know me, I'm one of the nicest people in the world and the most misunderstood person in fandom"? They've always been treated very badly by everyone around them, and they get all of these hateful, hurtful posts about their carefully crafted stories, and no one understands what works of deeply felt emotion those stories are.

These people are having more fun wallowing in their pain than I do eating chocolate. It's not my place to deprive them of their fun, but I'm going to mock them anyway.

I'm going to take a chance here and point out that their stories do pretty much suck.

Having recently been "treated" to the URL's of two or three authors who have put up pages sobbing about how mean everyone is to them, and having sampled their stories and found them lousy, I have to wonder if there's a correlation, you know?

I feel compelled to point out that having an idea, and even typing it, doesn't constitute writing a story. Those authors who think "characterization" means using the names of characters from the show and that POV is a television program...they receive a lot a bad posts.*

*See flame addendum below if you're especially bored today.

I'm always amazed by how tricky the human brain is. These people are clearly unable to make the connection between being told that their story is full of typos and the possibility that their story is full of typos. When they hear, "Your story is full of typos," they interpret this as, "I don't like you." The idea that they should go spell-check the story never seems to occur to them.

When they get twenty posts asking them why they indulge in gratuitous Sentinel-bashing, what their eyes read is twenty versions of, "I don't like you." They don't seem to consider that maybe they routinely abuse the character. (Trust me. no one is going to believe you "love James Ellison" if you write a story that turns him into a thumb-sucking, bed-wetting, brain-damaged moron.*)

*Thinly disguised cheap shot.

If any of you who get a lot of bad mail are reading this, can I ask why is it that you don't ever consider that being told by ten people that a story is badly written just might mean the story is badly written? Why do you assume that ten total strangers woke up this morning and decided to hate you?

Is this, in your world, more reasonable than accepting that they tried to read your story and there were so many problems with it that they couldn't? Criminy, are you so perfect that you can't conceive of the possibility that you make mistakes? (If your answer to that question was 'yes', please go away.)

Here's another possibility...today, ten people read your story and they didn't like it. Maybe twenty people read it and did like it, but they didn't write to you. Maybe a hundred people liked it. Maybe a hundred people didn't.

The point is, if you ask for feedback, you're going to get it. If you don't like what you get, don't ask for feedback.

If you get no feedback on your stories and then ask publicly for feedback, and fifteen people jump in and point out problems with POV and tense and sentence structure and throw in some comments about how the characterization was completely unbelievable, does it ever occur to you that they're right, and you're wrong?*

*I've been told that there is one author who requested feedback and got so many comments on stuff that needed to be changed or fixed in their stories, that they now routinely post everything labeled, "a first draft, for feedback only." And, no, they don't ever go back and turn their "first draft" into an actual story. They're not willing to actually write the stories, they just want to jot down their fevered and incoherent fantasies and get praised for them. This person, as you can imagine, is constantly disappointed in this expectation.

(If you're one of those fragile types who requests, "positive feedback only" and no one writes to you...that's a kind of feedback. It's not positive, no, but it's feedback. And if anyone writes to me with that cheesy claim that every nitwit with a keyboard is entitled to copious positive strokes for sharing the product of their hours of typing, I may go postal. In case it has escaped your attention, pretty much everyone on the net can type, after a fashion. That doesn't make everyone on the net a author, okay?)

There are a lot of really, appallingly horrible authors on the net and most of the good authors I know spend a lot of time trying not to be one of them.

Unfortunately, the horrible authors don't do the same thing. They're using up too much of their energy feeling sorry for themselves and putting up web pages about how badly they're being treated.

I'm getting off-track here.

The point is, if you've put up a web site about how the entire world of fandom is in collusion to kick you around, you need to stop and wonder how this situation came about. If you've put up a rant about how no one is ever nice to you, maybe you should stop and wonder if they think you're not being nice to them. If you've cried over your essay about how no one understands your writing, maybe you should dry your tears and try to figure out if your writing is incoherent. If you've had to publicly slap down your beta readers for trying to "ruin" your stories by suggesting changes, maybe it's time for you to wonder if they weren't right and your stories needed a lot of work.

I heard of someone saying that they had to "fire" their betas for giving them suggestions to improve their stories. I don't know whether to laugh hysterically or to write to that idiot and ask them who their betas were...people honestly willing to put their time and energy into reading someone else's stuff and make comments on it are like gold, and that so-called author doesn't deserve those people.

If you've plastered your stories and your web page with "no flames" warnings, because you've gotten so many of them and you're scared of getting more...take a good, hard look in the mirror and ask yourself if just maybe you didn't deserve some of those negative comments.

Go a step further. Try to be calm and rational and act like a mature adult. Try. Look at the messages. Look at what they're saying. Make a list. How many say, "your stories need spell-checking"? Make a list of the negative remarks, briefly. (Spell-check, Point of View, Characterization, Tense, that kind of thing.) Then make a mark next to each word for each post that mentions each of those things.

Now, put away the emotional messages and look only at the short list. These are the things your readers have trouble with in your stories.

Now, throw the list away.

If you were the kind of person who cared about being a better author, you wouldn't have put that bitchy web page up in the first place, and you and I both know you have no intention of changing any of your stories or trying to improve them. You're probably never going to admit that your stories are the Christmas fruitcakes of fandom. Lots of us open up our mailboxes and find them. Few of us are willing to try and choke down the heavy, stale, gluey contents of the package.

And for the authors who claim that "every story deserves to be read", I've got a news flash for you. That's not your decision to make. Only the readers get to make that choice.

You have as much right to write as anyone. But you are not entitled to have your stories read. A reader is a gift, and a badly written story is no way to treat a gift.

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Flames

There are two basic types of flames (Feel free to send me either kind but be aware that if your message is incoherent, badly spelled, or contains primitive grammar, I'm not likely to change anything I'm currently doing at your suggestion. I'm not a big believer in the school of, "those who can't do, teach."):

(1) The "your writing sucks" flame. This person says your grammar is bad, your spelling is worse, and that you story went in so many circles that the reader got dizzy and fell down trying to follow the action. And that trying to track all of those switches in tense in the middle of a paragraph, or switches in POV in the middle of a sentence gave them a migraine.

(2) The "your story sucks" flame. This person says that you don't have any idea who the characters are, they'd never act that way, and that you should give up writing and collect cowpies.

Never ignore #1. Especially if you get more than one message like that. You were sent this post because someone wanted to read your story, but you were so careless in the mechanics of writing it that it wasn't possible for the reader to understand what you were saying. Use a beta reader and listen to the beta reader when they make suggestions. The least you owe your readers is a fighting chance at being able to finish your story. It's the least you can do for your story.

Grammar matters. You can argue all you want, but the truth is that if you can't handle writing a coherent sentence, or writing and allowing yourself to be edited, you're not a writer. You're not a writer unless you're communicating with your audience. You might be a person with a story idea, you might even be an "author" in the sense that you've authored a story, but if you can't communicate that idea, you're not a writer. And if you don't care enough about your story to work and sweat and write and re-write, then you're not much of a author, either, but that's a personal opinion so feel free to disagree.

#2 is a different subject, and a lot more fun. It either means that you have come up with something entirely new and rocked this person's world by giving them an entirely new view of the characters, or that you've completely failed to understand the fandom you're writing in and that your stories suck.

If you get this kind of feedback on one story you've written, the answer is probably (a). If you get it about most of your stories, the answer could very well be (b).

The thing about #2 is that this is your personal choice. You have the right to interpret the characters the way they seem to you. You might aggravate almost everyone in the fandom by choosing this portrayal, but that's not your problem. No matter how much I might disagree with Mulder written as a weak, victimized loser, if that's the way you see him, then you're entitled to write him that way. I assure you that I have the sense not to read your stuff, so you won't be getting negative feedback from me.

And if you get #1 and #2 in combination, watch out. Especially if you get them a lot.

Oh! I almost forgot. There's a third type of flame, pretty much exclusive to the slash community. It's the "How can you write that horrible stuff" flame. Ignoring all warnings and disclaimers, the reader plunges into a slash story and finds themselves appalled by the portrayal of m/m or f/f sex. Do they bail out, realizing it was their own fault for reading something they were *told* they wouldn't like? They do not. They send a flame to the author. Or, again ignoring all warnings and disclaimers, the reader plunges into a rape story, or a death story. And the same scenario ensues.

I have to wonder how they think it's the author's fault that the readers don't understand the concept of a warning. I actually know some authors who get a little upset by those messages, which is absurd. If the reader is an idiot with a monitor and a keyboard, there's really nothing the author can do about it. (I'm the proud recipient of one of those kinds of flames. Some idiot wrote to me to say, "You're so sick it's not even funny. That's pretty much all she had to say and she ignored my polite request for clarification. Since both my page, and my individual stories are pretty much plastered with notices that my stories feature men boinking each other, I've no idea why she bothered to read, much less send feedback on my perversion, but I was delighted to receive her post. Up until then, it seemed like everyone but me was being read by morons. It was good to know I wasn't being singled out by only intelligent readers.)

Anyhow, the correct way to treat that kind of message is to pass it to all your friends and laugh over it together. Ignorance can be education. Stupid can't be cured.