okay, i'll give it a try

[fox]

Ten Ways You Might Be Able To Tell You're Reading A Story I Wrote, by darthfox.

10.  There's at least one throwaway detail that's completely overresearched.  No kidding, I looked up the position of the signs of the zodiac over Ottery St Mary on 2 November 1979, y'all.  Can anyone tell us why I'd have done such a thing?  No, thought not, because the moment in the finished product is utterly insignificant.

9.  There's not a lot of fanon.  I don't have the skill for turning fanon completely on its ear that jacquez does (nor for seizing a bit of canon and making it absolutely literal; I very much liked her Ray Kowalski who really had a head injury, and I adored her Blair Sandburg who meant it when he said he'd flown Apaches in Desert Storm), but I'm more than happy to ignore things that aren't actually canon, and I'm pretty conservative about what counts.

8.  That said, the characters are all probably a little ... better than they are in canon.  Nicer, smarter, better-looking, more articulate; in some way, I probably miss the characterization by a point or so in the character's favor most of the time.  Is it because I'm a preposterous romantic?  Who knows.

7.  Someone's going to have a day's worth or so of stubble, and someone else is going to like that a lot.  So I project a little.  Sue me.

6.  Nobody talks much during sex.  Or if they do, the dialogue is unreported.  In fact the sex, though present, is probably less graphic than in a lot of other people's stuff -- though I could have that impression because nobody talks much.  I don't know.

5.  It does not contain the word blond (nor blonde).  Men are blond and women are blonde, but I get so fermisht trying to decide if hair is masculine or feminine that I only ever describe it as fair.

4.  But people (and things) are not described unless the description is relevant to the plot.  Meaning the POV character mustn't have seen them before, either.  (I had a Lucius Malfoy-POV narrator describe Molly Weasley thus:  "She looked like Molly Weasley."  Really not kidding.)

3.  The narrator is normally pretty reliable.  Or, failing that, hopefully sympathetic.  This is not because I don't think unreliable narrators are worth writing; it's really mainly because I'm not very good at juggling.

2.  Now that I think about it, someone is likely to be keeping a secret.  That's not always the source of the story's central conflict, but it's usually at least a B-plot.

And the Number One way you might be able to tell you're reading a story I wrote:

1.  You beta-read it.

Comments

[sanj.livejournal.com]

2 November 1979? WHY? I mean, Molly would have been about four-five months along with Ron at that point, so it's not a birth horoscope for anybody we know who would have been near anything called Ottery Whossname. So what were you looking up??

And yes, I do this too.... I hate having to just make shit up, I'm afraid I'll get caught out by the one person who knows something I don't. :)

[bethbethbeth.livejournal.com]

Kellie Matthews and I spent something like four hours working out the travel logistics for two sentences in a Due South epic we co-wrote. And it was fun! *g*

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

i realized i had a problem when i found myself, in background research for the DS thing i'll probably never post, actually looking in expedia to find the times of scheduled flights from miami to chicago. in my defense, i began just looking for how long such a flight would take. but when i started caring about when it was going to take off, man, i had to seek help.

[bethbethbeth.livejournal.com]

You and me both, sister.

This is one of the reasons I go a little crazy every time someone posts to a community with something like "Who knows who the president of the US is?" Baby research? Do it on your own! :)

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

[looks] narcissa guesses that molly is five or six months along, so i'm going to go with five. :-)

to actually answer your question: i gave the weasleys a clock with sun and moon hands instead of hour and minute hands, and zodiac signs instead of numbers. there's a scene where lucius and a lower-ranking henchman break into the house and nobody's home; the family clock shows where everyone is, a clock with only one hand says "time for a lie-down", and the star-sign clock shows the sun in scorpio and the moon in aries -- which happens to have been where they were, at 11:20 am on that day in that place.

it's the fear of catching-out that makes me do it, as you say. if i'd just picked two signs, the odds that -- well, the odds that anybody would notice at all, even enough to say "hey, cool idea for another kind of clock", would be minimal (and in fact nil, since nobody did say anything of the sort) -- but the odds that anybody would bother to plug the time and place and whatnot into one of those lookup things and send feedback saying "actually, you got your star signs wrong" would be, you know, slim. i'm this anal and i> wouldn't fact-check someone else's fic like that. (i admit that i did call cesperanza out on a mathematical impossibility once. but that was the kind of thing that just involves arithmetic, not, you know, astrological nonsense. and also, the calling-out was in the midst of a great deal of praise.)

[bethbethbeth.livejournal.com]

Number one? Is hysterical. :)

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

heh. i didn't mean it to be, but, cool. :-)

[ellen-fremedon.livejournal.com]

1. You beta-read it.

Hee!

[darthfox.livejournal.com]

yeah, so, what i meant was to suggest that people who beta my stuff are the largest segment of the population reading my stuff? but, it came out a lot funnier than that. go figure.