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The wee corgi is home! She’s a little bit stoned on meds, but she’s home, and I’m so glad to have her here!

Have a great independence day, my unfortunate neighbours South of the border! just close your eyes and imagine you have Idris elba or bernie Sanders or whatever your particular flavor of politics is as president for the day.

Spent 45 minutes hanging out under a bridge today. Note to self: Check the friggin’ forecast before you decide to take your bike to work.

New phones always fall on the first day. It’s a universal law. It’s motherfriggin science. If you got a new phone and it didn’t drop the first day, then you’re a witch and you need to stop cheating because it’s not fair.

Lakeside picnic with mum on a sunny 25C winter’s day. Not a bad day.

My cat found a christmas bow. Like the kind you stick on presents. I have no idea where he found it. He’s not an outdoor cat. Our christmas stuff is packed away in the attic only accessible through a closed off staircase in a closed off closet that he has no way of getting into… and he’s been playing with it nonstop for three days.

So…. I haz BA degree in English, now…

Have just noticed that when the program was run (or however it worked!) to move tags from the old place in summary box to the new place in their own box, it moved all my “MCD” tags as “MC” and left the D behind. This isn’t the first time I’ve unexpectedly had the D in the wrong place. I’ll get ‘em updated in a few days as very busy today, and apologies to any searching MC fans who hate character death.

I saved a spider from the bathtub twice today. He gets in there and runs frantically at the slippery walls trying to get out. 10 seconds ago i watched him run back in and fall like a kid closing his eyes and running across a busy street.

So I’m not going to be around much for the next month or so (not that I’ve been particularly present of late anyway) because I’m moving to GERMANY!!! So you kids play nice while I’m gone and hopefully the German internet company won’t take the whole 3 weeks it says it will to hook up my service. Auf Wiedersehen!

Happy Canada Day to our saner neighbors up North!

My stuff varies on the main characters, sometimes they’re gay or bi, sometimes not, depends on the story. Though, my Dale’s Game does have the main characters as gay (in a homophobic world), so if you’ve not read it @CloverReef, feel free to read and review it I am planning a sequel and it does have a short prequel in the 2016 holiday stories. For me, by relaxing the requirement for perfection, it lets me actually post, and posted material is much better than holding out for “perfect”. When I wrote The Repair Guy, I deliberately experimented by going for short chapters and one-pass proofreading; the result was, I finished that story in a couple of months, not years, and I’m overall happy with how it turned out.

85.24 hours this pay period. AAAAAAAAGGGGGGGHHHHH

70.45 hours and there is one more day to the pay period. Put me outta my misery!

The answer depends heavily on the fandom. The Star Trek universe is so thoroughly fleshed out that you could write an engaging story without using any canonical characters (CCs); as long as you include familiar alien races, technology, etc, and otherwise follow the “rules” of the Star Trek universe. (But you couldn’t do that with, say, Brooklyn 99, because that show is all about the characters, not the world it’s set in. ) The broader point here is that readers will probably accept a fair number of OCs in a fic as long as they are engaging and fit in with the fandom and its characters. I included several OCs in my Star Vs the Forces of Evil story “Star’s Crossed Lovers,” and readers generally liked them because of the way they interacted with the CCs.

I’ll chime in. Thank you mods, like @BronxWench, etc, for keeping this site running. AFF is the only website I’ve actually hit that donate button on, and not regretting it (so far).

That feeling when you set out to polish your old story before loading and end up extending and expanding it and then those bits need polishing too. Bah.

I have to see exactly where i want to take it, but my gut feeling is that Episode #15 will be on the shorter side. (Includes a small challenge prompted by @CloverReef )

Why, oh why, am I researching bullet-proof caskets?

I sort of expect my Games fandom stories to not get reviews. I don’t write for “popular” games, and that’s fine. But in posting order, with hits/reviews: Alchemy: 1086/ 16 Samahlen (combined one-shots): 22260 / 105 Stormborn: Book 1: 3103 / 7 Stormborn: Book 2: 949 / 0 In Lord of the Rings, I have a co-authored work, writing with the inestimable Pippychick: The Lost and the Hidden City: 1430 / 4 And my Originals: Almost Home: 358 / 4 Special of the Day: 513 / 4 Harrison Winter: 1109 / 4 The Accident: 270 / 3 Play It Safe: 452 / 5 Missing: 623 / 3 Compassion: 799 / 2 Culloch’s Rest: 2640 / 36 Hazardous Duty: 706 / 7 Hunting Elysium: 700 / 6 The Brownstone: 371 / 3 First Step: 973 / 6 Indigo: 520 / 4 Punch Line: 784 / 4 A Good Morning’s Sleep: 596 / 6 The Scapegoat: 1540 / 2 Surrender: 1190 / 5 Masking Intentions: 1780 / 19 Buggered if I know why some get more than others…

I can think of a few body-swaps that I’ve liked: --On Justice League Unlimited, there’s an episode in which Lex Luthor accidentally switches bodies with the Flash. I liked this one because they didn’t use the usual cartoon trick of switching the characters’ voices. And there was the great moment when Luthor-as-Flash ducks into a men’s room, stands in front of the mirror, and says, “At least I can learn the Flash’s secret identity!” Then he pulls back the Flash’s cowl, looks at his reflection, and says, “I have no idea who this is.” --Dipper and Mabel’s body-swap in the “Carpet Diem” episode of Gravity Falls. I love their initial reaction to the switch: running around screaming, punching themselves in the stomach, trying to make themselves vomit, anything to get out of their twin’s body and back into their own. --Buffy and Faith on BtVS. It was great watching SMG and Eliza Dushku play each other’s characters.

It depends on the source and your tastes. I generally prefer a majority of characters to be canon, but some settings that really isn’t possible. I attempted writing for the Neverwinter MMO setting, but those plots and characters were so loosey goosey within the setting that, aside from mentioning an event or character in passing my story didn’t even feel much part of that setting. By the time I had created that many OCs to be the entire cast, I realized I wasn’t writing fanfic anymore but an original fiction. I wasn’t attached to the canon-weak characters and events that I didn’t want or need them, I was doing ALL of the work of writing an original story without being able to take credit. It wasn’t hard to file off the original setting. (BW knows that hiatus’d story) MMOs with the generic nature of character interaction and repetition, seem very unlikely to build a gripping foundation for fanfic. The original Guild Wars had the bones for some gripping sequences, but with the very fluidity of the interative and constantly retconned canon, it’s not stable enough or even accessable years later to refresh the canon. Now single player games like NWNights and Dragon Age are released in large enough chunks they are stable enough for replay for fun or research as you have a copy of the game you played on disk. Canon characters are far better developed and rich for exploration and use in fiction. Few games have made as good characters. Too many characters mean they aren’t 3D enough to tempt my muse. I had hopes for project eternity game, but the supporting cast was too generic and boring, I believe that it is the canon characters (and lesserly- events) who drive my interest in fanfiction. If the significant cast is all original, I know I’m not as interested in reading. Writing about the adventures on the SS Vanguard that has no impact on the world just feels futile. What would be different if this happened instead of canon? Sometimes I’ve read even a single OC who can break the setting completely, the OCs need to play mostly by the setting rules too. (and not outshine canon) Some settings have so many minor characters that there’s usually an existing character for most any purpose, and these characters are already woven into the setting, OC’s need more work to get them to fit seamlessly into the setting and existing cast. (A small part of why Rey is a Sue is that her background is basically to be plopped into a saga that deals heavily in lineage and fate. She’s a rehash of early Luke without any real past, brought forth from the brow of the Mouse with less past than the leads of computer games) A good OC needs to be part of the world and have a good significant reason for why the character was offstage during canon. (wandering away again, sorry) I like using canon characters, and the challenge to keeping them in character but still have them deal with new problems and people. Banter and interaction with OCs is fun. It’s very therapeutic to have someone slap someone who’s being stupid in canon. But then many good stories can just reshuffle canon, like one where Kirk might have kidnapped Edith Keeler to the future. Few canon characters are that developed that you cannot develop them in a new way... or just better depicted than canon. We can show their thought stream better than video. In practice, my OCs seem to hold below about 25% of the significant cast. Mainly because the canon cast is as much a part of the settings as phasers and mithral. I find I cannot keep up with stories about the characters I like, and by definition I don't know OCs in OC laden stories. So I move on.

I think it’s important to do fan fiction your own way. And being that this is really your first official foray into fanfiction that I’m aware of, if you want to ease yourself into canon characters or never really utilize them at all, that’s perfectly valid. It’s your story. It’s your decision. That being said, when I was a reader in the Tekken or Star Ocean fandoms, I never read fan fics where the main character or the love interest were OCs. I went into those fandoms for the characters, the universe was only a small part of the appeal. So a story without the canon character would defeat the purpose for me. Of course, it would be a little different if I was looking for fics in game fandoms where the main player character is an OC by design, like neverwinter and DA. With MMORPGs, it would be more about the universe and the cultures. That sounds more fun to write in than read in, for me though, since there wouldn’t be much in the way of established characters to draw me in. But for rich RPGs like DA with a semi OC main, that lies somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. I would probably still kinda avoid OC fics, but would be much more open minded. I understand not wanting to limit yourself with canon characters, and that’s perfectly valid. If I go into it expecting to be reading fan fiction, I’d probably have a problem with it, but I go into it expecting original fiction so it doesn’t bug me.

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Yum...my internet fix is now being served (never satisfied, one is never truly satisfied on internet, not for long) …. cravings are subsiding.