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Definitely, yeah. Yes. Yup. All the time. Today in fact :-) I'm of a mind that a writer doesn't improve unless they receive positive AND negative criticism. No story is perfect, no writer is perfect and if no one ever points out things that need to improve, how will you? I know that it's possible to self-critique, but often it just doesn't work well. Myself, for instance, I've been known to write a completely nonsensical sentence and when reading it back, consistently read it the way I intended to write it instead of the way it was actually written. This is something that someone else reading it back would spot in a second, but my eyes missed it. So negative criticism is to be embraced, I know I seek it out because I prefer for my final products to be as high quality as possible. And I agree, even after that final product has been put out and completed, there's no reason why you can't go back and change something. I will admit that frustrates me with some authors. They'll spell a character's name incorrectly, a location incorrectly, make a canon mistake or even a mistake within their own established universe, acknowledge it when you mention it (sometimes even say that someone else already mentioned it, in a snide tone), yet refuse to go back and fix it... I don't get that. But yeah, I've had some pretty negative responses to constructive criticism. I think one of the funniest was this one author who had maybe... 20 or so profiles. Yes, it was pretty clear that this was the same person. All from Canada, all using the same format for creating story summaries, and all stories the same basic variation of the others (even using identical phrasing at points). And when you'd send criticism, the response would consistently be NASTY and if you mention the other profiles, yeah... Somehow on one of the Yahoo fanfiction groups a couple of us came together and started collecting a list of all the profiles this one person had... It was pretty interesting and it makes you wonder what they do all day, that they have time to put up all these stories, even if they were all pretty identical. I had another author once sic her readership on me for pointing out that rape is not a plot device leading to neverending love. Got nasty emails for awhile until they quit. I had an author tell me that I had mental issues because I made a play on words joke about one of the characters that she, as an author within the fandom should have picked up on, and pointed out a few negatives. In this case, I actually included several positives before hand, but I guess those negatives were too much for her, and she went off. Tried to report it to the site (AO3) and the Abuse reporter was even more ridiculous (i.e. she essentially said that if you dare to leave negative critique for an author, constructive though it may be, you better bend over and take it if they decide to get nasty) And just today, I had an author take offense when I pointed out that her Mary Sue was a Mary Sue and defend her refusal to label her OC character on her story, even though her OC was the main character. Something she neglected to mention in the summary or the warnings and that a reader doesn't figure out until a few chapters in because of how she chose to write the character's introduction. As if fooling you into wasting your time reading a story about an OC when you know you have no interest in reading stories about OCs (I specifically filter against them on ff.net because I'm not interested) will make you a reader for life. So yeah, it happens. And often you can't do anything about it. It's frustrating as hell, but you just have to ignore it.... and post their story title and url on various forums so other like-minded individuals know to avoid like the plague.

I hate you all! Was that too harsh a review was it?