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I wrote this several years ago on LJ. *amuses herself way too much* I thought it might be helpful for people worried about writing a Sue or anyone who just wants a little chuckle. How to be a Mary Sue by Jezebel Haddo Have you always wanted to write a Mary Sue character but weren't sure how? Now you can with these 15 easy steps! 1. Prattle endlessly about their hair - Hair is the most important aspect of a person. How can we understand a character if we don't know every minute detail about their hairstyle? 2. Give your character at least two nicknames. It makes them seem more interesting that way. 3. They should be drop-dead sexy. Even if they have traits that are not commonly thought of as sexy, they should have multiple people falling in love with them for no good reason. Only evil and/ or stupid characters should be ugly and/ or fat. Cool characters should be gorgeous or at least ruggedly handsome. 4. Don't waste time developing their personality. All you need to write is that they're a cute, smart, sassy, fun-loving, badass rebel who's good at everything and is popular with the in-crowd. That makes it true to life. 5. Don't give them discernible flaws. Your character will be much cooler if they come across as more god than human. 6. Put an emphasis on music, sports, and dating. The best characters are always listening to hip rock bands, are their team's MVP, and have lots of people falling for them (though they only date equally cool people). That's what life is all about! 7. The rules of any established universe should bend for your character's awesomeness. If anyone complains, they're jealous. Laws and consequences are for losers. 8. Why not make your character a twin? Twins are really common! Every twin has at least one twin. 9. Your character has the right to treat everyone else like scum and still have said scum love and worship them. Hey, how can anyone not love their coolness? 10. If it's a girl, make her super-skinny, yet super-buxom. What's the point of having a nice rack and an incredible arse if she isn't thirty pounds underweight? And we all know that's how most girls are built. If it's a boy, he must be ripped, with a six-pack stomach and bulging biceps, but he's not too muscular, of course. 11. Employ a deus ex machina whenever possible. It's the fun way to solve problems. 12. Make blanket statements with nothing to back them up. If you say your character is friendly, I'll take your word for it, even if they never do anything to show that they're friendly. 13. Oxymorons, stereotypes, and anachronisms are your friends. Just because your character goes to Hogwarts doesn't mean they can't be immersed in Muggle pop culture. A Chinese character doesn't have to be at all Chinese as long as they're named Lee or Wong and they like egg rolls. And just because grunge rock came about in the 90's, doesn't mean someone in the 70's couldn't be listening to it. 14. It's okay to give your character rare abilities, famous relatives/friends/lovers, and a high profile job. While you're at it, why not several of each? 15. Make sure they've experienced lots of trauma, but don't bother showing them actually being affected by it. You don't want the character's coolness being watered down by things like human psychology. Emotions are only good for eliciting sympathy. As long as the character whines about the bad stuff, it will seem authentic.

I have put a ban on any channel that might show the orange menace’s face for the entire weekend. I’m going to pretend the world stopped on the 19th and live in my little bubble until it pops, until then I will be watching a marathon of cartoons with the kids. That is all.

All I know is that rain is the most appropriate thing to happen today...

Well… This morning I turned on the TV and threw up in my mouth a bit. I haven’t done that since the day Diana died. And for many of the same reasons.

Read The Warriors by Sol Yorrick. Dead serious. It’s all about black adolescent street gangs, their lives and how they form. Their mentality. Granted it’s set in like the 60’s or earlier, but it paints a vivid enough picture that it could easily be applied to inner city youths today. After all, war...war never changes.

Working Title: The Bone Collector Fandom: Naruto Plot: Remember that filler episode where Naruto and Team 8 fought those crazy bee ninjas? I had this idea where the one woman Suzumebachi swears vengeance on the genin, Hinata specifically. She hears rumors of a powerful witch and against better judgement seeks out their help. What she actually finds is this cackling, foul mouthed, old hillbilly in cave and his pet crow. He claims to be a witch but she just assumes he’s a dottering old hack ninja. So Kurenai, Kiba, Shino, Hinata and Akamaru investigate this blighted village where a young lord claims there is a plot by the farmers to kill him, and he just wants them to investigate and see if there’s any truth to the rumors. At that point I got stuck on where to go from there, other than a few hazy ideas. Team 8 would have to solve a mystery, while fending off raiding parties of zombies and skeletons. With a touch of horrible dreams a la “The Serpent And The Rainbow”. Really the whole idea was just an excuse to have Team 8 have their own adventure, fighting skeletons and well, a D&D style necromancer. Fatal flaws: 1. While the eponymous Bone Collector was A LOT of fun to write about (think the unholy love child of Mumm-Ra and Otis B. Driftwood), and he stole show…He is an outside context issue for the ninja. He’d be more at home in a D&D or Conan The Barbarian story than in Naruto. That made it harder to justify his abilities and how it would contrast to the ninjas and how their world worked. Balance was an issue I just couldn’t work around without poking holes in accepted canon. 2. Team 8 themselves. They were never really explored much in canon, so I had to fill in the blanks myself how their group dynamic would work. Shino is especially difficult to make interesting. Kurenai was also with them supervising them as Kakashi would Team 7. 3. I tried working an angle of him being the servant of a Discount Cthulhlu god. This ended up requiring a whole backstory in of itself, with an ancient Groman/Not Atlantis city (in order to justify having a bunch of Hoplite skeletons roaming around the extremely Japanese setting of Naruto), and trying to staple it into an otherwise “working within canon” story. 4. Getting from point A to B was one thing. Giving the Team banter between themselves ended up not being as interesting as I had hoped. The whole plot revolved around their mission being a trap. The bee ninja woman kind of fell by the way side as the idea just fizzled out. 5. The team fighting their way to the Necromancer through his spooky zombie infested woods was cool and all but. But. . . actually fighting him? It goes back to problem 2, how to do it in a way that makes sense and doesn’t end in a curb stomp battle for either side. You gotta be damn good to convince cynical ff readers you’ve made a genuine OC and not just another Sue power fantasy. 6. Ninja aren’t exactly equipped to fight the undead. It’s not like in Inuyasha or something where Miroku could whip up some sacred sutra and Turn them. In order to justify spirits and other ghoulish fun that would mean giving the ninja something to level the playing field. I came up with the idea that Hinata’s byugugan can be trained to see spirits, and over the course of the fic she would learn how to unlock this ability. As an added bonus, to give the villain a reasonable motivation, he would be out to steal the byuguagn for said purpose. After I wrote it out, it just felt like cheating though. Typical readers of Naruto crap tend to frown on this kind of canon welding too. 7. My alternative to make the story make more sense was to pull a Shyamalan and make the so called witch...an actual fake! As in he’s just an old ass ninja who using illusions to make it seem like he’s this all powerful sorcerer, when in fact he’s a fraud. This idea bored me and was a chore to try and write. Keeping or abandoning? I started the first two chapters before fizzling out. I think I’ll scrap the fic and use the Necromancer character I made for something else. Maybe put him in a setting that makes more sense for his type of character.

Awesome way to learn characterization. I was into D&D years ago. Got me started with creating characters, and led to writing. I'm not a frequent back story O.C. writer. I prefer to throw my O.C. characters to the proverbial rabid wolves form line one. Brings out lots of flaws, and shows the subtle sicknesses so to say. Then again, I tend to write the psycho loner that thinks He/she has to save the world. My O.C. characters last only so long a necessary to carry off the plot requirement. Most of my characters tend to be somewhat psychotic with illusions of grandeur that make them easy enough to kill off as soon as they finish their job. I did enjoy your how to Mary Sue though. That made me smile. It usually is the oh so perfect that irritates everyone around. Then again, I've known an FBI lady my uncle worked with for several months who was damned near perfect. Took nearly four months to find a single flaw in that one. She was scary perfect. All I can say is that when I found out she had driven herself into a really huge emotional hole from the stress, she finally became human. It took her needing emergency surgery to put her damaged guts back together because she had so many bleeding ulcers for people around her to recognize that there is such a thing as an imposter of perfection. One thing I would love to see is the Cannon that sees and O.C. as perfect. Then show the O.C. away from the Cannon do something like bulimia fits or any kind of huge emotional crack up where the other characters can't see the supposed perfect one completely lose it. the O.C. resumes his or her spotlight on the stage with the cannons, and voila, you have seen how imperfect and fake the O.C. is pretending to be.

I write a great many OC's in my fics and have NEVER written a Mary Sue. To make such a generalization is not only ignorant but offensive. There are many good writers out there looking for an audience and fanfiction is one way they find them. In the fandom in which I write, there is a dearth of female characters of a certain age. There is little choice but to bring in an OC, otherwise a writer ends up producing nothing but Lolita stories or post end of series stories. Sometimes those don't work. As for the low number of reviews, maybe the number is low because too many people view fanfics like you do, and disregard OC stories without giving them a chance. I'm not trying to be offensive, just pointing out the error in your logic. My rule for OC's is there has to be a reason for them to be in the plot. They can't just suddenly show up and be accepted by all and sundry because the writer wants them to.