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It’s a good day when you get a first look at the cover art for your book, and it’s completely amazing!

Agree with all of you: When it comes to fiction writing, there can be no hard and fast rules. Yes, 98% of your sentences should have both a subject and a verb, but there’s that other 2% that are so much better if they have only one or the other, or neither. (“My name is Bond. James Bond.”) That said, rule-breaking only results in good writing when it’s done for a purpose, and not just because the writer doesn’t know the rules in the first place.

Oh, yes! This! Seriously, if I need to zoom to read what you’ve written, I’m just going to click on by.

Well that’s unfortunate, unrealistic and highly improbable are my forte. The rules of writing are more like stable observations, everything is ultimately circumstantial. I guess my biggest personal peeve is lack of detail. A lot of internet fiction I’ve read take place in a vacuum, with the setting only vaguely described and characters who lack motivations or identities. Fan fiction tends to be especially guilty of this because novice or lazy authors may just assume we know the characters and setting. Failing to fill in the blanks makes immersing the reader into the story difficult. This makes the story inaccessible to newer readers, doesn’t convey what the author has in mind, and ultimately doesn’t build upon the established lore. Which I think is the whole point of fan fiction, never mind original works that need to be engrossing right out of the gate. Other than that, basic literacy errors that should have been corrected in grade school will turn me away. Such as spelling mistaiks, poorer grammar, missplaced!punctuation, verbing, run on sentances that go on and on and on, and sentences that end before they.

What?! No! Not as long as I have something to say about it! Okay… Content warning: I swear. I actually raged about epithets before. I don’t remember where. People just acted like it was just inane – like I just pulled a random, nonsensical pet peeve out of my ass. I get this reaction whenever I tell people that helper verbs are passive. Yes, I am still on a crusade against overuse of ING verbs. But one of my major pet peeves, and this I have developed recently, is something I see in a lot of writing tips articles. It never used to bother me, but I find I get pretty pissed off when I encounter it now. Professionals telling amateurs not to do something. The word lists apply to this. “Don’t use gimmicks”, “Don’t use intensifiers”, “Don’t put rape in there”, “Don’t chop your arm off and eat it” (I couldn’t remember any more...) Of course there are some things that are best avoided, but when you tell a budding, insecure writer not to do something, like BW said, they’ll twist themselves into a pretzel to avoid shit when maybe, just maybe, it would have been fine. There’s a time and a place for everything. To me, when I beta, it’s more important that you’re conscious of your word choice, and when you make iffy choices, like throwing in a ‘very’ (outside of dialogue) that you did it intentionally and well. Plus I really fucking hate it when someone tells me not to do something.

Bear and bare. Oh, and definitely and defiantly. Really???

I’m going to own up to abuse of epithets. My editors tend to want to beat me over the head, I think, and they are teaching me to stop that annoying habit. It started, quite frankly, when one person who was editing a novella of mine took the hard and fast rule that there could only be one “he” in a paragraph. Dude, I write slash, okay? It’s ALL he. If you are clear enough in the context of the sentence, a reasonably sober reader can figure out which male it is. I’m also coming out in support of the correct use of “that” because nothing grates more than seeing people go through contortions in writing to avoid a word someone put on a blog as a “bad” word. There are no bad words. Trust me on this. A good editor understands when you need “that” as opposed to “which” and certainly as opposed to the spate of verbiage required to avoid using either word. I do miss the Oxford comma, however. Apparently it’s going out of style again. ::sigh::

Wow, such an old topic, interesting find @Dirty Unicorn. In my stories, I want things to be realistic/plausible, so I excise anything that isn’t. Guess that’s a pet peeve of mine, unrealistic/highly-improbable. (Though, I’ll overlook it on a story/movie if it’s otherwise very, very, interesting.)

So, my mum’s mini strokes can’t be made to go away permanently. Well that’s just fucking dandy. Anybody got a heart in good working order they don’t want anymore?

I actually tear at my hair when geniuses confuse waste with waist. I can’t even roll my eyes hard enough anymore!