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A bird recently shat on my head. Apparently that’s lucky, although I can’t say it felt lucky at the time. Still, perhaps the lucky bit was that it was a seagull and not one of the 28lb pelicans we were surrounded by.

Yes, we’re working on tightening things up further. Understand something, we are not an eCommerce site, thankfully, so credit card numbers, banking information, personal identifiers such as social security numbers are not something we ever ask our users for. We don’t ever have a need to ask for that kind of critical information from a user. No announcements will be made until everything is finished. Kind of silly to do that if it takes awhile to get it done, yes?

What I do to help combat the tendency, is to randomly choose some personality traits for each character. So, I’ve got a file with a comprehensive list of various traits, and let the computer randomly grab from it. Ditto for hobbies, allergies, and phobias; that’ll help shape the characters. In the end, though, there will always be a bit of you in the character, but hopefully, they’ll all be distinctive enough that an audience can’t tell that it started out as an orgy in your head.

Yaaas! Let shit happen! Might I also add to that, let good and bad things happen to other characters? Our lives aren’t always about us. Sometimes we get involved in other people’s shit and we’d be douchebags if we went around making all that other stuff all about us. But maybe your character is a douchebag, so they make things all about them, which is fine, just make sure the surrounding characters react accordingly, and don’t all rip off their clothes on sight and throw themselves at the douchebag.

This is a very common doubt that plagues writers, particularly if they're new at the art. The only way to really know whether the characters you're writing are Mary Sues or not is to develop a strong sense of objectivity. You need to learn to pretend you have other opinions, other viewpoints, that you don't know what you, as a writer, know. Place yourself in the eyes of the audience, that's the only way you're going to find out. Like, for example, pretend you despise "cuteness" or clinginess. Does your character still have redeeming factors? Does she have flaws the audience can identify with? (remember: a flaw is only a flaw if it actually hampers the character; arachnophobia is not a flaw if the character never encounters spiders or never actually gets hindered in any way when she encounters one). Being detached and unemotional about your own writing is one of the hardest skills to acquire, but it's arguably the best when it comes to ensuring the quality of your work. And if you ever become a respected author someday, do try to keep this sort of thing in mind. I can't tell you how many authors I've seen who become so full of themselves in their maturity that they don't even consider the possibility that they too can make mistakes and write painful Mary Sues.

Try this: http://www.springhole.net/writing/marysue.htm

It’s fixed. Apparently my account in the archive was hacked. The hacker then deleted me after setting him/herself up as admin, and did all this.