MadoushiClef

Greetings and Salutations fellow Yaoi fans! Are you looking for a longer story to fill your nightly reading? Something a little sweet, a little angsty, with a dose of humor and sex to make you smile after a long, boring day? Then please check out our long-running project! With three couples there's a little something for everyone! ~_^ Title: Someone Like You Author: zalmansheart Rating: NC-17, please no children. Summary: Two households, both alike in dignity--no--wait, two groups of friends in high school merge uneasily after one fateful night in New York City, 2004. In the eternal search for love, friends, sex, and a good time, Hige, Duo, Quatre, Toboe, Omi, Trowa, and Heero stumble through one adventure after another. Oh, and Ken, mustn't forget Ken, Hidaka Ken, soccer coach, flower shop assistant, mechanic and friendly neighborhood heart-throb. Feedback: Like all of you writers, we LIVE on feedback. Fandom: Wieb Kruez, Wolf's Rain, Gundam Wing. Is it anime? Then you'll probably see a cameo somewhere. URL: http://anime.adult-fanfiction.org/story.php?no=600043708 Thank you so much for letting me promote our story! We hope to hear from you all very soon. ~Enjoy! Clef P.S. We promise to update every month. (Two chapters if we've been really productive!)

I want to put this out here because I don't think I can do this fic justice: Tezuka Shinobu verses Ootori Kyouya. It's a clash of titans. I have no idea who would come out on top, how they would fight or why. It could be with sex or without. Thanks to Shinobu, there could be other-worldly bent or not. It could be the entire Host Club verses all of Greenwood dorm. Or Kyouya could take over Greenwood with his private army. Or the two could sit over a Go board and stare icily at each other. They could be vying for class president at Tokyo University--really what ever would pit these two against each other. I ask that it be amusing as hell and please no non-con. I don't read non-con. You get to pick the why, when, where, how, and who wins. ^^ I am going to sit here and hope for an answer.

Heh heh heh... I think I only ever once left a review in similar vein because it was a WIP and the direction the author was writing in made it fairly obvious that the advertised pairing wasn't going to happen. That was fine with me, I didn't need it to, I just though that since it wasn't going to happen, maybe she should change the warnings and summary so the story the readers got was what she advertised. She of couse took it like I was beating on her for not going for the sex and stormed off in a huff. But what I meant was I preferred the new evolution to the sex. One of the reasons I am so heistant to actually assign my stuff to aff.net is because it is strictly an adult content stuff site, and I think maiafay said it best: translates to sex. After ff.net threw a fit and drop-kicked a lot of yaoi and adult writers out we didn't return. To anything. We took our stuff and left. Silk and Stone has closed. *tear not my SLAYERS FICS!* Archives have been dropped and abandoned, people kind of gave up and moved on. They didn't move their stuff to aff.net. I know there are near-perfect fics with sex in it, and sex wasn't the plot. I've read these fics on personal archives. These authors won't post here because the readers here don't seem to want good!fic. It's not true, but it seems to be. I love a good epic. And I love a good pwp. I wish that epics would be welcomed here as much as pwp's.

Start issuing challenges. Back when people used webrings (and they worked) you could slog through link pages and ring site lists for days and find stuff. You could e-mail to the list of writers and put forth and idea of, say, my new fav paring Sumeragi Subaru (Tokyo Babylon) and Conrad (Kyou Kara Maoh). Or some Nick/Greg (CSI). Try requesting something on LJ or GJ or InsaneJournal or DeviantArt. Offer to host writers and fics on your site if they include such-and-such fandom and are willing to write a few specialty fics just for you. Like I would want nothing more than to see Shinobu (Koko wa Greenwood) verses Kyouya (Ouran Host Club). No sex involved, just a clash to two titans. I can't write it because I don't know who would win. I don't know how they would fight or what they would fight over. Would Shinobu's psychotic sister get in the way and shoot someone? Would Kyouya's private army invade Greenwood? Would they just buy out each other's companies? Or would they icily glare at each other over a Go board? I don't even know who to ask this of because NO ONE knows Koko wa Greenwood, it's too old, never mind how much everyone hates a decent cross-over. Frankly, I've seen enough well-done cross-overs to love them as much as awesome OC's. But then the people that write those things never post to forum sites like ff.net or aff.net. They have their own homes. Build it and they will come? Maybe start a pairing request e-mail group and start an archive?

I must be really old-school because this isn't true. Yaoi is the anime catch-all term for male/male relationships. It includes shounen-ai, shotakon, non-con, anything with m/m sex. Shounen-ai is specifically the sweeter side of things, like kissing, holding hands, and WAFF stuff; if clothes come off, it becomes yaoi. Yaoi stands for Yami nashi, Ochi nashi, Imi nashi = without climax, without resolution, without meaning. The unfortunate collection of cliched romance stories with defined roles is due to the writers generally being 14 year old girls. As far as I ever knew (cause apparently this has changed) slash is any kind of a pairing fic. It's specifically a shipping fic, even if it's rape because you are slashing two characters; i.e. Hermione/Snape. Slash could be m/m, f/f, m/f, or f/m. Like yaoi, the order is important because like it or not, there is always a leader in a relationship. It can switch off constantly and the degree of who is running the show can be very slight. The best relationships are the ones where is doesn't feel like one is dominate or submissive, but your other half is complimentary to your weaker areas. Even then, what someone desires in bed can be comepletely different than way s/he is like outside the bedroom. If I find the name of the transgender study that I've read I'll post it. To sum up, the Japanese display of imposing heterosexual gender roles to a same-sex couple seems to be a societal compulsion to be "normal". (National motto: The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.) Anywho. Slash today seems to be defined as m/m since people use labels like femslash and hetslash. Yaoi is specifically anime m/m, but it isn't just the dime-store romance novels. To add to the collection... MYTH: Gays have a lisp. Truth: Homosexuality does not require a speech impediment. It was a fad that has thankfully faded along with that limp wrist movement.

I hate not being able to give people gushing reviews of awesomeness. I want nothing more than to finish a story and only be capable of giving a one-word review: Brilliant. I want to be swept away in a cascading seduction of a beautifully written story. I want Aristotle to be right: Plot. Character. Theme. Diction. (music) Spectacle. A good story well told. It's a lot to ask for. Most people can get even a basic plot down. Since AFF is mostly 'adult stories' and by that it sort of (unfortunately) translates to sex and porn, plot tends to get slightly forgotten... Which is a shame because that leaves Goggle to find something with plot, written with intelligence for us Yaoi writers since FF.net decided to oust us. We didn't move over here like I'd thought people would. Which leaves a lot of PWP which is fine if that's what you are looking for. Gods above know I've hunted for good porn more than once but really, I became a writer because it was another outlet for me: I'm a storyteller. It's GOT to be a good story. You can't have a story without plot. Characterization in fanfic is a mercurial thing. It can be very hard to agree with characterizations just for the sake of a kink or the advancement of an unlikely (or AU) plot. I write AU with Zalman's Heart and it's a disheartening thought to know someone is going to complain that our characters are COMPLETELY OOC and we stole from some 50+ different shows characters everyone loves and we had to have them. But we did that knowingly. We even warned people shit was different. But character interpretation is a hard thing to argue. 'Cause once you write them they are no longer the author's character, they are your character and hell be damned no body gets to touch them. But if you are going to go with radical changes I would request an explanation for the change from the show's character to your character somewhere. Your audience is reading the story for the show, characters, or the interesting summary tag. (Did I miss any? Sex, maybe?) The changes shouldn't make me want to withdraw my willing suspension of disbelief. I'm a yaoi fanfic writer, I have a lot of suspension capacity. Themes: have one. Please. Somewhere. It's a through-line, it's the bow all the threads at the end of the story get tied up in. It doesn't have to be AMAZINGLY complicated. Teamwork. Love. Hate. Pain. Good guys should always win. Good guys aren't as good as we want them to be. Bad guys can be good guys. I don't care what it is, so long as you the author can pinpoint what the theme is if I have to ask. Diction is my biggest pet peeve and the hardest to talk to writers about. A lot of it has to do with age, maturity, education, and style. Young writers tend (operative word) to not have the skill to convey a captivating story. Practice does make perfect only if the feedback helps him/her mature. If you can't read something because it so poorly written it won't matter the amazing-ness of the plot or characterization. Education is a huge factor. Younger writers sometimes just haven't been given the information, the structure, why the structure is as it is, and how to use language. I started writing fanfic at 14, I read a lot, I paid attention, but until college my writing was immature because I didn't understand the structure, why, and how to break it to tell the story better. Until college I didn't timeline, research, or pound out plot charts because I didn't know I had to. How do you explain to a 14 yr old that you need specifics? Their story wasn't exact enough? It had plot holes or the time-line didn't work? That their description (if they have those) of the Corinthian column is actually a Roman composite? Try convincing some 14 year old kid to do their homework on what they are writing about. Or they'll just dump excuses on style. Style should elevate the story, not disconnect the readers. Maturity is know the difference in all these things and others I won't get into. It's that personal strength to know what matters to your story most and how to best showcase it. It's the ability to have someone ask questions in the margins and being able to give them answers even if it's, "I don't know, I'll have to look it up/decide." I always want more description; my mind needs that moving picture. Unless the person has that genius style to describe a setting in eight words that give me the tone and mood and time and place. But that in itself is a mature style of a highly educated person. That precision word choice is a kind of dedication that can't be asked of most adults, never mind teenagers. Music doesn't apply much to fanfic, except in song fics or fics inspired by songs. The later is easier to deal with than the former because it is almost impossible to read the entire fic at the pace the song plays. Poets, on the other hand, can make music of spoken word. Spectacle for me is mostly the sex. Generally a story doesn't need sex, it's just window dressing to draw people in, I think. A small hook that hopefully the plot will override as the reader continues on. When I get a review that is negative I go over my goals I had set for my story. Did I meet these goals? Are they pointing out a plot problem? A characterization screw-up? Was my writing style boring? Too descriptive? Did it not have enough sex? What was the point? Did I make that point? Is this thing the reviewer didn't like something I could work on? As a writer, what do I personally think I need to develop? Or has my ego grown so big that I don't think I need to work on anything and that I'm PERFECT? Do I think my story meet all the Aristotelian requirements for a good story well told? I once had someone leave a review that they didn't like the kind of magic system I had used for a DNAngel story. That was all s/he said. There was no hint on what s/he thought would have made for a better system to use, or what could have been altered to heighten the tension or keep the tension and change the aspects s/he didn't like. I was more angry that it was a useless one-line than it was negative. The only thing I could think of was that in his/her religion, ritual magic is used and my corruption of it for the story insulted them. A haphazard guess at most; I only had one line to work with. It's hard dealing with insults and negative comments but the maturity of a writer--or indeed anyone--is to grasp the root of what is being said of their skill and use that to overcome something that might not have even been in your consciousness before. That's one good thing about having a beta that works on a different plain then you; they will see and know things you would not even consider.

Editing is neccessary, it can be lots of fun, and having a Beta is always a Good Thing. In fact, editing with your beta in the same room or on the phone with you can be the funnest way of working on your story. I prefer printing stuff out, which is a waste of tree and yes I'm ashamed, but putting pen to paper is ALWAYS more satisfying the typing. Even if the story is just going to be typed up later. But reading it out loud to your beta helps the syntax and makes a stronger character voice. Plus I am a perfectionist and my writing partner and I have no qualms about changing each other's works, so long as we give it back and let the other undo/rework any changes. The different perspective always helps me find things I miss and she'll come up with turns of phases that would never cross my mind. Plus she's good at things I'm not, like innocent, naive characters. I'm going to echo what everyone else has said: Creating is work but it's the kind of work I can love.