icon habit

You know how there are some days when you use a different icon for every comment or post, and you scroll up and down that icon menu like a hawk, and you rush hither and thither to make and upload new icons for all the new moods / fandoms / people / quirks / exotic flora rollicking through your life?

And then there are some days when you just want to sit back and hit 'post' and use that default icon.

Yeah. That's my profound thought for the day, anyway. :-) Sunshine clearly does make the brain slow down.
(Oh weather post, where art thou?)

why do people dislike first person singular and present tense fic?

isiscolo posted a list of her personal unreasonable dislikes in fic. But what is even more interesting than her list is the thread the list has generated. Because while one list tells you something about that person and the idiosyncratic nature of personal taste and how nobody's predilections ever overlap 100 per cent with your own, a look at the thread reveals patterns.

Most of the people on that thread seem to be HP (or former HP) fans and SGA fans so maybe there are also some fandom patterns in there. Certainly, some of the dislikes do not coincide with what I remember of lotrips.

Two disliked points I found especially intriguing:

1. A lot of people dislike the first person pov and say it throws them out of a fanfic. Even when they don't specify, I am assuming that all of these people mean the first person singular.

I have no special dislike of the first person singular. It is a very objective voice (perhaps that is why people don't like it? some people also voiced dislike of omniscient which can give the effect of objectivity as well) because the first person narrator will nearly always know more than the first person character. When I was writing Desert Prince, for example, I noticed how easy it was to build suspense: "I trusted him but I was young and innocent and did not know the doom to come." That kind of thing. So there are interesting experiences to be had with a first person narrator. I am intrigued (and a little bit puzzled) that this seems to be such a disliked voice, especially as it is quite popular in publfic.

2. A lot of people dislike the present tense.

Now, this one also puzzles me. In lotrips, I read a lot of present-tense stories; I got quite used to them. I also value them a lot in publfic. One of my favourite publauthors, Andrea De Carlo, often uses present tense in his novels (I may be biased here because I read his novels in the original and, er, Italian present tense is much easier to read than the Italian passato remoto... *g*). I have also written present tense, and it has a sparkle and sharp tang to it that I like a lot, both in the writing and the reading. It makes everything very vivid and slightly artificial (and I like a bit of slight artificiality in my prose fiction, a sort of stylistic self-consciousness). It also lends itself well to stream-of-consciousness writing, not a mode I particularly love but a mode that I don't mind exploring now and again (both as reader and writer).

This tense also reminds me of the epistolary novel because if you're writing a letter, you are presenting what is happening from day to day, from moment to moment. The bulk of the letter might be past tense ("this morning, we found an alien presence in our midst") but can plausibly veer into present tense at all times ("I must sign off as there is a screaming down the corridor and I want to investigate").


Also, I noticed that a few people dislike weeping men and detailed anatomical exposition of the sex act. Ah, now these are two unreasonable likes of mine... A well-done weeping man, weeping manly tears in manly reticence, can reduce me to squees, and a detailed anatomical exposition can just make me darn-it-all hot.

Over and out. :-)