I'm worry about posting new story setting in this forum

Well right now I think that the Two stories ideas that will fly are my 24th century Sword and Planet and Kavi 27th century stories,


Were is the spellcheck button on this forum?,


LW

Michael Everett

I'm glad that you are posting here, the advice is good, common sensical stuff. Like our friend, I do tend to play around with "set building" rather than story writing, but for me the exercise is intellectual and not really intended for consumption [human or otherwise ]

I was discussing writing with another person, who noted that Star Trek was a great place to grab story hooks; mostly because Star Trek has very little internal consistency within each series, much less across the board. (This seems a double edged sword to me, there is a lot of stuff people would consider "cannon" in Star Trek, but because of the various in series plot holes, there is also a lot of background material you will have to do yourself)

My question to you is do you find it easy to grab a hook from an existing series, or do you need to delve deeply into the series to do your fanfic?

Three of us now have told you that there is no spellcheck button on this forum. We have previously explained several ways that you can use spell check in MS Word or other word processing programs when writing your stories. You then copy and paste passages to post here. All of what you write should be checked, not just what you post here.
I must admit to being a little frustrated by your continued refusal to read what we say and act on it. We aren't telling you this for any benefit to us, but for your benefit.

lwhitehead wrote:Well right now I think that the Two stories ideas that will fly are my 24th century Sword and Planet and Kavi 27th century stories,


Were is the spellcheck button on this forum?,


LW

Thucydides wrote:My question to you is do you find it easy to grab a hook from an existing series, or do you need to delve deeply into the series to do your fanfic?

The answer is... yes.

Quite a bit of it depends on the series in question. Harry Potter only has 7 mainline books and a limited number of secondary sources, so is relatively easy to work with. Things like Marvel have much more to work with, but are a great deal messier, meaning that it's all too easy to trip over Canon and annoy the fans.
And something like Naruto... well, recent revelations have seriously undermined some of the early portions of the story. That means that it's almost open season for doing new things.

In general, I try to do at least some research. With fanfic, the world-building has already been done for the original series, thus it can be used as a strong foundation with only a few tweaks to let you write the story you want. Serious fanficcers often have encyclopedia-levels of knowledge about the universe(s) they play in.

With fanfic letting you learn how others build their worlds, those lessons can then be applied to original fiction. Star Trek itself is a sort-of case in point, the lack of overall consistency is because a large percentage of the books are written by fanfic authors trying to turn pro.
This also explains the varying styles and quality of writing in the books.

The one thing I truly detest is the "Fanfic In Name Only" stories where the only thing it has in common with the original is the names of the characters (and sometimes not even that). Some of these FiNO stories are so legendarily bad that they can actually achieve a deluded grandeur as the writer is totally ignorant that their skills are akin to Bergholt Stuttley Johnson.
If they want to write things unconnected to the source material, why don't they simply write original fiction?
Grrrr.....

I told before NO Fanfics, I don't write that way.


Um also I can't figure out how to use MS Works or Word on this forum, I don't do links.


In a nutshell PC's and me have a love hate thing going on, I love them but they hate me.

BTW I bin thinking about sleeper ships, if one has to travel around 10 to 20 light years from Earth how can one keep up things running with little support from Earth?,


LW

You don't use MS Word or Works on this forum or link them. What you do is write your stories on them or something similar away from the forum. Then you use their spell and grammar checkers to check your document. As mentioned by several of us they are not perfect but will help. Regardless of whether you mean to post on this forum you should do this. What do you write your stories on now?

Then when you wish to post a sample for those here to help you with you copy the sample across.
There are a number of ways to copy text. I just highlight what I want with the mouse using the left button, then click on the highlighted piece with the right mouse button, and select copy from the dropdown menu that appears.

Then you go to the forum, open up a posting page, put the mouse cursor over it, right click again and select paste from the menu that appears.


In regard to sleeper ships there have been many stories written about them. Some have a crew rotation system taking watches in yearly turns, some have a dedicated crew staying awake all the time, some are totally automated with all asleep until arrival. Larry Niven's Known Space series was a good example.

lwhitehead wrote:I told before NO Fanfics, I don't write that way.


Um also I can't figure out how to use MS Works or Word on this forum, I don't do links.


In a nutshell PC's and me have a love hate thing going on, I love them but they hate me.

BTW I bin thinking about sleeper ships, if one has to travel around 10 to 20 light years from Earth how can one keep up things running with little support from Earth?,


LW

Hi lwhitehead:

On my computer in edit and compose mode I see red squigles (squiggles) under mispelled (misspelled) words right clik (click) and sugested (suggested) spellings ahould(should) appear for you to click on. I purposely left the misspellings in the first sentence (with the correct spelling in parentheses) if you reply with quote you should see the misspellings underlined. So right click on them and you should see the suggestions for corrections on your machine, then left click the correct spelling when your mouse arrow highlight is on it. If not it is due to vagaries of your software, and that I can't help you with

Be aware if you misspell a word correctly IE 'fro' (a long bladed tool to make shingles by hand) for 'for' it won't underline it. Also if you pick a correct spelling from the list, but it is not the correct spelling the word you really want it can cause snide comments. The world is unkind to the spelling deficient, sigh.

Poker

Bergholt Stuttley Johnson. Hahahahahahaha.......gasp

Reminded me of the scene in "This is Spinal Tap" when they describe a massive stage set for a keynote song in their tour. Sadly for the band, while the envision dwarfs dancing around an 18 foot high replica of Stonehenge, the drawing on the napkin says 18".....

Michael Everett wrote:Serious fanficcers often have encyclopedia-levels of knowledge about the universe(s) they play in.

But it is definitely not a requirement.

Occasionally i read some crossover where the writer apologises because s/he hasn´t actually read/seen one of the sources at all, and you read the story and it turns out to be excellent...

That´s actually happening more often than one where the writer mess up a source.
Although that may of course be that those who apologises seriously tries to do a good job about it, because they understand their limits.

But of course it helps to know the source.

Michael Everett wrote:The one thing I truly detest is the "Fanfic In Name Only" stories where the only thing it has in common with the original is the names of the characters (and sometimes not even that). Some of these FiNO stories are so legendarily bad that they can actually achieve a deluded grandeur as the writer is totally ignorant that their skills are akin to Bergholt Stuttley Johnson.
If they want to write things unconnected to the source material, why don't they simply write original fiction?
Grrrr.....

Aye... It´s sometimes funny though when you read a synopsis and go "WTF?" and then it ends with "AU", uh yeah i kinda got that considering how the synopsis didn´t have even the slightest connection with the source material(and probably contradicted it to the -nth degree)...

Had to admire the audacity(sarcasm/parody?) of one writer i recall though, who stated the story was "Slightly AU" and then specified that several primary characters had changed gender, half the cast turned gay, the story moved hundreds of years in time, to another planet(possibly dimension), and most characters types/skills and personalities were changed while the story itself had nothing to do with the orignal.


And BSJ...

Michael Everett wrote:Quite a bit of it depends on the series in question. Harry Potter only has 7 mainline books and a limited number of secondary sources, so is relatively easy to work with. Things like Marvel have much more to work with, but are a great deal messier, meaning that it's all too easy to trip over Canon and annoy the fans.
And something like Naruto... well, recent revelations have seriously undermined some of the early portions of the story. That means that it's almost open season for doing new things.

I usually go by the notion that canon is a strong suggestion, a baseline to start with, and if i want to change anything i have to either do it in story, or justify it to a degree that i can realistically argue it as if it was a legal case.

Annoying fans you will do no matter what you write, so i just dont bother trying to avoid it per se, instead trying to focus on the story and having a decent reason for it if i ever write something that i know will annoy some fans.

But that´s the thing, all fans have wildly differing views, especially for fandoms like Naruto, where there are hordes of "shippers" as well as love/hate for every character there is.

For my biggest story, twice now i´ve gotten both a "ooh neat!" and a "how could you!" reaction to the one and same character development, and i think as long as you get close to a 50-50 divide on like and dislike about details, you´re probably doing pretty good.

If you get nothing but good response, you´re either doing great, or there´s a bigger problem(only getting an "easy" audience, or you wrote so horrendously poorly that readers dont understand what´s really happening).

Oh so that what those read marks means when I write thanks,


Now one of the problems that I got with finding a planet from Earth is that's in the 10 to 20 light year range. Sleeper ships would take a long time get too and through, I don't know how they are going to crew it that's one of things not mention in the Avatar setting.

LW