Selenay's Ramblings

Femslash "don't have to know canon" rec fest!

Would you like to read more femslash but are intimidated by unfamiliar canons? Or would you like to draw more people into your femslashy fandom? This fest is for you! Rec & find recs for femslash narrative fanworks that can be enjoyed with little to no canon knowledge!

Today and tomorrow are planned as quiet, very little activies days and then I'm on a plane back to Canada on Saturday. My feelings about this are mixed: I've loved my holiday, had so much fun doing stuff and playing tourist in England, and am at the "will kill for my lovely comfy bed and beautiful shower" stage of being OK with going home. Obviously I'd love to continue wandering around in shorts and bare feet, doing cool stuff like bookshops, musicals and cream teas. Not being at work has been awesome. I am starting to miss my own bed, shower and kitchen though.

Seriously, how did I sleep in the bed here for all those years?

Today I tried to sleep in a bit, which resulted in me getting up not long after 8am with a nasty oversleeping headache. I'm now trying to consume sufficient caffeine to make that go away.

And thus, I'm thinking about fun silly things like fic and fandom and stuff!

On the one hand, it's very frustrating that AO3 keeps going down. Argh. On the other hand, I'm constantly amused that it's because the Avengers explosion is taking it down :-D As I'm one of the people hitting it up every day for new stuff (I have more stuff flagged to read later than I can count right now, argh) I can't even be that mad. Poor AO3, it survived Yuletide fairly well this year and now a single newish fandom is killing it.

Speaking of Avengers fandom, you should all go and read everything Avengers that scifigrl47 has written. She brings the crack and it's laugh out loud, brilliant stuff with astonishingly good writing and characterisation considering she's writing high octane insanity. I'm particularly enamoured of anything in the Toasterverse and you need to read it to know why it's brilliant.

Also, I got recced this Sherlock slash story yesterday (Matchmaker, Matchmaker) that is lovely and long and the first chapter has already got me hooked. When I get home, there is going to be a big recs post of doom for all the stuff that I've been reading lately.

I should also probably throw all of it onto Haven Reviews. It's been too long since that got a good update.

It appears that I'm falling back into fandom with ease and joy :-) And now, I'm determined to get at least 1,000 words down on something today. I've now got two on the go fics - Sum of Parts (Doctor Who) and the as-yet-unamed Avengers thing for the Marvel Big Bang. This may be my most productive year for at least five years.

Who am I and where did tired, unhappy, uncreative Sel go? Because I don't want that Sel back. I like this happy one much better :-)

I've already got two fic recs for this author in next week's review archive update, so I'll point to the fic here instead :-)

Lovers in a Dangerous Time is a very good Jack/Ianto fic. The author describes it as mostly an excuse for smut, but it's rather more than that. So far, all her Torchwood fics are worth reading so check out her fic journal, lucyjanesparlor.

Today I was mostly trying to make a poster about what my department does. The slight technical hitch is that I don't really know what we do. My role seems to be mainly punch bag for things that go wrong and tech support for idiots in Ireland at the moment - not what I think they want in a promo poster for a conference Thursday :-)

I've been meaning to make this post for a while because every now and again I get asked this question: "Why do I only review things that I'm recommending? Why don't I review stuff and tell people why it shouldn't be read?"

There are a lot of reasons. One of them is that there are people out there who are doing a great job of that already and I don't feel any need to add to it.

Another is that when I'm looking for something to read I'm much more interested in what's good than skipping past a bunch of things telling me to avoid something. I assume that visitors to the archive are looking for the same thing so I'm trying to provide that - a place where they know that anything on the site must have been enjoyed by someone else and they don't have to scour for the good stuff in among the "OMG, this one is so bad don't read it!!!" reviews.

On some level I'm also not comfortable about hosting a site that's tearing fics to pieces or being deliberately cruel. That's not to say that I don't think fics should be discusses and critisised in the same way that profic is - far from it - but it's far too easy for that kind of thing to go way too far. I think it's healthy to discuss fic and I get very annoyed by the fanfic writers who demand that all dicussion of their work must be positive or they'll throw some kind of tantrum. If they don't want to read critisism of their work then don't go into those areas of the internet and stop reading your feedback.

I don't really have specific criteria for reviewing/recommending something. These days I do tend to read fic with an eye to whether I'll review it, but I definitely don't review everything that I read. There are fics that I quite enjoy while I'm reading them, but not enough to rush out and tell everyone else to read them. There are also fics that I really enjoy, consider recommending but eventually decide there are too many flaws for me to be able to recommend. I read one just this week (no, not going to be passing that one on) that had that effect. I also had one in the most recent batch of reviews on the site that I recommended despite its flaws because I there was something about it that made it live on in my head.

There have been a few fics that I've reviewed days or even weeks after I read them, not because they were immediate candidates for reviewing but because the ideas and questions they raised stayed with me for so long. Not perfect fics, but I thought there were people out there who would really get something from them.

Of course, there are a few things that will prevent me from reviewing something. There are some authors, cesperanza, mmmchelle, riverfox to name but a few, who would have almost everything they'd written reviewed on the site if I didn't control myself. With those authors, I restrict myself to reviewing only the really stand-out pieces. Hopefully readers who find fics through the archive will also go on to explore other works by the authors reviewed because, nine times out of ten, the rest of their stuff is also pretty terrific.

I probably review more than half of what I read these days. There are always fics that are so bad that I can't finish them and feel no need to because I'm not running an archive that would review them. There are always, sadly, fics that have fantastic potential and fall apart in the final sections. There are fics where I never even get past the summary because they sound so, so bad.

Not everyone agrees with everything that I've reviewed and there are things on the site that I recommended four years ago and wouldn't recommend now. I'm not taking those down, though, because I know that I saw something in them at the time that I thought was important.

I'd be interested to know what other people think of fanfic reviews, what their policies are if they review and, if you don't review, what things you actually want to know from a review that would make you want to read the fic.