ingrid
2009-04-27 11:05 pm UTC (link)

Is the show on hiatus? One shots are hard when canon is scarce - post-eps are where it's at for those kinds of fics.

"Series" is another name for WiP except you don't have to put the dreaded WiP label on it so people are more likely to read your loosely related one-shot versus an "incomplete" fic. Series are the ultimate hybrid between one-shots and WiPs. Not incomplete but not unfamiliar ... win-win, at least for authors.

It's all about the feedback, baby. Yes, authors are sneaky, sneaky creatures, especially with limited canon.

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stella_polaris
2009-04-27 11:09 pm UTC (link)

It is on hiatus, but I scrolled through two major fic communities and the trend seems to have started before the second series begun.

I'm just baffled by the amount of it. Not to mention the fact that the majority of them are LONG. I don't know if the chapters are short, I haven't looked since I don't meddle with WiPs myself, but it just seems so odd. That one fandom has loads of WIPs with over 20 chapters.

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	erototoxin 2009-04-28 06:28 am UTC (link)
	A lot of the chapters are VERY short. Sometimes they post more than one part a day. It's maddening. (Reply to this)(Parent)

wallflower
2009-04-27 11:21 pm UTC (link)

The writers of those series where the number of parts goes into the triple digits tend to be writing badly punctuated, OOC "this is the story of Jack and Ianto's epic love" fic.

I think it's related to feedback; posting a new -- if shorter -- part every day instead of waiting to post one or two longer, more cohesive parts per week leads to more comments. And unfortunately, there is also a large market for badly punctuated, OOC "this is the story of Jack and Ianto's epic love" fic. (Not that ALL TW series fic is like this, but if you look at the stuff posted by the butthurt Janto authors who created epicproportion, it tends to fall under that category. The only non-Jack/Ianto long series that comes to mind right now is that unending "Gwen Cooper's Diary" fic.)

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	stella_polaris 2009-04-27 11:30 pm UTC (link)
	Yeah I kinda suspected it might be a case of quality < amount. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	janegraddell 2009-04-28 04:09 am UTC (link)
	Wow. I followed the original kerfuffle on jackxianto, but I didn't realize it had actually spawned its own schism community. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	lilpocketnin 2009-04-28 04:50 am UTC (link)
	Oh, god, we have a girl in one of my fandoms who posts like three drabbles a day. They're not badly written but it's like... Jesus save them up or something, please? (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	annabelle_lee 2009-04-28 05:26 pm UTC (link)
	I had the same issue on x_men100 before I decided to leave it for good. I suppose I should have given more slack since the community is pretty much dead otherwise, but ffs, it was just so annoying, especially since the poster didn't use any cuts either. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	lilpocketnin 2009-04-29 08:19 am UTC (link)
	...now I'm wondering if it's the same person. She writes comics fic. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	annabelle_lee 2009-04-29 08:31 am UTC (link)
	That'd be kind of creepy if it was. Name doesn't start with 'ion' and end with 'bond', does it? It could also be someone that starts with 'viking' and ends in 'princess', though as prolific as she is (seriously, she's writing some long ass AU that's not even made of drabbles on a drabble community and it's like at 100+ chapters already), she's not as annoying. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	lilpocketnin 2009-04-29 06:30 pm UTC (link)
	Ahh, nope! Starts with 'dork.' (Reply to this)(Parent)

snakeling
2009-04-28 01:57 am UTC (link)

It also may look like there's nothing but these soap fics right now because the writing part of the Tardis bigbang is ongoing, so a lot of the people who do write one-shots or reasonably-chaptered long-fics are currently participating, and not posting.

And, yes, the chapters tend to be on the short side. Very short side. Very, very short. There's a disturbing amount of bad mpreg as well :/

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	pariforma 2009-04-28 03:08 am UTC (link)
	That's a really neat icon. Bare-breasted priestesses FTW! (Reply to this)(Parent)

janegraddell
2009-04-28 03:56 am UTC (link)

God, I wish I knew what it was so I could hunt it down and make it suffer. A lot. The WIP situation is bad enough, but these "one-shots" that actually require you to track down and read the other bajillion tiny "one-shots" make my crazy. And yes, if you were wondering, the majority of those 20+-part WIP stories have very, very short chapters.

There was actually quite the (now deleted) kerfuffle on jackxianto about the WIP topic not so long ago. There were several prolific authors posting their 500-word "chapters" every day (or more often), and readers began to leave the community and/or complain to the mods. The mod made a housekeeping post reminding the members of a few of the rules, and also politely suggested that prolific authors consolidate their posts or otherwise post less frequently. Several of the worst offenders (teachwriteslash and cazmalfoy spring to mind, but there were a couple of others, too) flounced from the community with varying degrees of passive-aggressive grace (And in some cases apparently not realizing that their departure was not, in fact, much of a punishment to said community). It was really glorious while it lasted, crammed full of every single whiny author cliche ever, and I wish like anything I'd thought to cap it.

When torchwood_three started separating the WIPs from the finished stories in the digest, they got a lot of fan mail.

Now, I've gotten to the point in Torchwood fandom where I not only don't read WIPs, I don't read anything that's more than 20 parts without a recommendation from someone I trust and I also don't click on anything written by someone who posts nearly every day. Yes, there's the possibility that I'm missing out on the greatest masterpiece of Torchwood fanfic ever written, but somehow I don't think so. And if I am, someone will rec it and I'll get to it then.

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wallflower
2009-04-28 07:50 am UTC (link)

Here are some links from the anonmeme I sent to a friend (who's not a big participant in fandom but didn't want to miss the lulz when I told her about it) around the time it happened:

Original thread on the jackxianto post
(includes quotes from unsaved comments/comment threads)
Thread with cached version of jackxianto post with (some) comments
Link to new comm with quotes from the original version of the profile
Mocking the find-a-beta participants' inability to spell correctly
Anon snark attempts derailed by spelling errors
New comm is open for business

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	ariadne484 2009-04-28 09:27 am UTC (link)
	That was tasty and hilarious, thank you! (Reply to this)(Parent)

vzg
2009-04-28 10:16 am UTC (link)

Oh my god the mouse arguing that “I know.” Jack smiled. is wrong because Jack is apparently smiling his words to people is pissing me off, and I'm not even involved.

Until you create a language based entirely out of different ways of smiling, no one is ever going to smile a word, sentence, phrase, or any sort of vocalization at you! Common usage by terrible fanfic writers does not constitute the evolution of a language, or else I'd be hitting myself with a hammer and writing my script entirely in chatspeak.

Sorry. Major pet peeve. :[

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rodo
2009-04-28 01:02 pm UTC (link)

It took me about ten minutes to figure out what the problem was, because I first thought I'd have to fight with my ESL skills again. (We weren't taught English punctuation at all in school.)

And yes, major pet peeve for me as well. I betaed an awesome story a while ago and the author's writing was really great ... except for her habit of using words as speech tags that don't have anything to do with speech.

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	vzg 2009-04-28 01:45 pm UTC (link)
	I find this both surprising and not — we really never learned any of the punctuation in my language classes, and it took me a long time to learn that there were differences. It should be taught, damn it! ...Of course, after four years of Spanish plenty of my classmates still said things like "chair-o" and couldn't figure out how the grammar worked at all. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

rodo
2009-04-28 01:54 pm UTC (link)

Yes. I remember that my Japanese teacher said that there aren't really any rules for Japanese punctuation. I'm pretty sure she lied, because there are two different quotation marks and they are used with a system, I gathered that much. (Hey, we were told that English uses different quotation marks!)

In Spanish we were only told to put the question and exclamation marks upside down before the question ...

And how can someone not figure out grammar at all? Spanish really isn't that difficult. (Okay, I admit that I only took it for two years and that most of what I remember can be summarized with one Manu Chao song, but ...)

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	vzg 2009-04-29 11:36 am UTC (link)
	I don't know. It came pretty easily to me (although if you asked me to say anything simpler than "this boy likes to wear dresses" I'd fuck it up royally); they just kept using English grammar. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	tarash 2009-04-28 01:07 pm UTC (link)
	"I know," Jack smiled would be wrong, but "I know." Jack smiled isn't, because obviously Jack's smiling as he says it. Daft mouse. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	vzg 2009-04-28 01:43 pm UTC (link)
	Exactly! But they're arguing that it's a common way of saying "Jack said smilingly" WHICH ISN'T EVEN A THING. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	stella_polaris 2009-04-28 01:52 pm UTC (link)
	Well, to be honest, Jack probably could smile words to people, including, "I know". I bet Jack has more smiles that mean different things than anyone else. I bet he has a special smile he directs at Ianto when he wants to play Naked Hide & Seek. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	janegraddell 2009-04-29 12:07 am UTC (link)
	Thank you very much. It was really an event that should have a memorial somewhere. :) (Reply to this)(Parent)

	ruuger 2009-04-28 11:33 am UTC (link)
	I think some fandoms just naturally gear for long, multi-chaptered fics, and others for one-shots. Buffyverse, for example, is another fandom with a tradition of longer fics - most of the updates in any given community seem to be wip updates (and as the mod of gen_storyteller, I can say that the trend isn't limited to just shippy fic). (Reply to this)

	ellensmithee 2009-04-28 02:14 pm UTC (link)
	Maybe it's a new trend? I've been noticing it in the Dean/Castiel part of SPN fandom too. I usually prefer series, but at the moment I don't have much time to devote to reading them so I prefer one-offs, and it's almost impossible to find any. (Reply to this)

	velvet_mace 2009-04-28 05:23 pm UTC (link)
	It's nice, isn't it! But a lot of the chapters are actually only 400 words long, which if you go by word count would make the fic the size of one of my longer one-shots. But a few are wonderfully meaty. The SGA has a lot of longer fics in it as well. I guess some series are more open to plots and long character arcs. (Reply to this)

	kita0610 2009-05-03 02:57 am UTC (link)
	And 99.999% of them SUCK. (Reply to this)