Percyness quality guidelines.

Over the last several months I've received stories at Percyness: The Percy Weasley Archive that were of questionable quality.

Many of them were completely unbeta'd and written with the care you'd put into sketching a fic on the back of a cocktail napkin. Some had formatting so strange the story was unreadable. I'm not speaking to the person who uploaded their story as a solid block of text.

I've struggled with some truly bad poetry. Other stories were borderline. They seemed to be beta'd, but consisted of minimalist verbal tags floating in a sea of nothing, or epithets overused to a point that it seemed dozens of people occupied the bed and not just two. There were excellent characterisations of Percy with all other characters as cardboard cut-outs dancing around him.

It has stretched my original policy of "accept everything if it's at least beta'd" to the breaking point.

I didn't want to be the arbiter of taste. But neither do I want to host an archive of stories no one would want to read. Where does one draw the line?

What do you think? What do you want in an archive?

[Poll #695887]

Skating AU

God damn it. I have four or five wildly different versions of the next part of the skating AU. But none will click.

I ran the first version past WG. He said, "Ick."

I ran the second version past WG. He like it, "That's nice." But still, it didn't feel right that John would do what he did there.

I ran the third version past WG, but John still insisted on doing something rather bad. I described what was going through John's head after he woke up at Rodney's. It didn't make sense that the story kept going back to the "bad boy" stuff. WG reminded me of something that happened earlier in the story which would make the "bad boy" overkill. I agree.

I wrote a scaled down version (number four) of the "bad boy" stuff, there, but not as "Ick." It included some nice flirtation but felt rather forced.

I sat down to write the next part, version five. It worked. Er. Except it's boring. And there are lines lingering from what I excised that no longer made sense. And the Rodney POV now no longer went anywhere, yet my instincts tell me it's needed.

So I wrote something completely different, version six. And... it feels like it wanders. It's cool, but maybe it should turn up later.

Version seven had a reversal of the bad boy stuff -- this time Rodney had the upper hand. It was... amusing. But rather weak. I didn't like it.

I'm reaching the point where I'm just gonna pick (possibly at random) slap it up here just so I can move on.

This is what I get for not keeping my word about writing one part per day. My apologies, I really thought that I could keep up with regular writing during finals -- I have in the past. This just turned out to be a much rougher final than I imagined. *does Vajrasattva in apology to cesperanza and other people I promised.*

Is there a raindance I can do to unstick this part?



ETA: Thank you, o wise ursule, lady of the laundry. She pointed out that I've likely hit the "dead zone" in the middle of a long story, where you know everything that's going to happen. She advised that I write it backwards -- or out of order.

Makes offerings of praise at the washboard of wisdom. *bows*