Percyness quality guidelines.

[icarus]

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]

Comments

[sarcastic-irony.livejournal.com]

This really got me hung up, actually. It's true that Percy stories are hard to come by (I've read most every story on the site), but we cannot sacrifice quality for quantity. I picked choice three, because it's a fair minimum. I mean, I always want more Percy stories, but I hate getting lulled into reading crap.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

This really got me hung up, actually.

It's tough, isn't it? I'm usually a pretty decisive person, and more interested in being fair than in being liked -- but this? This is a tough call. Especially when you get down to the individual stories.

Icarus

[sarcastic-irony.livejournal.com]

Yeah. This is a real problem in the Percy-centered writing pool. I just hate when I finally find a Percy story I haven't read (there are few), and it turns out to be WAY OOC and just plain bad. That makes me even more sad than not finding new stories at all.
I feel like Percyness is a good archive (with the exception of people's lack of commenting) because it is a good collection of stories that, even though I've read them, are still better than most you would find elsewhere.
And as much as I'd like to say, "fuck up bad stories until they're good," one, it's not your job to beta everyone's work, and two, filling an archive with crap is worse than not filling it at all.

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

because it is a good collection of stories that, even though I've read them, are still better than most you would find elsewhere.

I'm glad to hear that. I think when I cut off my Earthlink account and the Percy Fic-A-Thon site shut down and moved... well, that made a core of 50 quality fics. People did an amazing job on the Fic-A-Thon challeges. Then I begged some solid writers like James Walkswithwind, Hijja, and Cedar for their Percy fics, so that really helped. Oh. Almost forgot: I haven't asked Copperbadge yet. He's got a great Percy/Oliver, very masculine and hot.

with the exception of people's lack of commenting

That is a problem but it's not the readers' fault. The system is set up so you have to be logged in to leave a review. It's a real pain. I don't know enough about eFiction to solve it yet.

Icarus

[sarcastic-irony.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I often want to leave a review, but then I have to sign in, then find the story again, and then remember what I was gushing about a moment before. And my admiration cools, which makes for less awesome reveiws.