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

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

In the end, I chose the latter, but I'm afraid if you go with this option, you'll get a lot of tedious work for yourself: not to be accused of nepotism, you'll have to explain why this or that story isn't decently written, in your opinion, and argue with the authors of those fics.

I'd have to state the standards up-front on the submission page and run the risk of scaring people off. Or do what Telanu used to do with the old WTP and just say I reserve the right to refuse any story. But I need to clarify for myself at least what those standards are because it's too hard to make the call at 2am when a paper's due and a submission turns up in the in-box.

It helps that the Percy-fans are a quiet lot, used to being downtrodden, hopelessly defending their favorite much-maligned character. :) Anger is less likely than wounded sulking.

Icarus