LilMaibe said:
Oh, a little question to high and those sharing his/her (?) sentiments about fanfiction:
If 'filling in gaps in canon' is something a good fan should never do, shouldn't this board just get closed then? Except the Drum and maybe Games and TV&Movies?
For what is it we do when we discuss the books? When we go and speculate about how things go together? Hell, when we waste a thought on the text instead of just taking it for granted and blindly applauding?
I hadn't planned to comment on your fanfiction efforts, or to do so by PM, but since you specifically asked for it, I will make some comments now. I've read " Earned a Name" and the 1st chapter of
Technomantika (all I could stand). I will say that the short story is marginally better, in my opinion than the longer work, but neither of them is very good. Your command of English language and sentence structure (while remarkable in that it's your second language) needs considerably more work before you can write well in English, I think.
Let me give my credentials first. I have a Ph.D. in English literature and taught at 2 different universities for a period of seven years, I've written articles and edited a Restoration play for a series of re-prints. I've also served as 1st reader for Susan Cummins Miller's newest book,
Fracture.
In the first place, you obviously don't know or understand the difference between literary analysis (which is what the discussions on the board are supposed to be) and 'filling in gaps in canon' is something a good fan should never do” as you said in the quoted post. Fanfiction is writing a work using someone else's characters, ideas and trying (apparently) to imitate the author's style. Analysis is reading what the original author said
carefully, and suggesting what themes or ideas are being expressed, explaining allusions and how they contribute, and making informed comments about the author’s writing style. For example, I think it is a fair comment to say that Pratchett’s writing style has become somewhat more colloquial and less tightly written now that he’s dictating rather than composing at the computer himself.
I find the rest of your comment personally offensive. I have made several long posts which have, in fact, disagreed with your supposed analysis, but I have not quoted you or referred to you by name because I’m not interested in picking on you. But this comment is over-the-line, as other people have already suggested.
You do not appear to understand what is good English sentence structure. Fragments and dangling modifiers are almost never acceptable, and the 1st Chapter of
Technomatika has very little else. “Lovely...” Ridcully commented and crossed his arms to which Ponder Stibbons just shrugged, rather short of an explanation.” This sentence makes little sense. I suspect you meant “Lovely,” said Ridcully crossing his arms. Ponder Stibbons just shrugged—without trying for an explanation.”
And while one can use a one sentence paragraph effectively, your tendency to overuse this device creates a jerky, unprofessional looking work. In the review in
Time magazine by Lev Grossman of Joan Didion’s new work,
Blue Nights, he says,
“
Blue Nights initially presents as an oddity. The pages look weird, filled with rhetorical questions and one-sentence paragraphs piled on top of one another in teetering stacks. … All this could be mistaken for wandering. But Didion is too sharply self-aware a writer to allow herself to wander far.” Didion may be able to get away with this kind of writing, but you are not that skilled.
Another problem is illustrated in your short story “Earning a Name,”, which suggests that you do not understand what a “shandy” is. At the crucial point in the story you write:
“Of all the possible beverages ,a shandy... and a whole bloody pint at that. The beer of Ankh-Morpork alone was... and mixed with the city's lemonade...
The other people in the room gasped and for a moment there was a shocked silence, broken only by the soft thumbing caused by Skazz hitting his forehead against the table in desperate frustration.”
A Shandy is, as you note, a mixture of lemonade and beer or ale. But the idea that anyone would pass out from drinking a pint of it is simply ludicrous. When Terry refers to it in
Soul Music, he’s being ironic about how Drongo got the nickname. Thus your story fails to make any sense because your premise is wrong.
