Hah, oddly enough, inspiration often hits me when I'm either a) on the can, b) in bed, ready to fall asleep, or c) in the bath.

Do what I do: keep a note pad/pen by your bed, and if inspiration strikes, jot it down.

 

Exactly this. Many of the things I've written that people liked I thought of while taking a dump. It's kind of funny, actually.

 

I always get ideas in the shower... You know, the place you can't write anything down. That or when you are right about to fall asleep and you're too lazy to write it down and promptly forget by morning.

 

Yeah my imagination runs wild in the shower too - wait. Ohhh, we're talking about *writing*...

Never mind.

 

Again, I say: Manipulative!Dumbledore.

As soon as I see the word 'manipulative' now, I automatically click upon the magical red 'x'.

"Scourgify!"

 

If it's a real problem for you, then use this.

 

IMO that thing's way too small for any good ideas.

Unless your handwriting is fucking tiny anyway.

 

I hate the concept of "reading the books" stories. I never read any of those fics because the idea they are based on is utter shit from the get go. It would destroy my immersion to even think about the RL HP books showing up in Hogwarts, be it with the trio, the freaking marauders or whomever. This whole sub-subgenre of redo fiction should've been aborted before some lazy ass teengirl decided that thinking up a plausible and entertaining AU/timetravel plot was just too much bother.

Kill it with fire! :fire

 

One of the most annoying things that I keep running across is when an author decides that it is necessary to take a stance on corporal punishment.

"warning! spankingofminors!" is not a warning I want to find on a third year AU fic. Or a fifth year AU fic. Seriously?

Or, vice versa, when spanking becomes a soap box subject so the author can remove Harry from the abusive Dursleys because they spanked him.

 

Bwahahahaha! But the problem is, is that he wasn't "spanked", he was beaten by both Vernon and Dudley, and JKR seems to advocate child abuse, even though that wasn't really her intention.

 

My ultimate pet peeve might be self-inserts. I mean, seriously? And they, if possible, become worse when the author(ess) has no command over the English language, and it ends up like 'ZOMG A NEW GIRL GOEZ 2 HARRYS SKEWL 4TH YEAR SHE DUZ THE TOURMANENT THINGY, THEY FALL IN LUVS!' Observe.

In fact, poor grammar and spelling is my ultimate pet peeve. After all, even if the premise of a story is preposterous, I can make some attempt at respecting the author for writing it if the spelling and grammar is good. But unfortunately, there will always be shit like this on FF.net.

 

Wasted animagus/metamorphmagus talents. The author spends a chapter telling us how awesome Harry is for being a phoenix animagus, which also means everyone wants teh sex with him, and then never uses the phoenix at all. Or Harry spends all of summer training with Tonks as he is actually the ultimate metamorph ever, but then only uses his talent to have awesome hair. They've just waffled for two to ten thousand words about something useless to the plot.

Or Harry calling himself a grey wizard. He isn't fucking Gandalf. He doesn't need to be ANY colour.

 

Haha,

Poorly written Harry: "I am neither light nor dark, white nor black - I am gray!"

Voldemort/Dumbledore: "...Douche."

 

Thaumologist, the grey thing used to a big thing in fanfiction, its just that trends have moved on.

 

Yeah, this pretty much goes for any aspect of a story that gets brought up once to show how obscenely awesome/powerful/rich Harry is, then never gets mentioned again.

I've bitched about this before: rare intelligent magical pets, (multiple) animagus forms, magical weapons, important ancestors, electronics that usually didn't even exist at that time...

Better make sure we let everyone know how much cooler Harry's life is than theirs... you know, except for that whole dead parents-life in a fishbowl-terrorists want to murder him thing. Wait, you mean I have to write about this shit later, too? Actually make it integral to the plot? Fuck that, I just wanted to show off Harry's bling.

It's just so much easier to blatantly plagiarize the books, adding a reaction shot here and there, than actually coming up with your own ideas.

I mean, copying clichés from other fan fic is sooo HAAAARD, why not just copy straight from the fucking source so I don't have to strain my overworked brain?

Isn't it just fucking amazing that FFN has an abuse report system at all? It used to be that having a single line of song lyrics would get your story shit-canned, and now the section is overflowing with "stories" that consist of nothing but the lyrics of an entire song, with a few banal lines about how Hermione's all emo over her love of Draco and her life SO totally parallels the song.

By the way, FUCK YOU, song-fic writers!

So it's no wonder that you can have "read the books" fic where the author has LITERALLY copied every single word of Philosopher's Stone (and I mean every word), and added a few comments to it... but they don't get their fic taken down.

Amazing. FFN tells you right up front that they don't host fic on stories whose authors have said they don't want fan fic written about them (which is BS as it falls under Fair Use), but they will allow someone to essentially upload an entire Potter book.

I've reported at least seven stories for various kinds of abuse (non-fics like lists, a letter to the actors, blatant plagiarism, someone looking for a fic, and one for extreme sexually oriented torture on a child) in the past few months.

They are all still there.

I'm sure if I reported a story for consensual, heterosexual sex, between two happy and fulfilled characters, it would be taken down immediately. :facepalm

 

I don't think I've ever been reported for content, but the last review cracked me up:

Right. Because of all the things in my stories that might earn me a perma-ban, that's the important one.


I say the system is best left broken.

 

For Spiral? That wasn't really chat speak or script format anyway. :facepalm

It was different and many may have found it annoying, but it wasn't chat or script.

 

One of my recent pet peeve is:

Authors say in the author's notes that Harry is going to be exactly like voldemort, by being dark (sometime evil too..) But they ruin it by making him cold during hogwarts. What the fuck? Who the hell said that voldemort was cold when he was a child? In canon voldemort was described to be very charming, very friendly and very manipulative.

Fuck them. I hate harry being cold fics.

 

Really? Your problem with turning Harry into a Voldemort clone, and a badly done one at that, is the Author's Note being inaccurate?

You need to sort out your priorities, mate.

 

I know what you mean. One of the fics I read recently (can't remember name) tried to do this by simply having Harry 'hide' his emotions, and that just meant that he had a 'blank' look the whole time. I don't know about anyone else, but one someone just has a blank look all the time, I tend to think they're retarded, not emotionless.

Anyways, a new pet peeve for me, it goes vaguely in this format.

[character]: "(spell?) we don't learn (spell) until (number) year!"

Forgive me VotN, but this line: "I believe it's 'Silencio'," Zacharias answered, "but isn't that a fifth-year spell?"

It happens in the first week of school in the first year, I mean, does the guy know when every year from every spell is going to be taught? Why/how? If you know that much about the spell, then surely he must know more about the spell as well. It seems weird that a kid one randomly know the name of a charm, the incantation, when it is going to be taught (5 years down the road!) and not know anything else about the charm. It just seems like if he learned it out of a book, he would be learning the actual charm because it would all be in the same paragraph of the book. /rant