Yup, still half a month...better get moving. >.>

(It's like...interviewing your character. About their life and stuff. They're a lot of fun for newer characters.)

Sounds like fun. Yeah, I'd like to take a look at it, if it's not too hard to get to.

I have a question that's been bothering me for awhile. If you're writing about a character whose name ends in an 's'... Let's use Jess as an example. Would it be Jess' or Jess's?

I was always taught to do it like Jess'...but then suddenly this year I got reprimanded for that.

I'd like to know now too. ):

I'm with Xandy on this one, I've always thought it to be s', as in Jess'. In general only -real- grammar freaks will probably care one way or another, though, and it may genuinely NOT have an established standard.

Where's our resident linguist?

I was always told to do it s' over s'....

I'm not sure the exact reasoning behind it but I was told it was to avoid the 'zz' sort of sound you get if you were to write "Jess's" over "Jess' ".

The age-old debate... I've held this one with many a teacher before.

Both are acceptable, but if you're writing a formal paper, it's better to put "Jess's" to be safe.

Personally, I prefer "Jess' " simply because it looks cleaner.

I was originally taught "Jess'" early in school, but like Xandy I was told off for it later on by someone (a teacher, if I remember correctly). So now I just go with "Jess's" to be safe.

I was taught to use apostrophe-s in school, but started using just an apostrophe pretty early on, and never ran into a problem with teachers.

I also pronounce it as if it's just a single "s," for the most part. Depends on what the name is, though -- some sound better than others with "s's" at the end.


I should be working on PoF, but instead, I found myself spending most of today starting over on that stupid Eternia novelization I started last summer. It was somewhat satisfying, but not a very productive thing to do. Still -- every bit of writing helps, right?

Oh, and I was thinking about something last night. I was at a concert here celebrating the Eudora Welty centennial. A lot of the songs were things inspired by her books or by other books/stories (one about Larry Brown's Fay, for example). And I got to thinking -- lots of folk-type songs are based on stories, both old and new. Then I thought about books being written that are re-tellings of myths or fairy tales, or modern sequels to classic fiction. (Though the latter are usually dire, there are exceptions -- the one that came out last year about Rhett Butler is supposed to be excellent, and there's always Wide Sargasso Sea.) A lot of Greek and Roman and medieval fiction writing falls into that category -- Ovid's Metamorphoses; The Canterbury Tales, of course.

...So, why is it that fanfiction is so demeaned as a medium of expression? Yeah, obviously, a lot of it is complete ****. But there's a general mindset I've seen many times that people who write fanfiction are somehow cheapening writing. And yet, to a certain extent, some of the oldest writing in the world, some of the most respected writing, is essentially no more than that: Taking an established story or setting or characters (or all of the above) and adding your own twist to it or take on it or history to it.

So if we could separate the wheat from the chaff, and stop My Immortal from even existing, should fanfiction be reviled just by its very existence?

Just curious. I write it for fun, and because I want to spend more time with the characters, and because I do believe that all writing, no matter the form, helps me to improve (and I find that writing something where I have the world/characters already established allows me to focus specifically on something else that in an original story would just be part of the package: narrative or description or... whatever).

Thoughts?

(And unfortunately, I can't promise that I'll be around to reply to those thoughts, because as I mentioned in Pos/Neg, work is sort of swamping me at the moment. But I'm still interested in reading them -- sometime. )

I probably have nothing useful to say on the subject, but I'm incredibly bored at the moment with nothing better that I want to do.

I admit, I let criticisms about fanart and fanfiction influence my thinking when I was younger. I include fanart because it really isn't much different, and I dabble in that just as often. I found my experience with fanfiction a little more unpleasant though - I first ran across it while googling for stories that contained certain content. Whether they were original or simply fanfiction, the people who write that particular content often...well, can't write. A few can, but it takes some serious searching to find them. Combine that with the general belief the people around me had that everything needed to be 100% original (an impossibility), and there you have why it took me a couple of years to come around and accept fanfiction.

I purposely sought fanfiction for Shadow Hearts later on down the road, after playing the games and falling in love with the characters. I even entertained the idea I'd write some of my own. I blame (and love?) MikoNoNyte because her Shadow Hearts and Koudelka fanfiction really convinced me that fanfiction was awesome. I was able to read beautiful stories that gave me more of the characters I wanted to see.

When I started seeking out Spiral fanfiction, I took a step back and went, "ohgodmyeyes" or something similar to that. However, my favorite characters are not main characters - they're adults in a mostly-teen cast, and one of them barely appears in the anime or manga (yet his name is in nearly every episode/chapter). I had to know everything about them, but even that was never enough for me. And the plot bunnies...they multiple when I talk to people about quirks the characters have, or certain questions that were never answered. "What ifs" are always popular. As Aelph mentioned, I too believe writing fanfiction still improves writing skills and it is fun. =(

My friend Tal had a rant on deviantart a few weeks ago about people getting pissy about poses being used - he linked famous art where poses and pictures were sometimes exact replicas. Not merely by coincidence. He thinks poses are not something people can "steal" or "claim" - and I have to agree with him. But if people can be really obnoxiously upset because a pose isn't original, or the person who came up with the pose isn't credited (even though the pose might be a complete coincidence), then I can see where the same people think fanfiction is nothing more than stolen material.

That's really the point being made, though I went overly personal because I did have a negative impression of fanfiction at first. I've since grown out of it - though I've learned the power of listening to recommendations over trying to go through the sections of ff.net page-by-page. ^_^;

Though I do find concepts in fanfiction unappealing and will stubbornly ignore most fanfiction if it advertises or contains such concepts.

While I don't necessarily write fanfiction, except that big piece of tales fanstory crap I've been working on for about a year now, I do like reading it and I've noticed that some people are actually really talented in recreating the characters and new scenarios you'd actually see happen. However, I do think that some people who write fanfiction really just go overboard and do a bunch of things to fulfill their crazy perverted fantasies. But that's just a minor population, from what I've read anyway.

Oh, and the 's thing at the end of names that end with s is something I actually know about! Woo-hoo, legitimate contribution!

Ahem!

Okay, so here is how it goes. Names that end with s and are one syllable long need an 's at the end. So that would be like: Cless's or Klaus's or Tess's.

On the other hand, names that end with s and are two or more syllables long don't need an s at the end. So like: James' or Isis' or Hermes'.