Terrors Of The New Stories Column! #1? in a series of "Meh...?" · 11:09pm Apr 15th, 2018
(The following tale is taken from actual FIMFiction events. All names have been removed to protect the guilty.)
Once upon a time, there was an author who had managed to gain auto-approval for his stories. (This had been accomplished through successfully having had an earlier piece published.) And so the writer was now trusted to submit his own work, in the hopes that all would go well.
The author, who was still working on establishing a follower base while also struggling to master other basic details such as 'periods go at the end of sentences,' decided that his next effort should be a reader choice story. This is a format which most of you are likely familiar with, where each chapter ends with the presentation of several options for the next chapter: the readers vote within the comments, and the author sends the story in that direction. So the author chose his characters and genre tags. He wrote both a short and a long description. And then he published his story, for auto-approval trusted him to do so. The short description appeared in the New column, and the long on the story's front page. The long description might have been seen as the more interesting of the two, for it presented the setup of his tale, along with the initial group of choices. It's something you would normally expect to see at the end of the first chapter, but perhaps the author wished his audience to begin their considerations early.
Or perhaps it was due to something else.
For the author, striking out into waters which so many others would have avoided for fear of drowning their site careers, had accomplished something truly miraculous. There were tags of characters and genre, descriptions both long and short. But we must now summarize his first chapter, and the word which most befits it is 'void'. For there was no first chapter. Nor was there a prologue, or a single piece of teaser text.
The author had published a zero-word story.
It is perhaps possible to understand this decision. The story was meant to be one of the reader's choice, and the author might have felt that started with the very first future words. What need to set up an environment when all that could be done after the first votes came in? However, the author was new, and so might not have considered that there is something far more difficult than reading a zero-word story: namely, casting votes towards the future of one.
Because no one truly comments on a story, now do they? They leave the comment on the chapter they were reading.
But there was no chapter. And so there could be no comments. The box was not left empty. The box did not exist.
A moderator, kind and fair, informed the author of his minor mistake: that auto-approval aside, no one could publish a story which began with no words. The author listened, then did what he must have felt was the only thing he could. He wrote a first chapter of nearly two thousand words in length, for he truly wished his story to proceed.
For a given value of 'wrote'.
You might wish to know what that chapter was about, in terms of setting the environment and getting things ready for those first vital reader choices. The author thought you might wish to know that and so summarized it in the chapter title, which has been completely reproduced for you below, without editing.
not a Fishel chapter so you don't have to read this it's just to get this posted it's from one of my chapters of the Godzilla chapters so
Because to write something new, even to keep this vital new piece of work alive, would have taken too long: that was likely his Fishel view. And so the author pasted a section from a completely different story, which could be distinguished by three things: containing nothing relevant to the long description, a complete lack of periods, and the fact that he told everyone this was exactly what he was doing. But happily, this did provide his readership with a place to make their comments. And in fact, comments are now being made. Perhaps eventually, one of them might even be about the future direction of the story.
But I wouldn't bet on it.
Dedicated to Darklordjadow1. And now to watch his just-posted No Man's Sky review.
I love this site. Whenever I struggle with writer's block, my characters won't talk to me, my plot falls apart, my allegories are as deep as a puddle in the Sahara, and I just can't convince myself that I'm any good as a writer... something like this will buoy me up, reassure me that no matter how dissatisfied I may be, not matter how prematurely I publish, no matter how badly I misjudge the mood, no matter how many typos slip through, I will always be better than that guy.
...Oh gods, I think I know who this is.
Edit: No I didn't! Good gods there's two people like this!
4841056
As in 'you personally know the author'?
*wince*
If so, having that happen was probably inevitable. (In a way, it's best that I got it over with on the first of any such blog entries.) And if that is the case, and the two of you are somewhere well past casual acquaintances -- do you think a gentle explanation would get through?
4841059
See edit: I don't, there just happens to be two terrible authors with bad ideas about Godzilla. The one I know isn't a close friend, just somebody who I've spoken with about writing.
By the end of the week, I'll have something for you to gripe about. I can pretty much promise that.
4841068
Oh. Well, in that case, it's a pretty safe bet that the number's a lot higher than two.
4841070
You should know I'm probably doing the leprechaun story as a crackfic one-shot.
The griping can thus go both ways.
ETA: I see you tracked down the story. And lived.
4841077
Fair enough. There is no possible way it could be worse than the one I came up with.
Incidentally, if you're looking for coverart, I found this:
img00.deviantart.net/2e85/i/2012/026/0/2/rainbow_dash_angry_by_ratchethun-d4np5yt.png
Source
4841077
I didn't read it. I'm not that crazy.
4841082
I did. (And possibly am.) But just seeing it puts you in a fairly exclusive club: the story has now been taken down, and I'm guessing that was done by a moderator because the author just collected what's probably a one-day ban.
I still have the pasted chapter upon in a separate tab, and can thus gaze at a period-free world as much as I like.
4841093
Why would you want to?
I mean, I shitpost every now and then--so I totally get the appeal--but at least I know how to grammar.
4841056
I have a feeling that one of these people that you speak of is also the guy that I recently gave up on with my editing service.
4841100
There's a big difference between knowing what not to do but doing it anyway, vs not knowing what not to do.
Well, hopefully the author will learn from this. Granted, it would've been nice if they'd learned basic sentence structure and spelling first, but such is life.
Also, I'm not surprised to see at least one company uses the Fishel name. A shame; it'd make a great fictional one. The slogan writes itself ("If it's one of ours, it's a Fishel!")
4841052
Such is the blessing of Sturgeon: Ninety percent of everything is crap, but some crap is the crap of crap.
4841126
Agreed. You have to know what you're supposed to do and then consciously decide to break the rules.
Now living in the terror that I'll post a story one day and Estee will see it in the new column. Title of blog: A Story So Bad My Browser Closed Upon Opening It.
This poor b, though. Why would anyone think it was a good idea to post a 0-word story, especially if it's a reader-driven one? That kind of participation needs something for the reader to build off of in the first place or there's nowhere to suggest it to go. It's risky in the first place since it could come off like you don't know where you're going with your own story so you want to outsource it. And copy-pasting another chapter of an unrelated fic of yours (I guess we should be grateful he didn't post someone else's) just to meet the word count requirement is beyond stupid.
when you said "story of the reader's choice" i thought of the most interesting variation i've ever seen, a fan-comic called "adventure logs of young queen" by Vavacung, aka "loveless nova", on Deviant art.