500472

I'm not sure what the problem is there. 10,000 words is PLENTY to give a story a chance. That's longer than most short stories. If an author can't grip a reader within 10,000 words, then you have a real problem. It's more than a fair chance.

At the end of the day, if someone who is trying to review the story can't make it past 10,000 words without a massive struggle, what chance has the casual reader who reads for fun?

504590 Where in the submission guidelines does it say that you have to catch and hold the attention of the prereader to get posted Blue? I'm not trying to be hostile here, I am honestly curious. When you read only the first part of the story and base the pass fail on that you're putting the whole matter to your person taste. Now you can say "Well what's the point in reading further than that?" Some fics do start out slow. A casual reader is probably going to lose interest if they have the same taste as you, and they will thumb that story down. But not every reader has the same taste as you. Clop It made EQD recently. Its free from error, and tells a very clear story. It's interesting because the subject matter is controversial. It's also a horrible story in which Celestia is portrayed as a homophobic troll. That made it through. Because it was interesting. Do I need to go explain why that's a bad thing?

504908

>Where in the submission guidelines does it say that you have to catch and hold the attention of the prereader to get posted Blue

I don't think it's a surprise that a story needs to be considered 'good' to get posted. Yes, quality can be subjective, but there's a lot of very obvious and clear ways to define whether a story is good or not. Saying "oh, the pre-reader only read part of the story so can't make a judgement" is quite an emotive statement without any wider context. Once you realise that it's TEN THOUSAND WORDS that the reader read before passing judgement, then I don't think anyone can say fairer than that. That's a lot of story. That's more than enough to be able to pass judgement on the quality of a fic.

Even if the story dramatically improves after ten thousand words, just the fact that the first ten thousand aren't good is enough of a blow to completely cripple the story. Maybe past that point it is the greatest work of literature known to man, but no-one is going to wade through ten thousand words of a bad story just in case it becomes good. (For the record I don't know what story you're talking about, so I'm speaking generally here).

There's a lot of stories submitted to EqD. A lot. For reference, Fimfic gets about 100-150 new stories a day. 1-2 new stories are posted on EqD each day. That means there's a lot of competition, and it's not difficult to see that there will be winners and losers. If you put up a terrible story, then that's a great story that is losing out. (And before you say it, yes, I'm sure there are stories that you hate that made it to EqD. However not everyone likes the same stuff, I would be SHOCKED if everyone liked everything posted, that's statistically impossible).

In the case of 'Clop It', that story is a comedy. It's a satire. Yes, Celestia is a homophobic troll. The story acts like it's reasonable but it's actually terrible. That's where the humour comes from. It is not literally saying being homophobic is fine, I think that's pretty obvious to anyone.

504945 There is not much more I can say on the matter sadly. I don't envy you your position Blue. You have to somehow decide which fics are good enough to make the grade. Without the star system there is no real accounting for quality anymore. Every story any of you let through has to be a six star rating to you, because they will all be treated as such. You have my sympathies, the fact that I disagree with how you folks do it does not make me less sympathetic that you are forced to read hundreds of thousands of words of bad fanfiction trying to find the gems amongst the garbage.

505000
"Every story any of you let through has to be a six star rating to you, because they will all be treated as such."
Not really. It seems like stories don't even get ratings tags anymore. There seems to be a bunch of five star tags on the menu over on the right, but it doesn't seem to be going up with any real speed. There are only a handful of six star tags. My complaint is that the overall variety seems to have gone down. There are more story updates than there are new stories, and even then it seems like the days of excitement are gone. Most stories seem to be either "Random" or "Shipping". I don't even see a good "Grimdark" story come out anymore. On the plus side, it seems like a bunch of the old guard, well beloved stories are still updating. Windfall's sequel is a good example. My friend who is helping me edit and polish my stories is trying to get me out of the habit of writing my stories just to prep them for EQD but to write for FimFiction and most importantly myself. His complaint is that the stories coming out right now are grammatically safe(even though mistakes still get through) but vanilla in content. I won't comment on that. I don't have enough input for a consensus in my head. I thought the new Octavia story was the one to renew my hope as it seemed to be a new story that finally broke the cycle I had been seeing. Theeeeeen he described the general plot for me. Oh well.

505490 Prepping for EQD is a good mindset for errors, but their list of what's acceptable can be limiting, even to a teen rated story. And yes, I agree, the fare that makes it through is... saddening. But I think it also speaks to the quality of what's actually submitted these days. I think more authors are coming to that same mindset, why limit yourself to what EQD considers okay?

505661 Oh YOU'RE the writer of Green. My friend was just raving about that story when talking about good fics that somehow fell through the system of EQD.

505661

Fan fiction has always had that mindset. I personally don't see extensive limitations outside the obvious genre and content filter for EqD, and with the exception of the NLR ban, I'm fine with all of them.

Quality material as opposed to decent material is hard to find.

505688 In fairness, when I submitted 6 months back there were some issues with punctuation, and some moderate tell issues that I had to address. Were I to resubmit now I fear I may have gone a little too racy for them.

505772 I am not saying I disagree with their right to filter, just that I personally have made a few choices in my story that were outside of their filters. I did so consciously, being mindful of my readers, not what EQD would approve of.

505914

I don't see why you would care what EqD does or does not approve of when writing your story enough to mention it. Writing strictly to get on EqD is a fool's game, lacking any true volition to write outside the thrill of attention seeking. Mentioning it your comments literally means nothing to me, as it's not something I would expect people to regularly consider when writing recreationally. Subsequently, I would hazard a guess that many people (if held to your opinion) hold the absolutely wrong impression as to go about writing. First and foremost, it is a hobby you choose to write about what you want to write for fun. EqD has no factor in this.

505926 Actually I don't really care about their restrictions. You responded to an exchange without reading the original post I am guessing. I was giving the opinion that, with regards to fanfiction, the problem is in the prereader system. As it stands a prereader is not just held responsible for ensuring the stories submitted are free from error and within content restrictions. They are expected to judge the story as a whole within 10,000 words. This is something that should be up to a reader to decide individually. Whether my story would be accepted is immaterial to me.

505977

It's not a system restricted just to pre-readers. Actual publishing companies work like that as well. I did read your original post and am overlooking what you are saying on individual points, and generally, I'm not getting much sense or consistency out of it. You talk about how writers can be limited by restrictions, but I reject that notion: stories available for publishing on the blog can exhibit a wide variety of genres and ideas. You then speak of how authors are "coming to that same mindset, why limit yourself to what EQD considers okay?" To which I responded that if you're beginning with a premise that you write only because you want to get on the blog, you're doing something wrong. Consequently, I understand little of your third response, which changed the topic back to original line of discussion regarding your objection to how someone rejected a friend of yours story (I would assume this would be Azu), which I do not understand why would do that because that's not what I am discussing. Nor do I understand your initial objections, particularly where you state making a decision within the first ten thousand words of a story is not good practice, whereas in professional publishing a decision is often made within the first chapter, if not the first few pages. You would be better off criticizing modern publishing companies rather than EqD on this matter.

Fun fact: 10,000 words is half a mid-sized novella. Yes, I do believe such a length of words should give significant inference into whether or not the story is a qualitative work or not when it's a third the length of Of Mice and Men, Animal Farm, or The Old Man and The Sea.

506011 Fair enough I suppose. I won't argue the blog's right to have standards either. I will however point out that were the same standards applied to many of the older works on said blog the fiction archive would be largely barren.

But hey, that might be best.

Too many reasons to count.

Most of the time the only fics they accept are shitty grimdark fics, shitty romance fics, or shitty trixie fics.

Anything that has a human is it is out of the question.

And most of the time they have to make shit up in order to have a good reason to deny fics. Like with Machine & Might (which is an amazing fic) they denied it because there was some 'grammar issues' here and there, of which there were two.

510914
Maybe you just don't know grammar as well as you think.

512889 Read the fic for yourself. Name all the grammatical issues.

512949
If you want me to read it, link it.

513083 http://www.fimfiction.net/story/6635/Machine-And-Might

Am I the only one here because of their confusing standard for art? Oh well. I've submitted a few pieces of art to them and all of them got rejected. I think. Seriously they didn't even give me the time of day to say declined. Can someone please explain to me why other works that are just a simple vector character can get in, but a piece that has gone the whole nine yards with a background, shading, and minor details doesn't?

514355
Face it. EqD is only for the upper crust of the brony community. If you aren't well established, an ace at whatever your medium is, or haven't done something big (and maybe they don't like the person submitting for some reason), you're pretty much ignored.

I hate Equestria Daily because it is a thing, and I hate everything.
Slightly more specifically, I find EqD depressing in the same way that I find big-name movie critics and magazines like The Rolling Stone depressing. Too many people want their opinions delivered in a can and the easy reassurance that, "yes, you are allowed to enjoy this because someone smarter than you said it was good."
As far as fanfic goes, I find that picking a random fic off the front page or a story update on EqD has about the same likelihood that I'll enjoy it. Their selection process isn't bad it just has nothing to do with what I want, because I'm a special snowflake discerning individual unrepentant pervert arbitrary contrarian person who makes his own decisions.

Sorry, I was reading through this thread and saw this:

"The verb 'spoke' is the past tense of another verb, '"speak.' Speak and spoke are two verbs of a class called "intransitive" which basically means that they can take no direct object. Compare to 'said" or "say' which are of a class called 'transitive' verbs which can take a direct object. This basically means that they can possess another subject, that being the dialogue in this instance.

To better illustrate this, I'm going to switch around the wording of those two examples a bit.

She said that she was here for the fleas.

She spoke that she she was here for the fleas.

The latter is grammatically incorrect. This is because 'spoke' cannot gel with the directly with the object of 'that she was...' An appropriate use of the verb 'speak' would be:

She was speaking about how she was here for the fleas.

But look at what changed! 'Speak' is not longer the main verb of the sentence! 'Was' is now the main verb. So, put into dialogue, it would be formatted like so:

She was speaking about fleas. 'Oh yes, they crawl and crawl.'

or

'Oh yes, they crawl and crawl.' She was speaking about the fleas."

I agree with most of the points you made, and also, since "said" is the default dialogue tag that people should use, using "spoke" all the time makes very little sense. It's awkward, jarring and takes up one more character than "said". (Concision, yo!)

However, "speak" can be used both transitively and intransitively. (Sources: [1], [2], [3])

"I spoke the words."

"I speak French."

"I spoke the dog's name."

You can totes change the transitivity of the verb by mucking about with the valence, too.

"The dog's name was spoken by me." is now intransitive, f'rinstance. English is super lax with verb transitivity, though, so you can even have normally intransitive verbs turning into transitive ones by adding an object to the sentence as well. idk. It's a weird language.

I'm certain that dialogue tags don't need to be exclusively transitive verbs, either, since using ones like "yelled", "whispered" or "groaned" (the first examples I could think of) is completely acceptable by just about every style guide and publisher, and all of those verbs are ambitransitive, just like "speak".

So ye. While the transitivity of "speak" is pretty fluid, you still probably don't want to use it as a speech verb all the time. It ain't wrong, but it makes you look like a tool.

</grammar nazi>

539509

Haha, you've made me quiet a happy fellow, Mrs. Whoeveryouare, cavorts with Mystic.

I'm very much aware that "speak" is also considered a transitive verb under certain circumstances, and I'm also aware of how verbs transitivity can change on the basis of its use.

Now, I'm no linguist, grammarian, or otherwise expert on this subject—in fact, I've self-taught myself all of this information within the last year or so, therefore it is fairly suspect to be spotty—but I do believe that I did not say that verb transitivity was the only qualifier for being a speech verb, although I may have possibly implied it by omitting other factors in hopes of providing a simple rule that'd be easier to the person in question to follow as opposed the reality of the situation where speech verbs are often used fairly flexible manner.

However, I would also like to point out that in your examples, the transitive use of "speak" is not akin to how the word "said" functions, and likewise, does not take work when used in my example's context. Unless I am gravely mistaken, "speaks" cannot take a predicate noun in the same fashion "said" can. I do note that I should have stuck to functions of "spoke" to avoid misconceptions on what I meant, but I believed that nobody would know otherwise, so here I am red-faced.

Second, the example "The dog's name was spoken by me" uses an non-finite verb form and doesn't really serve to prove your point.

Anyways, thanks for the comment. Made me want to research things again.

539782

Fair enough, and that's also pretty cool!

Mostly, I stumbled upon your post and went, "Hey, wait a minute. You can use 'speak' transitively..." Which lead me to a two-hour wiki walk on verb transitivity and valence, and then I had to share, of course. Wiki walks aren't fun if you don't spread what you learn like a venereal disease.

English isn't my first language, and I'm a bit of a slow learner, so I sometimes run into walls where other people would intuitively know the right thing (just ask Chris about conjunctive mood!). However, isn't something like, "She spoke the words, 'Help me.'" correct? I'm pretty sure I've seen something like that somewhere, although maybe it was used wrong, or maybe there was a colon instead of a comma, or maybe I'm mis-remembering. Is it because "speak" has a lower polypersonal agreement than "said"?

*runs off to learn more about gerundives and catenas*

Research is fun!

539982

English isn't my first language, and I'm a bit of a slow learner, so I sometimes run into walls where other people would intuitively know the right thing (just ask Chris about conjunctive mood!). However, isn't something like, "She spoke the words, 'Help me.'" correct? I'm pretty sure I've seen something like that somewhere, although maybe it was used wrong, or maybe there was a colon instead of a comma, or maybe I'm mis-remembering. Is it because "speak" has a lower polypersonal agreement than "said"?

English is a non-polypersonal langauge. I know absolutely nothing about polypersonal agreement, and am somewhat mystified that you do, considering it's mainly present in Georgian, Ganda, and Biblical Hebrew. Also, as far as I know, no comma is needed to introduce a quote when it is preceded by a subordinating clause, such as "She spoke the words."

Episode discussions are getting damned depressing these days.

541665

My first language is Biblical Hebrew!

Nah.

What does make a speech verb then? Because that would be super helpful as general dialogue advice, even if it does get technical. I can't seem to find anything no matter where I look. (The best I found was this, which is probably wrong because it says that you should not use "asked".)

I'll just leave this here then, shall I?

Edit: Please understand that I'm not trying to imply that any of the prereaders are quite that pedantic or mean spirited, only that being this stiff about grammar and language is quite a waste of time. I don't cringe every time someone splits an infinitive, nor do I care when someone leaves a dangling participle (which I can almost guarentee that most of the prereaders present have been guilty of at some point).

578482

:3

597136
Hey, Seattle, you're not dead! Where you been at, nig-nog?

601467
So, so busy bro. Moving across the country atm. Sorry for slackin lately brother; I'll be back in the game soon!

My most recent bitch about EqD would be how they denied my Turning Winds fic. Because foal-shipping.

Except that there isn't any. There is one paragraph in the fic that is only vaguely ship-like, but it not only went nowhere, it was done only to shed light on the deep personal guilt and drastically changing point of view of the character being focused on.

I like it when they point out some errors in spelling and grammar and such, but that kind of arbitrary shite just gets on my nerves.

578482
I think I love you for that video.

I don't know why I even try anymore with EQD. They rejected my story new story, The Tears of a Siren, even though it's the best I've written. They nitpicked the thing to death and insult some of the aspects of the story other readers have praised. No consistency in there reviews... except for the constant rejection.

665560
Let me ask you this:
All Equestria Daily has to send back is a yes/no decision. In practice, they give at least a few details. But "nitpicking" means you got some detailed feedback. I've gotten similar responses myself. Why would someone spend several volunteer hours reading your story to that level of detail, writing up what was wrong, why it's wrong, and tips how to fix it, especially since he'd have no expectation that anyone but you would ever see it? That's an awful lot of effort to put into a response if all he wants to do is send you packing. Seems like the point is to learn something from the feedback, improve, and try again.

670312

I'd be more interested if they didn't contradict themselves. They claim portions of my writing are boring, even though my editor and readers say it's the best part. While they even admitted to reading my AN about wanting input on SDT, they said NOTHING about it, instead pointing out some spelling errors I had caught days before I received their email response. I have seen fics in their folders that have minor errors like the ones they claimed were the reason they rejected my story. I got the feeling that my story wasn't the reviewer's cup of tea, so he looked for enough small errors to reject it. Granted this time they tried to be nice about it... last time I got someone reviewing my anime crossover who knew nothing about the show and said I should give up on the story. Maybe that colors my view, but the double standard they have still exists.

1. EQ's story guidelines are too strict, the site needs to feature more stories so the no fanfiction mode actually has a point.

2. The service for submitting anything else is too awful for me to even know how to criticize EQ's policies in those areas.

711520 Yep. I love how they introduced the No Fanfiction mode then drastically cut down on fanfics posted.

I've officially called it quits on EQD, but not for anything fanfic related. The constant "jumped the shark" and "Hasbro crapped on us" comments were getting rather obnoxious.

Being a person whose actually had a story featured to EQD, let me begin with stating what my fic included.

Alicorn OC.
Non-Pony OC.
No shipping at all, whatsoever.
Nothing grimdark.
Nothing sad at time of submission.
Barely anything remotely comedic.
Only two canon characters that talked and that was only the first chapter. After that it's only Twilight.

They are not inconsistent, they just want well-written, novel ideas. I was not an established writer and still am pretty terrible at it, but it took me like 40 hours to write 15k words to their standard. I worked on concepts constantly and sometimes I still don't feel like I don't live up to what I submitted to them with all my subsequent chapters. There are people who can write anything and send it to EQD and pass, those my friends are really good writers.

But sad, grimdark and shipping make up the bulk of the stories over there.

EQD is being really slow this month. I'd like them to officially reject my story before I add it to the folders.

I honestly wasn't angry at them until someone pointed out that a piece of crap story got in while mine was downed by technicalities they didn't bother to explain much. So... yeah, I guess I'm in the 'I Hate Equestria Daily' phase right now.

Maybe tomorrow, it'll be back to 'whatever'.

The amount of hatred in the comments section disgusts me.

The other thing I don't like is their extreme bias against HiE stories.

Do people really read fics on EQD? I mean, i'm there just for the news.
I read fanfics only on site like fimfic.net and the like.

765990

>.> What do you mean 'hatred'?

766106

shira said something similar.

766125, look in the comments section of a news update. You'll practically see miniature flame wars.

767935 To be fair, Equestria Girls just MIGHT deserve it. Season finale, not so much. Season Two DVD for possibly not including the unedited version of The Last Roundup, definitely not.

756644 And which piece of crap story are we talking about?

770964, he's talking about the original Conversion Bureau, I think.