(no subject)

[fairyd123]

I have a new love. Life on Mars is completely awesome. How the hell did I manage to miss that the first time around? Am now working my way through the first series and am developing a serious crush on John Simm - cute and a fantastic actor too!

I swear there must be about 50 Supernatural stories to every Torchwood story being produced on my flist about now. And I'm beginning to get a tad fed up with the fact that most of the Torchwood authors don't seem to use a beta. The occasional mistake I'm prepared to let slide but I've read stories recently with sentences which may as well be written in Klingon for all the sense they make. And we're not just talking about the bad authors here - a lot of the decent ones seem to be suffering from the same problem. My favourite was the story recently where the author clearly couldn't decide whether she wanted to write Jack/Ianto or Jack/Owen and so mixed up the names the entire way through. And what's with the description I've seen popping up a lot in fics of Jack having "warm hazel eyes"? Barrowman's got the bluest (and occasionally coldest) eyes I've ever seen.

Work still sucks - I desperately need a holiday. New York in April sounds good.

Comments

[titti]

I just started watching Life on Mars as well, and it's brilliant. I have no idea why I haven't heard of it before recently.

I agree on the TW fandom and lack of beta. At the start I was pretty lenient because I wanted my fix my after a while it gets tiring. I guess I'll have to be happy with the Supernatural ones. (We have a lot of fandoms in common).

[astrothsknot.livejournal.com]

Why do you think that I don't read TW fic at all? *Ignoring that I can't be arsed with Jack/Ianto and it's a ship that's eating the comms*

[wenchpixie]

I've managed to totally miss Life on Mars... I can probably borrow the box set for season one though - it's definitely worth a look then?

I've stopped reading unbeta'd fic altogether unless it's someone I really really like; even really good writers need one and reading fic with painful or stupid mistakes was beginning to drive me mental - it's a shame really, the Torchwood universe is very rich but the fic that's being produced doesn't reflect that at all.

And New York in April sounds fantastic :)

[fairyd123.livejournal.com]

Aw I love Jack/Ianto! But yes the lack of beta'd fic is driving me insane. If you can't find someone to look at it then at least print it out and give it a once over yourself before posting the damn thing.

[fairyd123.livejournal.com]

Life on Mars is actually pretty good. The storyline (guy gets hit by car and wakes up in the 70's) is pretty innovative and the stylistic touches of him being able to hear his family in the present speaking to him whilst he lies in a coma are pretty neat. The 70's sections are rather exagerrated often for comic effect (its pretty much a comic remake of The Sweeney) but its definitely worth a watch - John Simm is also adorable.

I can understand why you'd only read beta'd fic. Frankly unless you have insane attention to detail (when I was a law student noone pointed out to me that being a lawyer entails such glamarous work as routinely proof-reading 200+ contracts for typos and punctuation errors - Alley McBeal frickin sold me a lie dude!)you should get a fresh pair of eyes to glance over your story. Its painful reading a good in character story and then seeing typos and grammatical errors every few lines. The other problem with the world of Torchwood fic is that it mostly seems to comprise very young writers who produce these huge out of character opuses made up of 6/700 word chapters which they post on a daily basis. It takes a great deal of either resilience or self-delusion to be producing chapter 15 of a 30 chapter story when you haven't had any comments since chapter 2. I'm also quite amazed at the low standards of some of the readers - I've seen stories on rec lists that I would never rec in a million years.

I think its just a very young and young skewing fandom. The fact that the majority of online Torchwood fans seem to be in the 14-20 years old bracket continues to surprise me. It is supposedly an "adult" show and I'm amazed that Barrowman (cute though he is) is so adored by teenagers given that its rare for them to see a gay musical theatre star as the height of cool!

[wenchpixie]

I'll see about borrowing the box set then, possibly at some point after I clone myself, or things finish for the summer :).

The age thing surprises me, too, I know there are older watchers out there and given the slash is canon, I thought that fic would be a given. Apparently not though. I think the age thing also has a real bearing on the choice not to beta (and the chapter-a-day-of-drivel stuff); after all while people reach the height of emo at 14, they can also have an alarmingly self-centred ego.