Fabulous Time-Wasting Opportunity!

[xifeng]

Say, folks! Are you bored at work? Trying to put off studying for that exam? Or are you just a connoisseur of shitty, ill-planned fantasy novels?

Be the envy of your neighborhood! Leave a comment, and be the first to read Lee's Magnum Opus, which she honest-to-God is really going to write this time! Installments will arrive at the end of the month, via the miracle of electronic mail! No criticism too harsh! (Provided that you tell me why I SUX, instead of just going, "U SUX".)

(Portions of the story will already be familiar to dethorats, treyvadi, and jurhael, assuming any of you remember the bits and pieces you got to see, so don't spoil it for everybody else by telling them how bad it sucks.)

THRILL to a bunch of worldbuilding crap!
ROLL YOUR EYES as Lee tries to provide necessary exposition without too much dialogue!
SHAKE YOUR HEAD IN PATENT DISBELIEF at another improbable plot twist!
TELL Lee not to quit the titlehacking racket just yet!

End transmission. We now return you to your regularly scheduled program.

Comments

[dethorats]

Oh ho! If this is familiar to both me and Liz, I suspect the origins go back rather far. And I also remember that I was quite fond of what I read then. So sign me up!

[shake-the-stars.livejournal.com]

You suspect correctly. I can't promise it's aged well, though. XD

[tara]

That would be a tentative yes for me. It depends on whether you want feedback/constructive crit, because I'm really not reading anything apart from textbooks atm and I'm not capable of reading anything with any sort of critical eye. I'm interested to see what you're doing, but I doubt I'll be of any use to you.

[shake-the-stars.livejournal.com]

As always, I would like feedback/concrit, but I don't expect OMG INSIGHTFUL AND DEEP COMMENTARY on every line, and if you don't feel impelled to comment at all (or make any comment deeper than "omg yay" or "omg u kilt [character], u sux", that's fine, too.

♥

[tara]

*nod* I just don't want you to think that I think it's crap if I don't say anything more than "I read - cool" or else if I don't get back to you for a while after it's sent - there are weeks where I'm just not capable of reading at all.

[shake-the-stars.livejournal.com]

That must suck. I mean, there are weeks when I'm not capable of reading at all, but not for that reason. :(

I figure if it sucked, you'd come right out and tell me instead of not saying anything *g*

[tara]

It does suck. Especially when I really need to read books and write essays about the buggers.

Indeed. You would receive an email along the lines of OMG L33 UR TEH SUCK

[shake-the-stars.livejournal.com]

Yeah, for some reason it's very hard to write an essay about a book you haven't actually read. As I discovered in high school, when my specialty was "not revealing that I hadn't done my assigned reading".

Then I would reply, OMG TARA YYYYY D:

[tara]

Dude, I once got an A+ for a book report I did on a book I hadn't read in high school. Admittedly, I did read the blurb and look at the picture on the front cover, so that might've been cheating a little on my behalf.

B3C0Z

[shake-the-stars.livejournal.com]

I once made up a literary critic in high school. I needed four sources, and I couldn't find the fourth, so I used an anagram of my last name and went to town with titling her supposed book. It helped that most of my pleasure reading was literary criticism :D

D4TZ NAWTT A R3Z0N

[tara]

Hahaha. Years later, your teacher probably tried to find that book, and failed :)

IZ 2

[shake-the-stars.livejournal.com]

I still consider it one of my proudest moments that I could make an anagram for my surname at all, on account of its many German!consonants. ;) The not!critic's name was R.C. Shih (clearly of Chinese extraction), and her book was something like Topographies of Desire: Images of the Garden in Eighteenth-Century Literature.

The book report itself was on Tristram Shandy. I was a bit of an enfant terrible :D

OMG IZ NAWTT 31TH3R!!!!111

[tara]

Dude, that's such a believable title. It's the sort of crap I'm borrowing out of Melbourne Uni all the time *G*

POO

[shake-the-stars.livejournal.com]

I had fun inventing it, and will be happy to supply other, equally believable titles on request. :D

OMG P00 LOL
W33

[tara]

How about one for me to use on the essay I'm researching on Thucydides' 'Archaeology' as it relates to the rest of 'The Peloponnesian War' ?

U s3d a r00d w0rd!!!

[shake-the-stars.livejournal.com]

I don't know, wouldn't that be aiding and abetting academic dishonesty? ;)

r00d w0rdz lol!!!
D00DL3

[tara]

It would only be doing so if I actually used it *g*

b00b13z

[shake-the-stars.livejournal.com]

Thucydides Mythistoricus No, that one's already taken. Hmm:

"The Past is a Different Country: An Ontological Exploration of Thucydides' 'Archaeologia'"
(Substitute your favorite Academian word for "ontological"; you may also enjoy "hermeneutic" or "epistemological". ^_-)

OMG B3WBZ L0L :DDDDDD

[duokinneas.livejournal.com]

I am so not good at constructive criticism, but I am dying to see what you're writing. I don't care how improbable, stupid, filled with deus ex machina and dull exposition it could possibly be (and if it has all those things, I've read worse. Much, much worse. And those books were published fantasy novels!), I still want to read it because you're the one who wrote it. Granted, I haven't been in the loop of your life recently, but it's things like this that help me get back in the loop! Now we have something real to talk about. It's, uhh, another shared interest! ^__^

Again, I warn you: if you send installments to me, I'm not good for concrit. Not as good as I wish I was. I can review for you like I would review for anyone deserving of my time - which is to say, I can give you a lengthy version of my opinion, often filled with questions, sometimes smattered with what I think would improve it - but I'm not going to be able to say, "Would X person really say that? You need to explore your characters more deeply. And this worldbuilding is sloppy here, and what about blah blah blah and this and X person's motivations?" Although that'd be in more detail, uhh...

Signing off! ^^6

[shake-the-stars.livejournal.com]

Why do I suspect a little pink seahorse of wanting to sekritley hack my hard drive to look at all the fic thereon? ^_- I'll only worry if I see "lee's crappy fantasy novel" on your interests list.

Let me put it this way: this thing could be called "Terror from the Year 1991", because that's when I first started working on it. Naturally, it's been refined over the past 15 years into something that didn't completely suck ass, and now only partially sucks ass. This is the first draft, so tedious worldbuilding crap will probably be refined in further drafts. Right now the point is to get it all on paper (or on my hard drive of doom).

You don't have to be OMG SO COGENT AND AWSUM with the concrit, and I don't mind a longer version of your opinion with a lot of questions, though I may threaten you with tummy pokes if you've itemized your list. ♥