And now, without further ado...
FRAMES
APPLETS
BAD CROSSOVERS
MISSING MOMENTS
JAVASCRIPT
BAD LOVE STORIES
GRAPHIC-HEAVY PAGES
LOVE STINKS.
Considering my very cynical view of anything having to do with romance in real life (my full written opinion of Valentine's Day, for example, involves the characters !, @, #, $, %, ^, &, *, (, ), and + and is ten lines long), many people are surprised to learn that I am perhaps the ultimate romantic when it comes to fandoms in general and fanfics in particular. Yes, I am an XF MSR; in SW, I was one of the very first Mara-Luke supporters (YES! VINDICATION! BWAHAHAHAH!! TAKE THAT, HAMBLY!); and the list goes on. There is no quicker way for a fanfic to get my attention than to mention that it deals with a relationship between two characters. Even unlikely pairings entice me--I'll hold my breath until I see if the story is worth half a $#!+, but I'll read it.
Unfortunately, the poor romances drastically outnumber the good ones. The poor ones have a lot in common; and so, in "honor" of Valentine's Day...well, you get the picture.
Boy, does this one ever cover a lot of territory. SNERT, is a term that, I believe, originated with a friend of mine to describe AOL pests; it is an acronym for a Snot Nosed Egotistical Rude Teenager. The word I like to use to describe these kind of people is "gushing," and it's a trait that runs over into romantic fanfic. These are the kinds of stories where nothing ever goes wrong, everyone's happy-happy-HAPPY, where the author can't seem to get enough of talking about how wonderful it all is. These are the kind of fanfics that cause people to die of saccharine overdoses. Just about every bad romance fanfic ever written that hasn't absolutely massacred the characters or isn't even legible falls into this category.
As long as I'm on the subject, I'll note that my absolute LEAST favorite genre of fan fiction--Sailor Moon--is the worst offender of all in this category. If you've ever read one, you know what I'm talking about.
Mary Sue and her male counterpart, Gary Stu or Marty Sam were born, with the rest of the modern fanfic age, of Star Trek. To put it kindly, they were self-insertion fanfics whose purpose was to pair the author's depiction with Kirk/Spock/etc. And they were treated with all the respect and applause they deserved (that is to say, not much).
Closely related are "Mary Jane" fanfics, where the chosen character isn't supposed to be the author him-/herself, but the purpose is still the same in a romance fanfic--to pair said character off with the desired main character.
Bad enough. Worse still are when they have jealous cousins--the authors--who are determined to do the utmost damage to any rivals for their character's beloved's hand.
Two examples from professional fanfic, the SW series of novels--Barbara Hambly's Children of the Jedi and AC Crispin's Han Solo trilogy--stand out in particular. COTJ introduced the character of Callista, Hambly's Mary Jane for Luke Skywalker. (She wasn't suited for this, or any other part, of the role Hambly cast her for, but that's another story.) At the time, there was only one real "rival" on the scene for Luke's affections--Mara Jade, who was introduced in Timothy Zahn's Thrawn trilogy and, at the time of COTJ, had a working friendship with Skywalker which many (myself included) believed should develop into more. In the series immediately prior to COTJ, Kevin J. Anderson's Jedi Academy trilogy, Lando Calrissian had made a pass at Mara so widely telegraphed a drunken twelve-year-old could have parried it; Hambly wanted to get Mara out of the way--so she inserted a scene that did everything but announce to the world that not only had Mara fallen for that pass, but she and Lando were regularly sleeping together. (Because of this, I, along with many others, see a kind of poetic justice in the character assassination Callista suffered at the hands of Anderson in Darksaber.)
The Han Solo trilogy was even worse. Crispin was forced by canonical concerns to remove her "special someone," Bria (who I think is a full-fledged Mary Sue) at the end of the trilogy; apparently taking the stance "If I can't have him, no one can," she struck out not just at rival Leia, but at Solo himself--asserting that at the beginning of the Star Wars movies when Han first met Her Royal Highness, he was on the rebound from Bria. Fans of both Leia and Han were justifiably outraged.
For another textbook example, from a different fandom, of how not to deal with potential rivals, I recommend (and believe me, I use the term extremely loosely) the treatment of characters Sabin and Shadow in a Final Fantasy VI fanfic called Setzer's Christmas.
I could just as easily put this one under SNERT syndrome--hell, this is the frickin' cause of SNERT syndrome--but because the first rule of every story is that there must be complications, I'm going to give it its own slot.
To put it simply, even in a romance, you need drama, which means you need complications. REAL complications. Problems that are serious. Even the canon of my favorite whipping boy, Sailor Moon, has a number of real and serious complications--especially early on--with regards to the relationship between Sailor Moon and Tuxedo Mask. Fights, rivalries, disappointments were all there, and they were all real. They weren't solved in five minutes, and often not even five episodes. Unfortunately, few, if any, of the Sailor Moon fanfic authors who don't feel compelled to lift dialogue straight from the show (no, that's not a compliment) seem to have figured this out.
Go ahead, lay them on heavy! Don't give your characters problems with easy solutions, then try to build suspense by having them act like complete idiots for ten paragraphs. The harder things are for your characters, the better. And here's a novel suggestion--don't have a happy ending. Happy endings are a dime a dozen. Make the romance a tragedy. Have the hero propose to the heroine with his dying breath. Or worse.
It's a tall order, but let's face it--romance is the hardest kind of story to do well under any circumstances, but it's the one that, when done well, will hit your reader the hardest. And a well-done tragic romance is the height of the genre--after all, which would you rather have, Romeo and Juliet or Twelfth Night?
And an addendum to this one:
Generally, if your story has this problem but not the previous one, it means you've fallen victim to the "limp fist" cliche--that is, you throw up one last obstacle out of the blue (or resurrect one previously laid to rest) and bit of suspense for your heroes to (easily) overcome on their way to absolute bliss. NO, NO, NO! I can guarantee you that this will be a petty problem; the only suspense will be whether or not the reader turns away in disgust. The last obstacle that your heroes overcome should be one of the first ones introduced; it should be present throughout the story; it should be unresolved; and it should be significant! If you're going to insist on using the limp fist, don't give your story a happy ending.
The pure romance story exists almost nowhere today, and for good reason. If your story is anything longer than a vignette, than you'll need some sort of outer frame for your story that doesn't revolve around your main characters' relationship. In the best romance stories, that framework actually becomes an integral part of the romance without it seeming that way; the two worlds stay separate for the most part, but as the story goes on, the one begins to intrude more and more in the other, and vice versa.
And, finally,
Don't take it for granted that your readers already know and love the characters you're working with; in fanfic especially, where everyone and their uncle has a different take on the great ones, it's important to remember that while you can take past events for granted, you can't take personality for granted; if you do, your readers will either judge your characters to be acting out of character or--worse--not care.
Meanwhile, I'm still out there, reading through the Internet slush pile in search of gems. Maybe I'll get lucky and find a few more. Maybe one of them will be yours.
BACK
DOES THIS LOOK LIKE A 256K MODEM TO YOU?
As you may have noticed, if this is not your first time here, there has been a change to the front page of the Clearinghouse. That is to say, the option reading "With graphics"--which previously led to an Under Construction sign--has been deactivated and crossed out. The explanation for that is directly attributable to this rant, as I'll explain a little later on. But, enough of that.
Folks, we're here today to talk about loading time. Specifically, to talk about having too much of it. First, a word about where I'm coming from.
I currently work from a 486DX PC, with 16 megs of RAM, a 28.8k modem, and Windows 3.1. I use Netscape 4.0. I am, in this instance, what could be referred to as the "hard case"--someone with about the minimum capability one could expect to be active on the Internet, short of a dedicated Lynx user (and even they would probably have better equipment). So, if a webpage wants to get as many viewers as they can, and have them access the site easily enough that they want to come back (and, though some webmasters' coding habits make me seriously wonder, this is a professed interest of most webpages) I'm the acid test.
And I am impatient. Very impatient. I don't like waiting several minutes for a webpage to load, and I have, over the years, become very intimately acquainted with my browser's "stop" button. And why do you think it takes so long for pages to load?
Graphics.
It should be obvious that a page with graphics will load much slower than a page with just text, or HTMLized text. Sometimes, much slower.
Now, the web surfer has a number of options for dealing with this problem:
So, what are you going to do about it? Here are a few tips.
FIRST, CHECK YOUR LOADING TIME. The Web Site Garage offers a free diagnosis of any HTML page, simply by typing in its URL. Among the information you can obtain is how quickly your page loaded under a number of different speeds, ranging from 14.4k to a full-fledged ethernet connection. Once you have an idea how long it takes the majority of surfers (14.4 and 28.8 users) to access your site, you have an idea of how much work needs to be done.
DON'T USE SO MANY GRAPHICS. This should be painfully obvious, but still. Learn a bit more about HTML--there are any number of functions you can use that will convey the same effect as many graphics, without making my browser choke.
LEARN ABOUT TABLES. I love tables. I think they're the greatest HTML innovation in a long time, one of the things you can do with a table is break down a very large image into several smaller ones. A great tables tutorial can be found here. Just be sure not to overdo it, like Geocities did with the Geoguide menu up at the top of the page--if an image isn't too big, it will load faster as, for example, one 18k image instead of a dozen 1.5k images.
RESIZE YOUR IMAGES. By which I don't mean resizing their length and width parameters in the source code, but actually going into a graphics editor--I use Microsoft Photo Editor, which came with my non-Internet computer--and making the image smaller, which will reduce its file size and cause it to load faster. There also used to be a number of free image compression services available, such as Gif Lube and Image Wizard, that would have reduced your size even further; unfortunately, these have been converted to pay services and are no longer of any practical use unless one has some extra disposable income (say, $10 a month for Gif Lube) and enough of a need to pay it.
Now, what does this have to do with me permanently scratching the graphical half of the Clearinghouse? Quite simply, I'm taking my own advice. Because I'm on Geocities, I already have to deal with the Geoguide and watermark slowing down my load time; even without them, the number of site logos, and hence, links, I could have had on one page without the load time spiralling out of control would have been ludicrously low. Keeping the sites organized (which I planned to do by alphabetic order) would have been a nightmare--it takes me long enough to update the Clearinghouse as it is!
So, there you have it. I'm doing what my associate Dunc advised me to do when I first started work on the Clearinghouse, and making this, with few exceptions (the Geoguide, the watermark, the webrings page, my logo) a text-only page. Sorry as I am to bid the Under Construction sign a fair adieu (OK, I'm still going to keep main.html as it is, just for sentimentality's sake) it will be good to finally get out from under that stigma (I've been rejected from more than one webring because of it). This is a fully functional and growing website, thank you very much.