About me: I'm 40-something, married, no kids (unless you count furkids), and I write advertising copy for a living. I love so many different books of so many different genres that I couldn’t name just a few, and if I started trying to name any I’d be going on forever. I hope to publish my own original stuff someday, and in the meantime I find fan fiction (along with my journal) a great way to practice honing my technique. I also have a blog about my recent cross-country move called Fresh Start (www dot shootingforthedawn dot blogspot dot com).

I got my moniker, Fang's Fawn, from a very minor character in a VERY wonderful book called Bridge of Birds by Barry Hughart. If you haven't read it, do!

Fawn's Fanfiction Pet Peeves:

•Authors who don't proofread. I'm talking about proofreading, not editing. I know it's a learning process, we all makes mistakes, and things fall through the cracks. I also know that fanfiction writing is recreational for most people (me included). But when I see a story with no caps, all caps, or misspellings that could have been caught by a spell checker, I feel like the author couldn't even do the bare minimum to give me an enjoyable reading experience. It's disrespectful, and also the reason why I always go back and fix any errors readers point out to me.

•Chapters shorter than the time it takes to open them with a single click. There's short, and then there's one-paragraph-short. If you need to do a super-short chapter for stylistic reasons (as for a prologue or similar), don't release the tiny little chapter unless you have a longer one ready to release at the same time. Otherwise, you're just wasting your readers' time.

•Authors who hold chapters "hostage" in exchange for a certain number of reviews. At best, this sounds whiny. At worst, it sounds arrogant. Either way, it always sounds self-gratuitous, and I solemnly swear to never, ever do this to my readers.

•Summaries where the author says, "Better than it sounds" or "I suck at summaries." Word of advice: even if both those things are true, for Pete's sake don't say it! It's the literary equivalent of saying to a date, "I'm not good enough for you." It makes me want to say, "You know what? You're right." When I see stories with one of those two statements prefaced in the summary (or worse yet, both!), I don't bother to read it at all.