So, not much lately?

Well, we’ve been deep into some really good stuff lately.  Stuff that hasn’t needed CBN to jump in, put our hands out like a traffic cop, and pull a writer over for crimes so abominable against the English language, they shouldn’t be allowed to write.

One thing got passed between two of the people here.  A cute story.  Really cute.  I love the premise and everything.  The author’s pretty darn good.  It’s just that this particular story is in “rough draft” form; it says right in the title that it’s not betaed.  I take that into consideration when reading things.  And trust me – “Daughter” by velocitygrass is cute.

I just – me personally – have a hard time reading the following without wanting to claw my eyes out.

Ugh!  When speaking, you don’t say “Lt.” and you sure as hell don’t tell someone “btw”.  But yes.  It’s not betaed, so we’re not going to come down on the author.  We just hope it gets betaed sometime soon!

When it’s not horrible, but it can be better

So I was reading a story (found here at this link).  It’s actually kind of cute; the premise is good.  Of course we’re suckers for John Sheppard and his stunted emotions.  There’s actually a lot of intriguing things about this piece of fic.

It’s just that I, personally, cannot get past the idiosyncrasies of the story bits themselves.  Things like this:

“Oh, and Lt, next time you try a stunt like that, you’ll be on inventory duty for the next six months.”

or

(snip)… he had the other man’s back and knew his 2IC had his.

See, these would be considered a distractingly improper use of abbreviations.  That, and several bits of word choices in the piece just are irksome.  This author could very well have use for a beta to sort these things out.

A Welcome And The Rules

First of all, welcome to Concrit By Night!  We’ve put this site together as a way of giving anonymous feedback to authors, in the hope that it will guide them to better writing in the future.

Here’s what we’re NOT: A site that condones personal attacks on authors.  You will never find something like, “Author X is an idiot,” or, “Y should just stop writing.”  If we see that, those comments will be stricken. We’re not here to bully or allow bullying.  ‘Concrit’ is short for ‘constructive’, folks.

Continue reading A Welcome And The Rules

A Welcome And Our First Review

A few of us were talking, and wanted to come up with a way to give anonymous feedback.  Well, this site came from that discussion.  You know those stories that you sometimes read and just dread having to think of something nice?  If those stories make your skin crawl, then what you’re going to find on this site is so far beyond that, it’ll make your skin want to disown you and take root in a camel’s nether regions.

Our first entry had me laughing for so many reasons, in so little space!  It was a Hawaii Five-0 story (it’s called “Sorry, Wrong Number”) that I stumbled upon that was so poorly written, and the characters so poorly developed, I had a hard time getting past it.  What to do?  So much to make fun of, but there’s only a finite space to make fun of things (plus, I have a full time job that I need to do or they don’t pay my ass), so I cut it down to this:

 

Are you serious?  Do you seriously believe that Steve from Hawaii Five-0 is so weak that he’ll fucking CRY if Danny doesn’t fuck him?  Seriously?  And what’s worse than that?  I laughed so hard when I read “I’m going to make love to you” that I think I woke people up.  In Nova Scotia.  It got so bad that I started saying it at work.  I’d get this look in my eye, use a Spanish accent, look at my cubie mate, and then blurt out, “I’m going to make love to you.”  Only I don’t think I ever got through the whole sentence without busting out in laughter.

Anyway, I had to share.  And now that I have, I expect my minions to all go to work tomorrow, look at the fourteenth person they see, and say lasciviously, “I’m going to make love to you.”