In the hope of getting an answer from the site admins, I have now sacrificed a chicken. I can post a photo here as evidence if that would help.    Actually I can't post a photo. I have cut the chicken up to feed it to my Peregrine.

And what's with the blue page of ads? All of a sudden when browsing through stories I get blue pages of ads with no way out. Just ad after ad after ad.

I've managed to post a story by attaching an html file (only took me about five tries or so) and now I am forbidden from editing it.    Do I need to start sacrificing chickens to the internet gods or something? (Unfortunately I don't have any giant blue ones.)

   So, finally after a long break, I get back into writing and decide to post a story. What happens? Apparently I am forbidden from doing so. The site still tells me I am a validated author, but I can't post a story. I get a 403 error and it tells me there's an additional 404 error as well.

It is a matter of no small annoyance that when I optimise images to create animated GIFs, the colour goes stupid.   

Ah, well, here they are anyway.





And one final jpeg that I couldn't resist tinkering with 



cheers

Nancy

This looks like fun. Are animated gifs too big (in terms of file size) for this challenge?

     
     Gel Sadra: Galactor Leader and Fashion Victim.

     
     G-5 channels the ORLY owls.

Ironically, I wrote my first fanfic after reading a gosh-awful wallowing teen angsty piece of absolute rubbish on Lori's old archive (I won't name the author although she's no longer around) and figured I could do better than that. It was most encouraging. (I never said I was a nice person.)

Could you tell me who the author is? It might be a story worth reading since I'm just a sucker for those wallowing angsty teen fics....

I'm comfortable saying I've read an unspecified fic on another site and that I thought it was rubbish -- no doubt a lot of people think my stuff is rubbish -- but I wouldn't go so far as to humiliate the author on a forum. What did she ever do to me to deserve that? It's a moot point in any case as the fic is no longer up on the net. I'm sure that if you look hard enough on the world wide web, you'll be able to find something execrable enough to suit your purposes.

[The Good]

I feel that my writing is shaped a lot by my reading.

The Good   
Irony, dry humour. I love the works of Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams and AA Milne. I like sympathetic, complex characters who are good, but not necessarily nice, like Granny Weatherwax, Marvin the Paranoid Android, Eeyore and of course Severus Snape. They do the right thing but they don't have to like it!

The Bad   
Teen angst gets on my wick. I hate teen angst. I saw on a forum at another fandom that someone was deeply offended by the term, 'teen angst.' Now, there's a prime example of teen angst. I also find characters who do naughty, bad, evil and nasty things for no reason other than plot requirement irritating. 'Just because' was an adequate reason for me to eat my Brussells sprouts when I was two. I like Brussells sprouts, as it happens, so you're going to have to do better than that, now.

The Ugly   
Song fics. By all that is holy, WHYYYYYYYYYYYY?

I suspect it has something to do with teen angst. Particularly if Evanescence is involved. WHYYYYYYYYYY?

The topic   
So, given the influences, I tend to focus on characters and try to give them good reasons (not necessarily excuses) for what they do, and I like my good guys just a little bit bad. I try not to wallow in angst because it gives me a headache, and if I ever write a song fic, unless it's for something like Monty Python's Idiot Song or They're Coming to Take me Away you'll know I've officially gone certifiably insane. (As opposed to merely harbouring suspicions.)

Ironically, I wrote my first fanfic after reading a gosh-awful wallowing teen angsty piece of absolute rubbish on Lori's old archive (I won't name the author although she's no longer around) and figured I could do better than that. It was most encouraging. (I never said I was a nice person.)