vwl

Tim (highschool/tim-series) is the story of a teenager trying to escape his past in Ohio by avoiding all possibility of friends until he is confronted with Terry, a popular, charismatic boy who has taken Tim on as a Citizenship class project--a project to talk to and spend some time with someone he doesn't know. The project opens Tim's past, introduces him to John, another, crippled boy who shares some of Tim's perspectives on life, and brings Tim to life. The plot is a fairly fresh take, for one, on the evil-fundamentalist theme, and it competently treats the friendship/love theme. What is particularly nicely done is the flashback to Tim's life in Ohio and then the play of that into the present. The sex is subdued, but when done, is done well. The characters are well drawn, especially Tim and John, though Terry, likable as he is, is a bit too good to be true--but likably so. The minor characters are done moderately well, but there is no motivational basis for Tim's mother's and brother's--their actions have to be taken as a given. The writing is clean, workmanlike and generally gramatically correct, but the story does need a final editing and proofing. All in all, I think it is a good story that deserves a nomination. I don't think it is as good as Alone/Together, but I think few stories are that good.

I think we should call a draw on this topic so that we can get on with it--er, so we can get on with it. Oh, what the hell. rec

I nominated and am a very large fan of Alone/Together, (celebrity/boy-bands/alone-together). It is unfortunate that the story is stuck in the fan-fic section of Nifty, because it is not the typical fan-meets-rock star/actor-etc. story. No, it is a relationship story between two adults who happen (or happened) to be part of a rock band. The first 13 chapters of a long and rather complex and beautiful story form a complete arc, tracing the development, breakup and reconciliation of a relationship between JC and Lance, starting after the breakup of the band. [The first 12 chapters are reproduced in HTML format at the Yahoo Groups site under alone-together-novella. The 13th chapter is at Nifty.] The characters are full-fledged developed adults, with faults and fine qualities side by side, like real people, and they feel like real people that you might know or like to know. They are not idealized, but they are talented, and the talents play smoothly into the plot. There is no feeling of boy-band caricature at all. The plot moves back and forth across time, to portray the start of the relationship, its trials and its growth--with each main character developing differently. There is miscommunication, justified jealousy, real anger, reconciliation, real joy and real sweetness--all woven beautifully together. The arrangement of the pieces of the plot is tightly designed to move toward the conclusion. Which gets me to the writing quality. The writing is extremely well done: lyrical in places, crisp dialogue in others, nicely erotic. And, there is one scene, involving JC Chasez and a song, that is breathtakingly beautiful--not just in the gay-fiction sense but in the all-fiction sense. It is grammatically sharp, but it suffers from the Nifty problem of lack of final editing, but I consider this a minor drawback. In short, I think this story (or segment of it) not only should be added to the Best of Nifty list but should be considered one of the top few best stories on the net.

The following five stories have been selected as the nominees for addition to the Best of Nifty archive, with a decision of one to be made at the end of September by a review committee. Nominations are closed for this round but will continue to be accepted for rounds later in the year. 1. Second Wind, by Mickey S (beginnings) 2. Two Distinct Divisions, by Horatio Nimier (relationships) 3. Alone Together (chapters 1 through 13) , by D S, (celebrity/boy-bands) 4. Tim Series, by Cole Parker (high school) 5. Josh Evolving, by Cole Parker (high school) Please comment, advocate for or against (but politely) your choice. The criteria to be used are characterization, plot, writing quality and, last, the lost cause, it seems, of grammar, so comments attuned to the criteria are especially helpful. Post your ranking and your reasons.

I'm looking for nominations for new stories for inclusion in the Best of Nifty. The idea is to get a list of potential stories, maybe five, for comment and review over the next month and a half. Those that are not considered this time can be considered in the future. For nominations, just indicate the name and location of a Nifty story, which must be complete (or at least a segment complete), and a very brief statement as to why you are nominating it. With the "finalists," so to speak, you will have an opportunity to comment further. I'm nominating Second Wind (beginnings) by Mickey S, a well written, well plotted story; Two Distinct Divisions (relationships) by Horatio Nimier, which is a series of well-crafted mysteries that are largely self-contained in each chapter; and Alone/Together (celebrity/boy-bands) Chapters 1 through 13, which is one of the most beautiful love stories written in this genre. The segment from chapters 1 through 13 is a self-contained story, even though the story goes on much longer.

Colin, A very fine effort. I have an edited version of your story that makes some suggestions and a few wording changes. It is probably too long to post here, but if you send me your email address to vwl1999 [at] lycos.com, I can send you a red-line Word version that will show all my suggested changes--and they aren't many, given the quality of your work. vwl

Thanks for the alert to An Empty Grave. When it's completed we'll consider it for a nomination.

Am I the only one who can't find a story index on the site any more. Is there a URL for the story index? rec

I frankly think people are getting overwrought about unintentional use of ideas versus word-for-word copying or paraphrasing. Plagiarism is difficult to prove in any case. A clear case on point is the suits over The Da Vinci Code and the judge's decision that Dan Brown did not plagiarize. The following is a good summary of the judgment and some of the comments http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...6040700601.html The key graf is: But the expression of those ideas differs from one book to the other, and that's the standard criterion in plagiarism and copyright infringement law. "Copyright protects the expression, not the idea," said intellectual property lawyer Lee Bromberg, a founding partner of the Boston-based law firm Bromberg & Sunstein, who called the plaintiffs' claim "a long shot" at best. "What Dan Brown did is simply make use of some of those ideas, but the expression was his and was original."

It bears repeating.

There is a host of references on Google to "plagiarism," but the following site talks about plagiarism in writing fiction rather than plagiarism in an academic settng. http://www.fictionfactor.com/articles/plagiarism.html

The idea of a Top 10 list was not to get a vote on the best stories, but to get one person's perspective, and eventually to find a person that shares your tastes and expectations. The parallel would be a movie reviewer: some I consider uniformly good to excellent; others (read Ebert and Roeper) are awfully free with their recommendations (thumbs) and some are hypercritical. Finding a reliable reviewer is a personal choice, and that's what would be useful. For the reviewer, the discipline of having to choose among many stories should help him or her clarify what makes a story good--or not.

As I read the pleas for referrals to good stories and read the responses--very good to mediocre recommendations, in my view--it occurred to me that a useful service would be to allow forum members to post their Top 10 (or so) lists under their own names in the same manner that Amazon has lists from its contributors. These lists would be available at the click of a button so that a user could find a referrer that he likes and follow the recommendations with the expected effect of a series of good stories to read. At the same time, some recommendations could be discounted. The thought of a Top 10 list occurred to me because of the wide range of quality of stories in response to recommendations for what to read--and the wide range of quality of the Best of Nifty posts, which to me run from the very good to the barely average, with no way to cull out the better ones, because nobody can agree on what is good or not so good. So, why not have a number of people post their Top 10 (or so) lists and let the reader decide which one matches their tastes and expectations.

As one who has debated whether to send a "good job" after each of 27 chapters before a more detailed post at the end of a story, and deciding usually that I will wait, perhaps another solution is in order. Thus, a suggestion: Perhaps each chapter of each author's story could end with a button to invoke a poll, which would be an easy way to provide feedback to an author. For example, the poll could be as follows: I found this chapter/story: -- Excellent -- Very Good -- Average -- Below Average -- Poor Then there could be a further button to have an email comment. Such a poll would be easy for the reader to complete, and hopefully the author would take good and bad poll results constructively. Indeed, the notion resembles some of the computer-tech-help page polls that ask you if you found the article/answer helpful or not.

As one who has been burned by too many stories left uncompleted, I appreciate very much the notation that something is "Final." What would be useful also is a note, perhaps in News and Views, when the last draft chapter of a story has been completed. I'm willing to take my chances then that the story will be done when it goes out for editing and proofing; besides, we can hound someone who doesn't finish a good story to get their ass in gear.

Well, unless you allow ties, you have to be ahead by 2 or 4 games--3-1 or 4-0. If it's ahead by one on points, it should be clearer.

In reply to Graeme's question about whether or not to have another editing exercise, I offer the following: Why not take two or three pieces, ranging from something very raw to something that needs only final touches--that is the range between editing and proofing/final editing? What I suggest is that we all make suggestions for each using the current Nifty offerings. That is, for the former, find a good storyteller who doesn't write well, adopt him or her and edit the bejesus out of one of the chapters and present the various corrections back to the author--as an unannounced gift. For the second, take a story that is well crafted but needs the final touches and do the same--the gift again. Or maybe it will be considered a gift horse. It would be interesting to compare the editors' takes on each of these tracks. If people are interested, I'll look around and make my nominations for editing exercises and post them here.

There is obviously a gradation of editing/proofing stages from advice and major rewriting to final proofing/light editing that looks for punctuation, grammar and the like. It really is up to the writer and editor what the relationship will be. The objective, though, is to foster the writer's product, because that is where creativity arises, which is the reason for writing in the first place. But the effort is a joint one, and the writer should learn from a good editor as should an editor from trying to make readable what the writer creates. In terms of technique for an editor/proofreader, I find it useful to use the full range of Word capabilities, but I find the simultaneous change-tracking that Word offers as a major distraction. What I do is 1) save the original document, say a chapter--e.g., ch1.doc ; 2) create a new document, which I call, for example, ch1 - edited.doc, on which I will edit; and 3) at the end of all my edits, I create a comparison, using the Compare and Merge Documents Tool feature to, of the edited version to the original (using the Merge into New Document option on the Merge menu); in my example, I would I call it ch1 - red-line.doc. The reason I prefer editing a document that doesn't show the changes that I have made is that I find it difficult to read a document that has all the red-line changes immediately shown. In fact, sometimes I may make a change to a writer's work and later change it back, because the writer had it right. Step 3 above would show no change whatsoever. An instantaneous red-line document highlights the changes, however, and may make me more reluctant to correct my change. Plus, it makes the edited text more difficult to read, in my opinion. Just my thoughts.

Some high school journalism teachers used to have students list as many synonyms for "said" as they can--stated, shouted, etc. When students later got jobs at large newspapers, they were told only to use "said." The reason is this: "said" is unobtrusive. Readers tend to put it in the background and read what the person quoted actually, well, said. I think the same rule should apply to creative writing. "Said" is unobtrusive, like "the," or "and," or "then." Attention is not drawn from what is said. I read a story recently in which there were many uses of "spat." He spat; she spat. The usage became annoying after a while. There are, of course, no hard and fast rules on this, but simplicity is usually best. Besides, one can write something like this: "'She jumped and fell into the tub.' He laughed." Two sentences, but the same information is transmitted.