Fan-Fic Friday Spotlight: New Frontier by DragonsAreMyFriends
The reason why I named fridays, Fan-Fic Fridays was one to remind me to post my chapters to my fan-fic on Friday, or at least shoot for it, and the main reason:
To shine a spotlight on a fan-fic that I've read or currently reading.
So your fan-fic (if you who are reading made a fan-fic or completed one) might be the Fan-Fic Friday Spotlight from me.
If yours gets selected, I'll basically write a short review of some sorts telling how I like the story.
If the writer would want some constructive critque, then I'll be happy to give some advice, pointers, and anything helpful for that matter.
If those who read this thread then read her story, you can comment here to do the same.
I know that I have a fairly large following of readers, most of whom just read but not comment (which is fine), so I thought I could use that to show them other good fan-fics around the forum that they might not know about.
So without any further a due...
The first spotlight I will give is to one constant readers of my fan-fic:
DragonsAreMyFriends
And her story is:
New Frontier
I'll give my thoughts here in a bit.
One thing I did forget to mention is just a writer's tip.
When you read books and go through grammar studies in school, you should see that when there is dialogue, the words inside the quotation marks means you can say anything, even thing grammatically incorrect and words misspelled to emphasize how the word is said or the slang the person is using. But technically speaking, the narration part (The words outside of the quotation marks) one big rule of thumb is to never use n'ts. Words that are contractions: don't, doesn't, won't, can't, etc. It isn't like this is a rule and you get points counted against you, I just think it makes the distinct difference between dialogue and narration. So I try not to do it, though occasionally I even slip up. But yet, this is still left up to the writer's discretion.
Oh, one other thing did just pop into my mind. Indenting each paragraph, even if it is only one sentence or dialogue, it makes it easier to read (for some reason) to indent each paragraph. Three spaces is the least I do for an indent. Though when I copy/paste from Microsoft Word, it transforms the tab button (used to indent in Microsoft Word) equal's 9 spaces in the SoD forum document thread-starter-thing-a-ma-bob.
I guess it also helps to find the next line of the new paragraph if the writer so chooses to keep the paragraphs one right after the other. Like I do now with my books.
Still up to the writer's style, though, the writer is the writer so they get to chose what gets to be done with their story, formatting included, nobody else does.
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New Frontier by DragonsAreMyFriends takes place on Berk.
Thanks for stating the obvious, Drums. XD
Anyway...
Dragons' story is a hybrid between a School of Dragons fan-fic and a regular How to Train Your Dragon fan-fic.
The story has elements of School of Dragons classes that each of the Academy Riders (Hiccup and so forth) teach.
But this is no ordinary, average, everyday fan-fic of those two types. There is one more added twist to the story. But its a mystery to me. No, literally. XD It is a mystery.
Okay so it is a mystery story, big deal. Big deal, a yak's behind sitting on Mildew. There is action involved to keep things interesting and you wanting more, but also of course the comedic relief here and there to keep things light.
Dragons used a lot of the main characters from the Httyd franchise, but she also incorperates her own original characters into the fold. Her characters are the main characters. The supporting roles are some of hers, but are also some I created: Jarl Mollerson and his Family.
One other reason why I read this story is because Dragons used some of my characters (by premission) to add into the fold of the other characters of the story.
The writing and storyline of the story gets better and better with each chapter. The formatting is a little hard at first to read, as it is all one giant paragraph, but she learns and works on it each time to where she is now. Even I when I first started with The Clue of the Missing Socks, I had to go through the formatting change. For some reason if you type in Microsoft word and copy past into the forum document, it doesn't copy anything at all. So one has to reformat it again once they copy it over.
Once you get past the first few chapters, her writing gets better. Just in a span of 9 chapters, has she improve quite a bit from the start. But any writer first starting out goes through this stage. Yes I could be considered a "veteran" when it comes to writing fan-fics as I'm on my fourth one so far, but I start just a month or two past two years ago. I've still got a lot to learn and even I make mistakes too. Dragons has spelling errors and gramatical errors... but what am I saying, I make the same mistakes too. So I think as long as you do the best you can and do better the next chapter and learn, then making those mistakes become less frequent as one goes along.
The more you do something, the better you get at it. You'd think that if one chapter was the best she had done to that point (see comments on her chapter threads) and wonder how she could do better, she does. Then when you think about her outdoing herself for that chapter, the very next chapter is that much more.
That is one thing to remember in writer, that I've found out, every chapter you write not matter what it includes.... as long as you strive to do your best and write the best you can every chapter.... each chapter will be better than the last.
Though as a suggestion, I started with my fourth fan-fic (On the Edge of Mystery) by posting and intro about what I did, what the chapter is about, and asking for comments (What writer on this forum or any forum for that matter not like reading comments?) then in a reply to the thread starter post my actual chapter. This way if I make a mistake, gramatical, plot wise, character wise, the censor bans a word that isn't a bad word, or spelling, I can go back and edit it... As long as now one directly replies to the post, I'm fine and the edit button stays. If someone does reply to it, the edit button goes away. So keep this in mind if you see other people doing this with posts, not just fan-fics; those such as art threads are more prevelant.
So for writers out their reading this thread wondering about how to edit your work, this is how you do it: Create a post with the title of your book, chapter number, and chapter title, and then say a little something then click save. Then reply to your post and then post your chapter this way.
If this is your first time doing something like this, make sure you make it known not to "Don't Directly Reply" or for the 2nd time and on, "DDR" for short or any variation of that that you see.
That's as much as I can think of, so if you have read her story, what do you think?
Reading my review, what do you think? Will you read her story or not, based on what I said in the review?
Dragons, what do you think of my review?
PS: you can directly reply to this post if you like.
Here is the link to her prologue: http://forum.schoolofdragons.com/content/new-frontier-prolouge
You can find links to her following chapters in her signiture.
Is there anything about writing in general you, Dragons, or anybody else would like to ask me?