User blog comment:Adelina Le Morte March/Fanfiction Pains: annoying things I've noticed related to Merlin fanfics/@comment-5364525-20130128185659

I fully admit to loving fan fiction, whether reading or writing it, and  I totally agree, keep the summaries clean! I almost never search the new stories page for that reason, and because of all the summaries that say, "I suck at writing summaries, please read." Instead I surf the favorites lists of like-minded authors.

I love reading Freylin stories, though I set out to write my own Mergana story last summer because of the lack of stories that didn't amount to PWP. Now I'm working on a Merthian story for much the same reason. I like plot with a dash of romance, not smut with a sprinkling of plot.

The other things that irk me within fan fic is when someone starts a story with a great idea, maybe inspired by a particular scene they've imagined, but they don't plot anything out before throwing it out onto the internet. Then the story stagnates as they struggle to plot out this story and figure out how it's going to end all the while trying to cater to the demands for update! update! update! So they rush through and the story ends up being abandoned or ending weakly.

I've seen plenty of good, well-written gen fic that focuses more on the adventure aspect of the story than the potential romantic relationships between the characters. You do have to sift through a good deal of garbage to find the gems sometimes though.

I should also say, Adelina, that I've read a couple of your stories, and enjoyed them very much.