Sorry about the earlier post. Gmail seems to automatically send out
emails using Windows or Unicode character-sets encoded in base-64
and the list-software seems to automatically change the information
in the header to "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit" resulting in much
gibberish.
That is what happened with my post yesterday. Today I found out that
Gmail seems to do the same thing to emails that don't contain any
special charcaters when you are just replying to emails that do.
Composing a new email and copy&pasting the plain text into that
should be a suitable workaround. (There still might be some warparound
from Eric's overlong lines, but I don't know what to do about that.)
Hopefully Gmail will recognize this text as only requiring ISO-8859-1
and send it out encoded as quoted-printable which Ecartis should
then autoconvert to 8bit without problem.
Isn't technology marvelous?
I am really sorry for any inconvenience my discovery proceess
caused anybody. I will try very hard to avoid spamming the
list with more unreadable posts in the future.
On to the actual coments:
Hello, since I have heard that the best way to receive C&C here is to
give some out yourself and you posted right after me, you have become
first my target. Don't you feel lucky?
On 4/21/05, Eric Holdt <dragonboy1098@hotmail.com> wrote:
I hope this gets to you okay. this is my first attempted fanfic and the
first time i've tried sending it to the FFML. This story is a continuation
story from the end of the Ranma series and is roughly 80% comedy (i hope)
with a little angst and MSTing here and there.
I am new at this stuff, too, so don't take anything I say to serious.
It is all just the opinion of one person who isn't even a seasoned
writer himself.
This is a story that takes place in little place called Nerima, Japan. To
anyone who didn't live there, it would seem like the craziest, most out of
control place in the entire world. No exceptions, not even LA at midnight.
But to a resident, the events that happened would seem normal. In fact, if
something even remotely insane didn't happen every day there, they could
take it as a sign of the end of the world approaching. It's the city of a
hundred stories, and every one of those stories can be traced back to one
group of people.
Nerima isn't really a city. It is a part of Tokyo. I think the correct
term would
be a ward.
The whole recap thing doesn't really do it for me. The way it is written
it does not even sound like it would be very helpful to someone who does
not know the series. Anybody else who already knows of Ranma might easily
get bored.
I also find anything that even comes close to directly addressing the
reader very irritating, but that is just me and others might enjoy the
"let me tell you a story approach" you have going here.
Both this boy and girl happen to be extremely popular with the opposite sex,
causing a lot of jealousy between them. The girl also had a strange knack
Not just the opposite sex, or at least not just the sex opposite to the
one they were born with in Ranma's case. :)
Just Another Day
A Ranma 1/2 fanfic by Dragonboy (With random inputs by Dark Light)
Disclaimer: Most of these characters don't belong to me; though I wish I
could take credit for them. They belong to the amazingly brilliant Rumiko
Takahashi and whoever she sold the rights to, except for the ones that I
made up. I also made up the names for Ryoga's parents and Ukyo's father.
There are also several cameos from other manga, anime and video games in
this story. I'll try to have all of their respective owners by the end of
the story. Now, without further ado-Please enjoy!
Italic words signify thought.
<> signifies Chinese.
[] signifies sign writing.
() signifies author's random inputs/MSTing. My buddy DL will be doing most
of this.
Italics don't actually work in plain text.
I was going to complain about the use of signifiers here and MSTings
here, but looking ahead I can't see you actually using any of them which
I guess is okay.
For the record: Using normal quotes and adding a little explanation in
the text is far better than using such special notation. Most people
won't remember what the characters meant and will have to scroll back
up to your legend. Writing something like "she said in Chinese" or
somehow mentioning in the text that a conversation is in a different
language would work out far better for most people.
Witty comments and author's notes randomly inserted into the text can
break the flow of a story badly, so this should be done with caution.
How depressing, the boy thought, I come to this school hearing about
powerful martial artists, and I get no one.
This is much better than trying to use italics like you threatened above.
"Yes, thank you." Then the boy sat up and started looking around for the
one who ran him down. He saw him instantly; a slightly muscular boy with
black pants, a red Chinese shirt and a long pigtail. Ranma, the girl had
called him, was being confronted by the wooden sword boy.
I think you are supposed to keep speech and action always separated. This
should be two paragraphs. You are doing this a lot, but since I am not
entirely sure that it is a mistake I will not point it out every time.
"Turn and face your executioner, coward!"
Here you not accompanying the speech with anything, which might be
wrong, too. I think that if this is a mistake, than it is a far less
severe one than the other way.
Ranma smiled. "Tough guy, huh? Okay, let's see if you can keep me
interested longer that Kuno did."
That makes it sound as if Ranma has already fought Kuno today. Did that
happen while the stranger was knocked out?
"You scum!" Ginami heard someone shout behind him. He turned around
This part makes it sound as if you are telling the story from Ginami's
point of view. There have been hints of that elsewhere, but I think it
is strongest here.
There is nothing wrong with a Ginama POV in general, but you have been
using descriptions that he would not use (does he think about the color
of his eyes?) or given knowledge that he would not not have (how does he
know what the students think?)
"Saotome, I fight on!" The wooden sword boy suddenly shouted as he lunged
from out of nowhere at Ranma. "Your vile techniques shall never topple the
might of the great Tatewaki Kuno, Blue Thunder of-"
Kuno again this really sound as if Kuno had been knocked out earlier at
some point. He usually says things like "I fight on!" to mean that he
wants to continue a fight.
Ginami stared at Ryoga in wonder. "You can still move. Impressive, the
last person I kicked that hard is dead."
Dead? Really dead. There might have been lots of tough talking going on
in the Ranma series, but there never were any actual killers. With the
exception of Saffron who didn't really die the series mostly went for
lighter resolutions.
Unless you really want to change from the tone so much, you might want to
change this bit. It certainly is a jarring departure from the standard
Ranma fare.
Ryoga glared back at Ginami. "I will avenge Akane for what you did to her."
Ginami only smiled. "Don't worry, your time will come." He turned back to
Ranma. "Remember, five days until you meet your fate coward. You'll regret
ever insulting Ginami Ryujin, the Dragon Master." And with a sweep of his
cape, he walked off.
End of Prologue.
All in all this prologue for me lacked some sort of hook that would help
keep a reader interested. Just A new challenger is not really something
that brings you on the edge of your seat and makes you beg for more. It
also wasn't particularly funny except for the one repeated gag of having
the newcomer knocked down.
If you are planing to hook Ukyo up with Ryoga and don't have anything
planed to explain away Akari and Konatsu, you might want to remove the
one mention of the wedding and firmly plant it in anime continuity. If
you use the failed wedding you will also have to use anything else that
happened in the manga before that.
Please take my mostly negative comments to seriously. I am far better
at pointing out what I dislike than what I like. Just because I had some
problems with your fic does not mean that it is necessarily bad.
{Loki-L}
--
Visit my homepage at http://www.angelfire.com/anime6/loki-l/
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