Unfortunately, original anime/manga-flavor writing sort of falls into a
grey area.  The only anime-writing forums around are primarily based
around fanfiction for existing storylines; non-anime-writing forums are
usually less receptive to anime-flavor writing.  What's someone with an
original story idea to do? :/

Bite the bullet and figure out a logical way to include something from
anime in your story.  Sort of what I did with my original story, Ari.  I
put it in the world of Vampire Princess Miyu and made Miyu and Larva
participants in the story (well, observers at this point).  That gives
enough of a hook to get people interested and perhaps keep them interested.

My primary turn off for original stories usually happens the second I see a
bunch of American/non-Japanese names.  This usually signifies (very much
IMO) a story that has very little anime feel to it (and could be the plot
for an American comic book, science fiction novel or movie - ouch, I guess
that is almost an insult - apologies).  When the names are all Jack Smith,
Linda Carter and Ken Masters, and they get together to hangout and drive
the Mustang to the Sockhop at their LA high school, it's really, really,
really hard to think of it as "anime/manga-flavor writing". ^ ^

Not to say that original anime stories are bad (I think mine is okay :),
but when trying to keep up with just the Ranma-related ones has me reading
20+ story posts a day, deleting a few original, UY, SM or BGC stories is a
major relief.  On the hand, I read all AMG and MB fanfics, but tend to
delete MI.  I guess its just a matter of personal taste, really.

Fanfiction is usually a lot easier because we are taking the cream of the
crop of anime/manga backgrounds/universes and tweaking them - coming up
with a unique background/universe is extremely difficult (only two examples
of stories that have been posted here have really seem to have done this
well IMHO, one was the 3-level superheroes/gods universe written about
Puck, and the other was the start of a story by Windlily - basically two
non-anime stories by some of the best authors on the mailing list :).  So
setting out to write an original story means all the things that make it
easy for a reader to get into a normal fanfic are not there, and you are
asking the reader to do a lot more mental pushups to read your story.  Ah,
well, my two cents (which ain't worth much anymore, so perhaps I should
say, my quarter? :).

Charles Hurst  charlesh@teleport.com   http://www.teleport.com/~charlesh/