MetaFic

I am guilty of using "the smile not quite reaching one's eyes," and variations on that theme. I don't know how to otherwise describe the publically polite smile worn even while the character finds no humor in the joke or situation. I don't see them as a "warning sign" per se for a story.

No offence to Dave or Jonathan, but nicknames for Ginny that involve some form of a fire or heat reference are quite wide spread. I have a different take on the firefly meme and Ginny in the next chapter of Sorcerer's Apprentice. Oh, that and references to Ginny's hair (and the other Gryffindor chasers) flying behind her while playing Quidditch. Stylisitcally and cinematically it is fine, but would someone really want long hair flapping about their face while involved in a very visual game? I can imagine combing it out afterwards would be a bitch.

Josh's treatise on the physics of Quidditch maneuvers so lovingly described in many fanfics covers those memes rather well. But I still enjoy reading them, no matter how improbable.

I didn't mean to say these things are warning signs! Just things I notice that turn up. To use a musical analogy, in the infancy of bebop, the style was very specific but fairly new. There were licks, patterns of syncopation, chord voicings and other stylistic moves that came to be common because one player would hear another doing something and incorporate that into their own music. This is what made the genre what it is.

And might there be a spell for untangling hair, like "Sbrogliaro"? (from Italian, not Latin, for "untangle". I imagine that the Italians would be more concerned about making a spell for that than, say, a Benedictine monk.)

Molly Weasley has bone-crushing hugs.

Why is it that every fanfic that has Harry shopping in London has him going to Harrods? I mean, it is not even that close to Charing Cross Road, I think 2 miles or so, although that is a guess from a quick search online. Any of our members from Britain want to verify that for me? There are dozens of other clothiers nearer or as close. A quick search yielded:

Charles Tyrwhitt Shirts
Thomas Pink Jermyn Street
American Retro Soho London
Gladstone Jewellery
A Suit That Fits
Tshirt 123
Savage London
Wallers Clothing Stores Ltd
Russell and Hodge Ltd
Thomas Pink Chancery Lane

I did not check out every store, or whether this is supposedly a point on Charring Cross road that the Leaky Cauldron is, but it does serve the point of taking just a few minutes to check facts and perhaps be a bit more original.

- A good novel is an indivisible sum; every scene, sequence and passage of a good novel has to involve, contribute to and advance all three of its major attributes: theme, plot, characterization.
Ayn Rand - The Romantic Manifesto p. 74 (pb 93)

that read more like a play-by-play of a snake-wrestling match than a moment of intimacy. Tangling tongues, asking for entrance, deepening the kiss. It seems like the writers haven't done it that much, or don't want to show you anything but a list of instructions. It winds up reading like a recipe instead of the memory of your aunt Sadie's apple pie.

Is that warm apple pie? That would be borderline Puff, if so. Although I'm sure familial based Puff on FFnet must be prevalent.

I tend to think of less snake-wrestling, and more alligator wrestling. This begs the question, however, that if you flip one of the participants on their back, will they go unresponsive like an alligator will?

Don't forget about the broom closets every few feet, Ron's ability to consume his body mass in food at each meal (sounds like hyperthyroidism), the wicked Gargamel -- err, Filch -- restlessly on the prowl at 3am as the man needs no sleep, similar insomnia behaviors for Snape who has nothing better to do than terrorize students . . . the list goes ever onward.

I hear the tune Jingle Bells in the background. Is that a one-way mirror? Hmm.

Yes, Harrods... why would anyone want to go there?

Lots of places to shop on Oxford Street which is up the top of Charring X Rd. The best place to take anyone for an easy shop would be Marks and Spencers. However if you wanted to be more adventourous there is, as you point out there is a lot of choice.

American Retro... Soho London (Or is that its full store name?), in that same area theres a rather excellent Fridays restaurant. Not sure how long they've been there so that may exclude them from being in HP fanfiction but, theres also a rather expansive little Mall in Soho that I think Harry would find quite accommodating, I may be wrong but it seemed like that there were quite a few little neat stores there. Though a Teenager like him I'd expect would be like some tourist *cough father cough* who may accidentally run into the Red Light district. Thatne's another thing, the Dursley's kept the boy locked up, I'd expect he'd have a rather difficult time navigating London. But two miles really isn't that hard to get around, the mass transit does a pretty good job at shrinking distances down. My feet would have never survived walking around that much. Simple too.

And yet in a lot of Fanfics I find that he seems to be quite the master of locating exactly what he wants when he wants it. London is big, it makes Rome small if you're only talking about complexity. Sure Harry would know the magical world quite well, but the muggle world beyond Private Drive...? Doubtful.

Since several of these shopping trips that I have read have been in the company of a stinking-rich Hermione, one suspects a smidgeon of snobbery. Do they mostly also include Harry visiting Gringotts and discovering he owns most of it? (I think they probably do.)

Heaven forbid we might suggest that the authors are just too pig-lazy to look up any shops other than those they happen to have heard about. I mean, I don't find it so hard to imagine that there are shops in New York other than Macy's...and a little work could dig up some names very easily.

As to distance, I checked on Google Maps. Walking down Shaftesbury Avenue, which crosses Charing Cross Road about half-way down, along Piccadilly and continuing onto Knightsbridge itself, it's about a mile and a half: an estimated half-hour walk. One would, if I recall correctly, pass countless very good shops, almost all much cheaper than Harrods.

Aw, come on. Super!Harry has to have a super!wardrobe, right? To show off his awesome quidditch-toned physique, if nothing else.

He also has to meet a really cute Muggle girl and sweep her off her feet with his twinkling green eyes. She'll probably have a really mean manager, who Harry will annoy by making sure the cute girl gets the commission on all that gear he's buying.

The clever trick is combining the purchase of a whole new wardrobe in Harrods with the purchase of a hugely-expandable trunk at some specialist shop in Diagon Alley which (bizarrely enough) nobody ever remembered to mention in canon even though it's really famous and everybody knows about Mad-Eye Moody getting his from there.

That's not a trick. You overlooked two minor details.

1) They can stuff over 1,000,000 galleons of solid gold into the trunk, too.
2) No matter how much material they put into it, they can shrink it to a dime and carry it in their pocket.

Now that is a trick. Just imagine, I could put my entire house into a trunk, shrink it, and stroll down the street with nary a care in the world. Or the Library of Congress. Or an armored tank division. Or . . .

Hedwig (an unusual creature for a snowy owl as the females are a mottled brown and white) hands out quite a few "affectionate nips".

I've always liked the idea of the expanding-trunk-with-a-flat-inside device as a way of being independent within a system - it's a nice fantasy - I just don't like it when people don't follow it to its logical extremes. And no one has ever taken the trunk with Harry in it, as far as I know. Would he get thrown around in it while it moved?

with food. Most typically used for the Weasley kitchen table, but also found describing other places where a party is in session. Personally, if a bridging device (table) is groaning under a compression load, I'm outta there. Either that or "Reparo" is on my lips and my wand at the ready.

I just read a scene in which one kisser's tongue sort of knocked at the door of the recipient's mouth, "seeking entrance", and then proceeded to "explore". Now that sounds ... maybe a little incompetent for young adults (20+). Or like a clumsy thief. Exploring? Really? Why not just say, "he rifled through her mouth like a customs inspector"? That might be funny, anyway. Or "he tongued her like he was digging through a sock drawer trying to find an odd black one." Okay, two similes. But I like simile. When used well, a simile is like, you know, awesome or something.

Excuse me while I shudder.

Depending on the age of the fanfic: Ginny is referred to as "Virginia." Those that were written before Jo told us "Ginevra Molly Weasley" are forgiven. After that? You might as well write 'Mione Grainger.

Sir, I wonder where that came from. Only a completely sick person that lacked the common sense given to any one would ever dare such.

Amen to that. How stupid can you get?

Double weddings. Every now and then, you can find a double wedding in fanfiction.

Now, I really love my best friends, but there's no way I'd share my wedding with them. In fact, if it's a money issue, I'd pay for their wedding, but not share.

It doesn't look romantic to me and not to mention that while Ginny and Hermione might be best friends, they are completely different persons. Two of them planning a wedding together would probably start a war.

Oh, look! A bunny.

Errgh! Now that's a plot I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want to read. Unless it was done as a joke pulled by Hermione and Ginny on everyone else, or as a light-hearted prank war. Hmm....

In any case, sorry Dino but someone's already caught the bunny. There's a movie about to come out called, if I'm remembering correctly, "Bride Wars". I intend to avoid it like the plague.

Rumoured to be spunky, fire-filled, passionate, short tempered, dangerous, insert-other-random-thing here.

The problem here is that there haven't been any Weasley Women in several generations. So how does anyone know what the last one was like? Rumours, legends, distorted stories? Molly certainly isn't a WW. No one living would know of any. How can anyone with a brain bother to make a comparison?

Do you routinely compare yourself or others in your family to your three-times-great grandmother? Or have you collectively lost all memory of that person?

Harry being called Cub by Remus or Pup by Sirius. At least JadeSullivan was original as far as I am concerned with Sirius calling Harry Bub.

Also, some authors tend to recycle ideas they had from other stories they've written to the point where you can almost expect to find them in a future story they right. The two biggest "violators" of that are teddylonglong and Mrs. Sniffy.

Things in teddylonglong's stories:
She has a Merlin House in a few of her stories.
In all of the stories I remember where Harry is an animagous, his form or one of his forms is some kind of Pheonix and he gets "killed" in that form, is reborn in Pheonix form and has to wait a couple of weeks before he can take on human form.
Dumbledore and McGonagall are not only be married but be either Harry's grandparents or great-grandparents.
Lily/Severus pairing.
Ron bashing but all the other Weasleys are portrayed as good.

Things in Mrs. Sniffy's stories (especially the three she's currently working on):
Regulus is discovered to be alive but lost a lot of his magic when he escaped from the cave by forcing himself to apperate through the anti-apperation wards.
Regulus teaching ancient runes at Hogwarts.
Sirius was an Auror and his girlfriend was his partner.
Sirius' girlfriend having a life prior to her attending Hogwarts that is just as bad or worse then Harry's (living with Magic hating relatives).
Sirius' girlfriend's parents and younger sister died in a car crash.
Sirius' girlfriend's younger sister had some form of cancer.
A Snape that treats Harry like a normal person.
Slytherin being discovered that he wasn't the radical history thought he was and referred to muggleborns as pure-bloods.
The wards the supposedly keeping Harry safe being questioned.
Weasley bashing.

I would have to check canon, but the one place I would have thought this might be marginally acceptable is when Ron is speaking with his mouth full. OK, so that's yet another cliché in itself, but it can occasionally be pulled off properly. When done sparingly, there is a small vein of humour to be mined whereby only Ron's siblings can understand the blurred utterances which squeeze their way around a mouthful of whatever, but it's one of those things which can make or break a fic.

For me it's people rolling their eyes, i don't think I've ever rolled my eyes

One of the best exponents of this is Anne Walsh, the creator of the Dangerverse (yeah, I know, big surprise coming from me ;-)

She has not only created an AU which covers the whole timespan from March 1982 to sometime in 1998 (we think, anyway—she's not letting on, for obvious reasons, when the Final Battle will be, or even if there will be one ;-), she has also created stories which are effectively AUs of her main AU.

For example, her current story is "Be Careful" which is a very odd cross-over between canon and a pseudo-mediaeval version of the Dangerverse. The latter is populated with characters well-known from the Dangerverse, many of them analogues of people from the canon universe. The premise is that canonical Draco Malfoy, immediately after the death of Charity Burbage, is struck with the reality of his situation and desperately wishes to be somewhere—anywhere—that gives him a fresh start. He goes to sleep in Malfoy Manor and wakes up…somewhere else.

The two-fold joy of this story, as with others by this author, is that familiar names and faces appear, but there's always a new wrinkle. In this instance…well, let's just say that one of the least of the changes is that James and Lily Potter are alive and well, and that Harry has four younger siblings. He is still romantically attached to Ginny, however, and other familiar Dangerverse pairings are also present, many of them also canonical. Remus and Sirius appear with their now-familiar spouses and yet more children: in this story, however, the big difference there is that Hermione is the daughter of Remus and Danger, rather than the latter's younger sister…"she has blue eyes but still snogs Ron at every opportunity" as our wiki puts it!

There is much fun in watching the author produce a new story out of familiar material, both her own and JKR's. She's weaving her original story in and out of "Deathly Hallows" with great skill, and we're currently waiting on an evil cliff-hanger; happily the update schedule is almost daily for this story so we're not hurting too much ;-)

Chapter titles that sound like a hair salon in Denton, Texas?

Reflections, Impressions, Emissions, Contractions... maybe not those last two. But there are a lot of those.

Never having been to Texas, never mind Denton, I'll just have to imagine.

The Mirror of Erised revisited?

Sirius doing a very good impression of a dog? I'll get me coat…

I'm reminded of a hilarious fic where a bunch of lads were mortified, not to say mystified, to be given a lecture on "nocturnal emissions" which took entirely too long for their comfort to get around to making it clear that the subject under discussion was "accidental magic" rather than what their filthy teenage minds had immediately assumed…

That would have to be the obligatory "Ginny/Hermione is giving birth and Ron/Harry is cool as a cucumber/going bananas" storyline.

For what it's worth, I think I've seen something that would fit each of these somewhere or other: the challenge would be to fit all of them into the same story ;-)

But I like my cryptic chapter titles. They have multiple possible meanings, which makes me feel clever. And I still say that "Reflections" was an accurate and concise summary of what was happening in that particular chapter. =)

It was a good description of what happened. There's no such thing as a bad word, and you don't waste words. It's just a thing I've seen a lot of. But it's likely you were ahead of the curve on that one.

Easy for me to talk about given the imaginative names on my chapters, like the moving "Chapter Four" and the piquant "Chapter Eleven", not to mention the foreboding and yet sanguine atmosphere of "Chapter Seventeen".

This weird thing where someone sees something that's mildly amusing AT BEST and literally falls out his or her seat laughing. I keep seeing that and it keeps poking me.

…is when an author gets something wrong which makes it very obvious they haven't had the story Brit-picked (so this is a "guilty pleasure" ;-).

In the story I'm reading right now, the gaff in question is having Luna date (and apparently have sex with) Morag MacDougall … but neither is a lesbian because the author didn't realise that "Morag" is a girl's name. So we have the spectacle of Neville glaring at the "dark haired boy sitting at the Ravenclaw table" because the latter hadn't treated Luna right. And every time they talk about this boy named "Morag" I snigger inside.

It's not compulsory for a guilty pleasure to be coherent, right?