I think I might have no convictions.

I've been doing a fair bit of meta-ing with tiptoe39 and some capslock crack at speccygeekgrrl's lj, but mostly the secret in question has made me genuinely curious - what makes a fic stand out as good? A lot of people are throwing around random comments in the forum (i.e. "97% of fic is crap") which makes me wonder what standards by which people judge what they read.

( Here's a few that factor into my own personal enjoyment... )

So what are your thoughts? What are your standards? Sharing time!

I was thinking after scanning several sex-related polls last night about what makes good porn and what makes bad porn. I wonder if there's a way to objectively measure what smut is good and what smut is bad, regardless of whether it's het, slash, femslash. A lot of the conversation in the polls last night had to do with vocabulary. That's a good place to start, I think, because what one person finds acceptable another might find obscene, and there's always the risk of overusing certain words. ( But I think that's only part of the debate. )

No, wait, I haven't completely wasted my time today. In fact, while I was mulling all this over at work, I came up with a smut fic meme, to bide my time before heroes_exchange assignments go out.

( smutty meme! ) Also, here's my new favorite story.

So far I have started two discussions on topics related to writing.

On feedback (f-locked because I mock)
Writing Process (or Procrastination at Its Finest)