plebefic headers: but the zombies grip me the most

[cimorene]

1. Summary: Adam lives his delusional life and pines, until one day Kris slaps him in the face...



2. Summary: “Fine if you’re so brilliant, smart arse, tell me the reagents and conditions needed when turning a aromatic amine into a azo dye. Both stages,” Frank smirked smugly, it was one of the hardest questions he knew. He silently watched as Gerard thought over the answer.



3. Summary: “After all I’ve been through,” he growls. It frightens me a bit—hearing his voice change so much—but the zombies grip me the most. “It’s like I have a bullet proof heart.”



4. [Subject line:] Dirty Like the Tipe of your Tongue.



5. Summary: Kris has hooked up with the biggest Diva known to humankind and hopes to tame him. Will Adam Lambert finally grow up and become the partner Kris needs?

Comments

[sacredporn]

LOLOLOLOLOL yeah I know, I had a hard time coming up with #1.

I actually quite enjoyed reading your plebefic header list and wouldn't mind making one of your posts again.

And oh I started reading your works on AO3 and I think I've found another writer that I can learn from! \o/

[cimorene]

Well, I'm glad your feelings aren't hurt!

Plebefic Headers Frequently Asked Questions/ Frequently Made Comments

[sacredporn]

No worries, I'm still learning the language and sometimes I'm not really sure what I'm writing! I know I'm really lucky that people are kind enough to leave comments on my fics at all :)

And no, my feelings aren't hurt, like I said I had a hard time with that one, and I read your FAQ before commenting so I knew you weren't trying to be mean or anything. And even if you were, I believe that everyone is entitled to their opinions! If we all agree / disagree on the same things the world would be such a boring place, no? :)

So again, no worries!

[sacredporn]

Also, if you don't mind me asking for free advices (and English lessons), what do you think is wrong with the summary and how would you rewrite it?

You don't have to answer if you don't want to though!

[cimorene]

Well, the thing is, I can't easily suggest alternate phrasings because the summary doesn't quite make sense.

I guessed at once that you were a non-native speaker, but there are enough problems in translation that I can't guess, from looking at the sentence, what you intended to say well enough to rephrase it. I could imagine a near-infinite number of possible scenarios for what the story is actually about, because as it stands the sentence gives so little information that I really have almost no idea: just that Adam is possibly under some false impression(s) and possibly dissatisfied with something, and that this (these) thing(s) stop after Kris either figuratively or literally slaps him for some undisclosed reason.

For example, the most literal interpretation would be that Adam is suffering from a massive false belief about himself that affects his whole life, such as Tom Cruise's delusion that he can levitate things with his mind, or my grandpa's delusion that he is only a year or so away from striking it rich by building a golf resort on his farm without hiring any labor (but I have no idea what kind of delusion this might be, and the possibilities are endless). In addition to this, he also wistfully nurses an unrequited passion for someone - the most common use of "pining". What happens in the story is that Kris appears and slaps him, and he subsequently awakens to reality and also gets over his crush. But even if that is what happens in the story, it still wouldn't be correct, because:

• A delusional person would not normally be said to live a "delusional life". It's not a natural phrase. People are delusional; lives aren't.


• "To pine" is almost always used in the form "pining". In present tense, "he's pining" rather than "he pines". Furthermore, it doesn't make sense to use "pine" without any further context: there's pining away (which is more intense, and can imply the melodramatic suggestion that the person in question is going to die of love); there's pining after someone; there's pining for someone.


• Putting the comment about delusions and the comment about pining in the same clause in that way implies that they're logically connected somehow in the story's events, and it's very hard to imagine how that could be true. Having delusions is one thing, and unrequited love is another.


• The abrupt introduction of being slapped in the face in the second clause would give the impression that the fic was perhaps a brief comedy piece, but the rest of the sentence doesn't seem to fit with that hypothesis.

I think the best advice I can give you, in short, is that you may be attempting to express things more complex and ambitious than your command of English can support (also, it's advice, not advices. You get a piece of advice, or several pieces of advice). Using expressions or words that you aren't sure about - that you haven't mastered - is always an iffy prospect in a foreign language, because words never translate exactly from one language to another, so you will rarely end up saying what you want to say if you look up a word or phrase in a dictionary and try to guess how to use it. Sometimes it will work, but sometimes your sentences will just be too confusing for people to decipher. You clearly have a good command of conversational English, though, so you are quite capable of communicating in it. If you wrote more simply, with shorter and less grammatically complex sentences, and using much more basic words, you'd be less likely to run into misunderstandings.

As for how to improve your English vocabulary and grammar, the best and only fool-proof way is to read as much as possible, watch American media (tv shows and movies more than reality shows) in English without subtitles, and practice conversing with native speakers. You need to read and hear words and phrases as they're used naturally in context and then practice using them the same way yourself - it's much easier to get corrections on the fly and figure out how to say what you want in conversation than in prose, where the sentences are so much longer and more complex (and besides that, many native speakers don't have the talent for spotting mistakes as they read, or the talent for explaining those mistakes to someone, so even a native speaker beta isn't a sure bet).

[sacredporn]

Hey, sorry for the late reply, I was away for awhile. I want you to know that I legit flailed when I saw your response in my inbox. I mean, WOW, thank you so much! You are one of the most awesome people I've ~met on Dreamwidth!

What do I have to do to convince you to look at my fics and point out how and why they suck? Sometimes when I write I can feel that something is off, but I can't figure out what it is. It's a wonderful feeling when people read my stories and tell me they enjoy it, but I know there are problems with my fics and I need people who can spot my mistakes, be tough with me and explain things in a way that I can understand.

As to your suggestion that I write more simply, I'm definitely going to try that. And I agree with watching American tv shows and movies in English without subtitles too. I used to do that regularly, but stopped a couple of years ago due to personal reasons. I guess I should pick it up again.

As for books, I do love to read, but not many books can hold my attention (I don't mean it in a they-are-not-good-enough way, but a my-current-interests-are-very-narrow way). I'm not interested in reading heterosexual relationships, and it's not easy finding good books with gay porn in them, so I mainly stick to slash fanfics instead of original fiction. Although, I did fall in love with Anne Bishop's Black Jewels series recently, despite that it's 99.99% heterosexual. Have you got any good original fiction or fanfics to recommend?

Again, thank you so much for your advice and suggestions. I'm going to put your comment on my Kindle so that I can read it again and again :D

[cimorene]

Honestly, I can't imagine returning to a state of mind where I could read Kradam again, even in quite short doses. Otherwise I would be willing to look at what you were writing, so if you have something else easily accessible you'd like me to look at, I'd be willing. But I don't know how helpful that will be to you, because as much as I can continue trying to correct and explain the errors you're making, and I say this as someone who's learned my second fluent language entirely in adulthood, you'll learn much faster and better by immersing yourself in more English as much as possible.

In my case, it happened because 1) my sister-in-law gave birth to triplets and they needed a lot of help, so I was suddenly spending a lot of time with my in-laws surrounded by casual conversational Swedish; and 2) I needed to read a lot of textbooks, and hear a lot of lectures, in Swedish for university. But the latter, while it helped improve my esoteric vocabulary, didn't do a tenth of what the former did for me. It's hearing the language in a variety of situations and carrying on a variety of conversations in it yourself that really makes the biggest difference in mastering the language, because your language brain soaks up not just words but expressions and contexts and how-do-people-say-this and what-do-you-say-in-that-situation and grammatical structures and idioms like a sponge. It's why they push becoming an exchange student as the best way to learn languages, no doubt (it's probably pretty similar, and a much easier and less permanent way to acquire a foreign family than marrying into it :)).

So, I mean, I don't know where you live, but wherever that is, you probably can't just plunge yourself into the daily life of an English-speaking family, but I do think reading (surely you can find something, textbooks or non-fiction or newspapers, biographies of people you stan, whatever).

The thing about fanfiction is that the quality isn't at all dependable. Of course published fiction has a wide variety of quality, including things that could pass for bad fanfiction (Stephanie Meyer), things that are just plain bad (Dan Brown), and things that actually have grammatical errors that editors apparently didn't bother about. But there's still a baseline level of comprehensibility at least, because they do pass through a professional editor's hands - even if that editor isn't necessarily completely on the ball at all times.

There are some quite long and complex Kradam stories with a very high level of quality, but in every fandom the stories which are similar to published novels are outnumbered by the plebefic - the things that wouldn't make the cut - the slushpile. And if you're reading fic that's full of errors, or even written by other non-fluent non-native speakers, then of course it's not going to help you in the same way. But that said, while reading is the best way to learn the finer points of writing, TV is still probably more useful for language learning. Goes in through the ears, into a different part of the brain, and probably sticks better, unless your brain is quite atypical. I advise you to find some television show that's got like 10 seasons or something and just start at the beginning and go through to the end, perhaps watching while you chat or do other things around the house or something.

[sacredporn]

Aw, triplets! They must be so cute! <3<3<3

I agree with everything you said, it's really cool that you get to learn Swedish that way. I used to work at a company where they also hired people from the US and UK and my English improved a lot by talking to them on a regular basis. But it's been... wow... almost 10 years since I left, and I get tongue-tied whenever I have to speak English nowadays. It's really frustrating and a little sad :(

As for my "lessons", I think I'll pick Supernatural to begin with. Are you familiar with this series? I just wanted to pick something that I can UNF over (the brothers are cute) :D Are there a lot of "heterosexual elements" in the series?

I'll contact you about the fics by PM later. Thanks again for everything, you are so awesome <3

ps. I love Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings too! :D

[cimorene]

Well, haha, Supernatural's first few seasons are really buddy-adventure with the two brothers. For those seasons, there were a lot of incest shippers... I think they both had occasional het entanglements but the show (and the fandom) were really sexist, actually fairly horrible, and the female characters in their lives never lasted long.

Starting with season 4, they introduced Castiel, played by Misha Collins, and Dean/Castiel is definitely the dominant slash pairing now, although in the last three seasons they have also added some female characters in slightly less horrible ways. If you don't mind spoilers, you could read the post I wrote in season 4 when I started reading Dean/Castiel fic:

How To Read Dean/Castiel for People Who Aren't Up on SPN Canon and Don't Want to Be, OR: I Read Shipper Essays So You Don't Have To. But if you are gonna watch the first 3 seasons, I wouldn't read that essay first because it will kind of spoil most of the main plot of at least one of them I think. :D

[sacredporn]

Thank you, but, um, I'm not so sure about SPN anymore. I was going to rent the DVDs from a rental shop but thought maybe I could watch a couple of episodes before the DVDs arrive so I downloaded S01E05. It scared me. I'm okay with vampires / werewolves and whatnot but I could never watch horror movies. The series is called Supernatural. I should have known :(

So. Sorry about that. Do you have other recommendations? Preferably some with good looking guys? :D I thought about Queer as Folk but the rental shop doesn't carry it :/

Thank you! <3

[cimorene]

Not really, no. I don't choose tv shows that way. Or watch a lot of television. Maybe you should choose some that have active fandoms like Stargate Atlantis, NCIS, or Merlin.