So I've started reading it now, to pick up where Kyra left off (nearly at good old Page 63).

I actually don't think it reads that much like fanfic (at least not like *good* fanfic). There's way too much exposition (fanfic tends to assume that everybody knows what's going on) including some truly wonderful scenes with people actually saying things like "surely you recognise a girl, your sister, Isabelle, is one" (Isabelle, it should be pointed out, is *right fucking there*).

Favourite line so far: "Her hair was almost precisely the colour of black ink".

What colour would that be, exactly? Black, perhaps?

It strikes me, actually, that while most of us have a good idea of what "bad" fanfic is like, good fanfic must by its nature vary widely in style, because at least part of the point of fanfic is to produce something that is reminiscent of the source material, so good Lovecraft fanfic will read different from good Firefly fanfic, or good Pratchett fanfic.

(Which would mean that, say, "good" Cecilia Dart-Thornton fanfic is a contradiction in terms: if it's good, it's no longer reminiscent of the source material.)

I think Lovecraft fanfic is a special case actually, because it borrows Lovecraft's ideas rather than his characters. Lovecraft fanfic (and, to borrow Arthur's term, peerfic) is all about eldrich horrors from beyond the void, it's not like anybody writes Herbert West/Charles Dexter Ward slash.

Actually they probably do.

By contrast, I actually think with most fanfic the style is fairly consistent between fandoms (although I admit to limited experience here). Part of Cassandra Cla(i)re's big plagarism debacle, indeed, was the fact that she regularly borrowed lines from Buffy for her Draco fics.

In further updates on City of Bones I've now got past the point reached by our intrepid editor and have the following to add:

Holy Crap the wise old mentor dude is a lot like Dumbledore. There's a bit where he asks the heroine if she wants anything and I *totally* expected him to offer her a sherbet lemon. And if you don't read "Muggle" for "Mundie" every time you're a better man than I am.

Also, some exposition from earlier in the book which I found particularly awful:

"Demons," drawled the blond boy, tracing the word on the air with his finger, Religiously defined as hell's denizens, the servants of Satan, but understood here, for the purposes of the Clave, as any malevolent spirit whose origin is outside our own home dimension."
"That's enough, Jace" said the girl.
"Isabelle's right," agreed the taller boy, "nobody here needs a lesson in semantics - or demonology."

As you know, I *almost* applaud the bare faced cheek of it.

I think Lovecraft fanfic is a special case actually, because it borrows Lovecraft's ideas rather than his characters. Lovecraft fanfic (and, to borrow Arthur's term, peerfic) is all about eldrich horrors from beyond the void, it's not like anybody writes Herbert West/Charles Dexter Ward slash.

To be fair, there aren't that many recurring characters in Lovecraftian fiction except for the Old Ones themselves, who get reused all the time. And I've lost count of the number of times I've read stories about long-lost offshoots of the Whateley clan or where yet another dozy protagonist realises they come from Innsmouth stock.

I agree, though, that the Lovecraft-tribute scene is pretty unique; I expect this is partly because Lovecraft was one of the first authors who genuinely encouraged people to write stories set in his mythology, to the point of sending them detailed letters showing them how to boost their fanfic to peerfic. Having essentially established the core of his own fandom before he died, that core went on to set the norms for Lovecraft tribute works forevermore.

By contrast, I actually think with most fanfic the style is fairly consistent between fandoms (although I admit to limited experience here). Part of Cassandra Cla(i)re's big plagarism debacle, indeed, was the fact that she regularly borrowed lines from Buffy for her Draco fics.

I would suggest that this may be the result of people writing to indulge the sort of mores that have grown up around fandom-in-general, as opposed to writing to emulate the original work.

Which might explain why City of Bones exists. Once you don't care what the background to what you're reading is, so long as it has shipping and mary sues and whatnot, it becomes easier to accept the idea of fanfic-like work which is fanfic of nothing in particular - nothing, that is, except fanfic itself.

I truthfully have no idea what it is that makes fanfic work but it seems to me to have something to do with potential plausibility. Scenes of certain characters doing things they never explicitly did in the books (even if this is fucking each other) resonate with you because it feels both novel and familiar - to continue the musical theme, if I presented you with Remus Lupin playing the electric guitar you might raise an eyebrow because he's far too bookish and quiet, but it would totally suit Sirius Black for example. Or even James Sodding Potter.

Sadly, you made me immediately start wondering what Remus would play in James Potter and the Silver Marauders band. He might, ala George Harrison, play lead guitar. (Sirius would be play rhythm guitar and James would play the bass). Peter, of course, would be on drums. Which might explain why they put up with him all that time. It's hard to find someone who's got their own drum set.

Favourite line so far: "Her hair was almost precisely the colour of black ink".
What colour would that be, exactly? Black, perhaps?

To be fair, comparing hair to ink is a difficult image these days because we only really see ink in the stems of our ballpoint pens. Perhaps it might have been better to say, "Her hair was almost precisely the color of laser toner. In a really old printer. You know. The black-and-white kind."

To be fair, comparing hair to ink is a difficult image these days because we only really see ink in the stems of our ballpoint pens. Perhaps it might have been better to say, "Her hair was almost precisely the color of laser toner. In a really old printer. You know. The black-and-white kind."

Hee hee.

In all seriousness, though, it's not the comparison to ink that bugged me, it just strikes me as elementary that if you're saying "X was the colour of Y" then unless you're doing a Blackadder style joke "Y" should not include reference to a specific colour. "Her hair was black as ink" "her hair was black, like ink" "her hair was ink-black" would all have been fine. So for that matter would be "her hair was like black ink". "Hair the colour of black ink" is like something out of the Bulwer-Lytton contest: "Her hair was the colour of black ink, her eyes the colour of a blue crayon, and her dress the colour of a dress made out of red silk."

Since we're playing Favourite Lines, my personal shoutout goes to: "He had electric blue dyed hair that stuck up around his head like the tendrils of a startled octopus..." I guess it's just the awkwardness of the construction coupled with that startled octopus...

Arthur: I would suggest that this may be the result of people writing to indulge the sort of mores that have grown up around fandom-in-general, as opposed to writing to emulate the original work.

I'm not sure emulating the original work has ever real been the goal, well, not unless there's specific stylistic feature *to* emulate if that makes sense - like Lovecraft. I mean, you want to make your characters sound like the characters they are but ... well ... to indulge a bit of JKR bashing just because that's what we do here, most of the Harry Potter stuff I've read has been stylistically objectively better than the author.

"Her hair was almost precisely the color of laser toner. In a really old printer. You know. The black-and-white kind."

Hehe!!!

I think direct stylistic mimicing is, as you point out, actually rare, especially since a lot of fanfic is written about TV series, so you're translating a visual format into a literary one. But at the same time I think that the aim of a lot of fanfic is to emulate the source work in the sense that the writer's trying to tell a story that is a) reminiscent of the source material, in that it establishes a mood and tells a story which could recognisably fit within the source, and b) features the characters behaving in a manner recognisable from the source (unless the explicit point of the fic is something like "What if Captain Lolcats got possessed by a brain worm?"). At the very least, a lot of fanfic authors seem to want to produce something where the reader would look at it and say "Yes, that's very much how it would have happened on my favourite show if the screenwriters had only had the courage to write an episode where the ship's doctor and the robot owl consummate their love".

I say "a lot of fanfic" because I've seen the occasional piece (generally AU fics) where the premise is so utterly far removed from the source material that I start scratching my head and wondering why the author bothered retaining the link to the source material in the first place. Sure, perhaps the characters retain scraps of their personality, but they're in such an utterly different scenario it becomes a stretch to call them the same characters; to my mind, at least, characters are at least partially defined by context. Being a cheeky black marketeer on Deep Space 9 is a very different proposition from being a cheeky black marketeer in Blitz-era London.

We are now mainly haggling over semantics, dear boy.

So instead I would like to play the "Her hair was" game.

I submit: Her hair was almost precisely the colour of one of those motorola telephones, the ones with that come with a gloss finish not matte."

Her hair was almost precisely the colour of a grey cat in a room that was totally dark, such that the colour of the cat was indistinguishable from black.

Her hair was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel.

Oi! Minus three points from Slytherin for being meta.

"Minus three hundred points for turning the comments section into Harry Potter fanfiction," muttered Harry, glowering at his Nintendo DS. He was pretty sure he was on the right track in this Phoenix Wright episode, but the game was being evasive about precisely which investigative avenue he should pursue. Harry was not looking forward to the half hour he'd have to spend looking for the plot, but he supposed he couldn't complain: he normally had to doss about for half a year before getting anything done in real life.

"How's my hair looking?" asked Ron, anxious about his big date with Hermione. He had spent the last six hours smearing his skin with Hackiburr's Very Useful Ointment in order to conceal the telltale marks of gingerness, and was now in the process of rubbing the stuff into his scalp. Harry glanced at his bare-torsoed chum and then returned his attention to his game.

"Your hair is all carroty," quipped Harry, "like someone was just sick in it."

Draco giggled and ran his hands through his hair, which was bright yellow like artificial egg yolk.

I think these are still worse, but you're getting there ;-)