| 1. Slash. You might run into some gen or het here but it won't be very often, so don't count on it. 2. Correct grammar, punctuation and spelling. A few errors here and there could happen to anyone but fiction that obviously hasn't been through even a spell-checker or is littered with the current appalling grammar that's everywhere on the net just drives me bananas. 3. Canon Characterisation. I like fiction that is based on what appears in canon. I can even buy characterisations that are quite a stretch from canon as long as the author has bothered to show how the deviation occurred. 4. Romance. I can read most sorts of stories but I prefer romantic ones with happy endings. I can tolerate ambiguous endings but I'm not too keen on the really unhappy ones - except, funnily enough, for death stories. As long as the two guys are still happy in their relationship, I can deal with death stories quite well and tend to wallow happily in the angst <g>. 5. Realism. I don't demand everything be totally realistic - that would be boring! - but I do like a certain element of realism in my stories. I like my plot twists and angst to be organic rather than manufactured and I prefer the characters to act like the mature men they are, and not like thirteen year old drama queens. 6. Subtlety. I'm not a great fan of obviousness, and I especially hate it when an author insists on explaining every single word she writes as if I was a retarded 3 year old. For example, an author who writes one sentence of dialogue - and then writes five more sentences explaining just exactly what the character meant when they said what they said, and how they felt when they said it, and how the character they said it to felt - and so on ad nauseum. 7. Pet Hates (Minor):
8. Pet Hates (Major):
9. Common Squicks I Don't Have A Problem With:
* Sometimes a story will just hit one of my kinks or, for some other unexplainable reason, a story will break all my rules above and I'll still like it. |