Title for this report snerched from matociquala and originally from James Nicoll. More lists by Scott Lynch and Kevin Murphy.

My list*:

1. Excessive Capitalization. While it might be used for amusement value (see "The End of the Road for Hybeth and Grinar" in Twenty Epics), in general, not every Word, not even every Evil Word, in a story need be capitalized for readers to know it's Important. Seriously.

2. Thinly veiled political agendas masquerading as story. While I enjoy political satire as much as the next girl, and quite a bit more than some, I also want there to be plot and characters and a narrative style that can drive that satire, and not wooden mock-ups that mouth slogans instead of actually doing anything.

3. Excessive violence spelled out on the page just to show how EEEEVIL the antagonist is, or how clever the author is for coming up with seventeen different words for pain. Corollary: violent sex that doesn't have any repercussions, either emotional, psychological or physical.

4. Stories that are meant to have a plot, but which are really just long, pornographic, Mary-Sue-style author wish fulfillments. Ugh.

5. Other Mary-Suisms, such as the protagonist is terribly beautiful, everyone loves her/him, and she/he can do no wrong. I like flawed characters. A lot. No one I know is perfect, and it's boring to read about people who are. Which leads to . . .

6. Protagonist fuck-ups that are never addressed and no one seems to care that they happened. If the Hero/ine screws up big time, or does something that would be considered Evil if the Bad Guy did it, there had damn well be some consequences. No one gets a free pass.

7. Random misspellings of regular words, to make them sound other-worldly. Corollary: random made up words that mean exactly what the English equivalent means. Call a rabbit a rabbit, for pity's sake, and not a smerp.

8. Obvious lack of understanding of how an economic system works, or no concept of how the presence of magic as a common entity would change how that society functions. Do you really think that people who can explode mountains and call lightning from the sky would not have electricity (or the magic equivalent)? Or advanced transportation systems? Or mass produced goods?

9. Stories where the author is more interested in being clever with verbiage, metaphor and symbolism than telling a story. I don't generally like stories that I don't get. That said, Sometimes I don't realize I don't get it, and the story is fun to read all the same.

10. First person narrators who sound like they've just come off the rack and have no voice of their own. If you're going with first person narration, have it be for a reason, such as getting more deeply into the narrator's head and mind set. But make sure it's a head the reader wants to spend time in.

11. Generalizations and stereotypes. All sidekicks are plucky, all Heroes have enormous thews, all Heroines are beautiful and smart, but all blondes are dumb, all villains are unmitigatedly evil, when they aren't idiots, and all fights will be won by the Good Guys. Except when they're not.


*Some item stolen whole cloth from those mentioned above.