Author's note: I tried to post this yesterday, but the JournalScape server mysteriously broke between the time I started writing and the time I tried to post. Seeing as it's rather cranky, I thought maybe by this morning I'd be in a better mood and think better of it, but, yeah, that hasn't happened. For future reference, if you get hit in the head with a beach ball five minutes after leaving your apartment in the morning, consider it a sign you should just turn around and head right on back to bed.

So for organizational reasons it won't do to go into here, I'm trying to catch up with the Pboz inbox (the Doppleganger has temporarily suspended submissions so we at least have a fighting chance), which means I've been doing a lot of reading. And though, overall, I've seen a marked increase in the quality of the submissions since I started reading here, More Reading means More Finding of Trends That Annoy Me. Two, in particular, keep popping up in the past two weeks:

1)The Lesbian Twist: The story features a pair of female characters in some kind of seemingly platonic relationship, only to wind up in a passionate embrace in the last sentence of the story. (The variation on this is to hide that one of the characters is female and talk about their romantic relationship, only to reveal they are both female at the last minute.) I'm not a big fan of the last sentence twist anyway, but "Ohmigod! Lesbians!" seems a bit dated, no? If Law & Order has already done it, I think the ship of innovation has long since sailed.

2)Misogynistic Fantasies: We don't have a PG-13 rating at Pboz, by any means. And I'll acknowledge that getting into the head of people who make choices "normal" people never would is part of the fun of both writing and reading fiction. But just describing some character's perverted little fantasy of raping and/or beating up the woman he saw on the street is not a story. There's no motivations, there's no story arc, no character development -- just a little sketch of a scene in a snuff film somewhere. Which just makes me very, very glad that we only communicate with these people by email.

Anyway, I just had to get that off my chest. Why these things always come in bunches (I literally read three of the sex fantasy "stories" in a row today), I do not know.