(no subject)

[maevele]

okay, seriously, this whole getting into fanfic thing? fanfic is too big. how do you narrow it down, my god? the last i dabbled in reading fic was umpty years ago, on the farscape newsgroup, an i was just like "people are wrting d'argo/john smut! what a wondrous thing is the internet!" and there was not so damn much to pick from, and then i stopped having time to even watch farscape so i wasn't going to read the fic. Now umpty years later, i rediscover fanfic, and it has GROWN. And any fandom I am remotely interested in has a veritable flood of fanfic. and i can not tell what is crap til i read it. What are the best sources or tools to winnow it down?


eta: might help to give examples of fandoms I like. who/torchwood, buffy, trueblood.

Comments

[trouble]

Hmm.... I take it none of your friends are reccing fic?

Try searching for tags on delicious, maybe? See what's got a lot of links?

[littlebutfierce]

Unless I'm feeling really motivated I tend to just read things that my friends write or rec--I agree, it's hard sometimes to find the right stuff (the "wrong" stuff would include, for me, badly written stuff, but also offensive stuff or stuff that just doesn't grab me).

I have had reasonable luck just flicking through Yuletide (I note they do have some Rent stories) as well.

[fairestcat]

I always start with by looking up/following recs (recommendations). From there I branch out to other stuff by the recced authors and stuff those authors rec/mention/beta.

The absolute best place to start is crack_van which is a recs community where different people agree to rec one fandom for a month. It looks like Dr. Who, Torchwood and Buffy are all currently active fandoms, which means there are people lined up to rec them each month for the foreseeable future.

polyamorous recs is one of my favorite recs sites. The polyamorous refers to their multifannish nature. They rec het, slash and gen in a huge variety of fandoms including Torchwood, Dr. Who and Buffy.

recsrainbow is a community where reccers post announcements when they've updated their recs sites/journals, with a listing of which fandoms the new recs are in. It's a good way to find the reccers whose fandoms and fic tastes best match your own.

I don't know if you're familiar with delicious, it's a social bookmarking site and a lot of fandoms have really embraced it as a place to share unofficial recs. If you search, for example on Jack/Ianto, you get a short list of pages that have been bookmarked a lot with Jack/Ianto in the text or the tags. At the bottom you can click on "Jack/Ianto under everyone's related tags and that'll give you a list of the most recent pages saved with jack/ianto as a tag. From there you can also look at a list just of the most popular pages recently saved with that tag. The more people who've bookmarked it, the better the story presumably is. With big fandoms like Torchwood, I'd start by only clicking on stories that have been saved at least 40 or 50 times.

[fairestcat]

Oh, and I just realized I totally forgot to tell you about my two favorite individual reccers:

norah does great recs sets and they're all tagged on her lj and easily accessible from the sidebar.

thefourthvine does themed recs sets and writes the most amazingly awesome recs that are basically works of art in and of themselves.

[maevele]

see, this fanfic thing is so big that you need people to rec reccers. i srsly did not know.
thanks for the rec-recs