The BSN writers club

I think we all like reviews for our fan fiction, it's the way we get 'paid' after all But sometimes you have to wonder if the person who left a review actually read what you wrote. I know I certainly do. And don't get me started on one word reviews either. 

one sentence reviews aren't great either it's like ok....and.

The trouble i have with my sucky memory is i often forget a point I was going to make its like 'great point ' and it's gone...

I know but what's been done has been done already. There's nothing left of it anyhow. 

I've had some pretty emotional reviews as well mainly for the 'original' version of TDS which I deleted a while ago once I started on the revised version. People either 'get' what I'm trying to do or they don't... it's the ones that don't that get emotional. They have a preconceived notion what a Sith is and how they should act, and there's hell to pay if you try and turn that on it's head. Just as well I don't give a damn.  

These are by far the most sensible approaches I think. It's good to consider what is said in feedback, but ultimately we are the writers, it has to work for us before it works for anyone else and sometimes there's an end game that readers aren't (couldn't be) aware of.

I'm not sure how, but I've gotten extremely lucky with reviews of the works I've posted so far, I've had a smattering of very short ones but I have a few regular readers who leave me lengthy descriptions of what they liked for quite a few chapters. I haven't actually gotten any suggestions, the closest I got to it was a comment from one reader who would have suggested something, except I already answered her question by the time she would have posed it. I suppose that's a good sign! It may just be that there are very few readers who are even interested in the particular subjects I've chosen to write about, but all my feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, it's really made me happy to have attempted this.

I feel this experience has helped me enormously as a writer in general, too; I've been struggling with my novels and short stories for a very long time, I've questioned whether or not there's any point to me forcing the issue of writing at all because of how my work has been dragged out across the years with very little in the way of tangible results - posting fanfiction and getting such a great reception has shown me that the problem isn't my writing or any technical/inspirational/conceptual factor, my main issue is that I find it hard to actually push things out the door, finish the project and send it off to publishers. I mean, I've sent stuff off of course, but I'm starting to realize that I haven't been putting as much effort into making that end of writing happen as I could have. I have finished works that aren't fanfiction but if I don't show it to anyone of course nothing is ever going to come of it...

The other thing that this experience has made me realize is that I am more than capable of writing entire novels in a very short amount of time. I have been writing my "magnum opus" piece for 15 years now and I spent years on some of my other works, too (only 2 of which I actually finished from beginning to end) and it was really damaging my self-confidence and confidence in my writing that I seemingly was incapable of finishing the projects I started. I've had my problems with my serious works in general, e.g. I really like to have someone read as I go along and give me feedback (or just listen to me talk at them about my ideas for coming chapters) and I've had trouble finding people who are willing to do that for me, or rather, finding people who have the time for it, but since I got back into the fanfiction game I realized that I pretty much already have everything I need and it's not these issues, like having a regular beta, which are holding me back, it's something else. I'm still struggling with this, I haven't touched my big novel in many months now (again) although I did take out my finished MS and started going over it to produce a third draft, but I'm not really sure I fully understand what it is about my "serious" vs. my fanfiction that keeps me stuck in the mud so to speak... I mean, one part of the puzzle is, I think, that I place a lot of pressure on my serious works to be absolutely perfect, whereas with my fanfics I have a limited amount of control in that sense; I'm posting chapter by chapter after all, so I don't have the luxury of going back and editing previous chapters before anyone reads them, but I'm starting to think that this is a good thing, something I should learn how to apply with my other stuff. It's still a little different though, because with my fanfic chapters there's a kind of instant gratification, I post and I see my numbers rise and if I'm lucky (now that MEA is dead in the water) I still get comments from the few readers still reading MEA fanfics; in comparison, no one's going to give me a pat on the back for how brilliant this or that chapter turned out for my novels. I suppose that brings me back to the issue of finding regular betas, but I resent the idea a little, I am supposedly a professional, I should be able to do this without anyone's input, at least not until I have a finished draft that is ready for the editorial eyeballing.

Sigh. I'll stop ranting now.

I'm writing about a historical person dying than coming back through time to the modern ara. He even has his girlfriend (ironically, since he's a York, that he should fall in love with a Lancaster Princess!  ) 

Oh yeah. I don't think it would for him, and I'm not going to make this comedic either. 

Working on it. Thus far, he's still in the tower of London after unfortunately returning home after looking a woman to marry in Burgandy to than be exiled from England after his uncle decided to do that to insure he ruled successfully as well as throwing his younger brother into the tower before him. Edward hasn't had much luck even back in his day  But when he did return home to find England in a state of tumorous, he was immediately captured and brought to the Tower, much to his confusion. Poor Ed. I think he's a mix of Edward the Fifth and the Black Fish (a highly popular prince of wales that died before his time.. well yes, Edward in essence is that). 

I just want a logical backstory, lol as to whom he was before his death via hanging.    Not exactly spoilers considering he was going to die anyhow. 

After two hard struggles for peace and years of fighting (fic), peace has been restored and things have been sailing smoothly. Been mind blank for a few days now, trying to cook something.

This is true, it is much easier to use an existing framework from that point of view, and yet it presents totally different challenges that are much easier in original worlds: you have to make an effort to remain in-character at all times so as not to accidentally throw people off while still saying what you want them to say, you have to decide what to share about the environment and what not to because you assume that people already know but then again they still need written descriptions to aid them in picturing those specific places but you don't want to overshare, you are more or less bound by the constraints of the existing world and can only elaborate or deviate from existing lore very carefully and you have to make sure to explain it all in a way that sounds plausible, and so on. Using pre-existing worlds and characters is by no means an easy feat, which is one reason why I think people shouldn't just write fanfiction off as less or as not being serious writing, because it is. It's time, effort and takes a lot of creativity (and guts to put out there). I commend anyone who tries.

Honestly though, it's never been the technical details like that which cause me problems, descriptions, dialogue, world building, etc. all come pretty natural to me, it's the part where I bridge world building stuff with just doing it... I don't really have a good reason not to just get on with it, as I said I have pretty much everything I need. It's happened before that I've made this work, with my finished MS, it started out as just another original fic on a forum before I realized the story excites me so much I could make this into an actual novel, so I took down what I had, radically changed it and finished writing it. Sure, it took me some time, but somehow I managed to do it with that piece - although I still have some issues with it that stem from its origins, actually. I'd go into details but I'd be writing another wall of text. I suppose that's why that one was just gathering dust, I'd love to find someone who has experience editing books who could advise me about those issues with that particular novel; my issues with my other major work are totally different though. I'm trying out some new techniques to get over said issues, hopefully one of them pans out and helps me finish that monster finally. First and foremost I think I need to forget all the nuance and just do the groundwork before adding all the juicy extra stuff I worked out.

Have you ever seen Les Visiteurs? Basically the same plot, only set in France, a 12th century knight gets teleported into modern 20th century times and is totally lost, absolutely hilarious movie, one of my favorites.

He wouldn't have spoken Latin unless he was Roman, Latin influenced Old English, not the other way around. So as a result we have tons of Latin derivatives in our language, but at the time the English language was a chaotic mess that lacked any uniform grammar, although people could more or less understand each other's dialects. If you want linguistic hints you want to look in the direction of German, as English up until Middle English is much closer to German than modern English in speech and grammar, we had verb conjugations still and things like that; the spelling of words is actually very close to what we still use today (the reason for some totally crazy spelling is because it used to be pronounced exactly as it was written, the pronunciation changed, especially after the Great Vowel Shift, but the spelling remained).

See here: public.oed.com/aspects-of-english/english-in-time/early-modern-english-pronunciation-and-spelling/ This is about the transition to early modern English from Middle English, but you can trace it backwards and get some clues as to what kind of fundamental changes the English language underwent in order to become modern English; if you compare this to Old English you're going to have a much harder time understanding it than if you look at ME, which is closer to recognizable in most texts, but I presume you're not going to actually have your characters speak in period-specific language (because that would take a lot of research and you'd have to translate each sentence, etc. - though that would be really interesting!) - of course, this isn't pre-Roman era so actually Latin might serve as a good "common ground" to understand each other at least for the space of a few words. Again though, you'd have to pretty much familiarize yourself with the etymology of a bunch of words to make that realistic. In general though, Latin was always the tongue of the clergy outside of the Roman Empire, not the tongue of the people, so your boy Edward might have spoken it due to his royal status, but it wouldn't be his native tongue.

Addendum: look at this video here, you have 3 poems read aloud and spelled out from 7th to 12th to 15th century English; your protagonist is from the War of the Roses, right, so medieval English is your goal, note that the last poem (15th century) is much, much closer to modern English (that's ME), so there's a chance that he would be able to basically understand a lot of what is said, if not clearly, that's what you're aiming for, you can lean on the similarities and maybe limit his "outward-facing speech" to a handful of words:
 

Also, you know the "War of the Roses" wasn't named so until the 19th century, so from his perspective he wouldn't recognize his own time period from a modern perspective. Though, if you want to go all time/space magic and make him somehow fluent in modern English I suppose that would solve that problem - don't go full German, as you can see there are quite a few differences and this is closer to our English than not, but Germanic pronunciation is definitely a go.