News
New Challenges

Two new challenges to propose to our writers this week: Valentine Poker (submitted by Too Late Kev) and All About a Peripheral Character (suggested by McGigi).

Don't forget, there are plenty of challenges just waiting to be answered such as Wedding Week (submitted by sorano), Arabian Nights (suggested by Susan), Paintball (suggested by lizzy559).



--Morning Angel on June 17, 2007 07:37 pm 0 Comments
Two New Challenges
I've added 2 new challenges: 1) Office Fiction Writers was submitted by Azlin. This challenge asks you to write a story as if you were a character of The Office writing fiction. Intriguing, no? 2) Daddy Jim is an idea by sarabell, who would like to read more about what kind of dad Jim would be.

--Morning Angel on June 03, 2007 10:07 am 0 Comments
New Challenge
It has been a while since I added a challenge, but since it is now summer hiatus, I'll try to add challenges on a more regular basis to throw mew ideas out there. Please do email us your challenge ideas or post them on the forums.

Today's new challenge was submitted by Lizzy559: Paintball.



--Morning Angel on May 20, 2007 02:10 pm 0 Comments
A Thousand Thanks!

We have reached 1000 members at MTT today. (In case you are curious, dunderjim was member #1000.) We never expected the archive to get that big. We hope you have enjoyed your stay here so far, and thanks to all of you for making this a fun community to be in. We'd also like to thank everyone who has lent a hand along the way to set up, organize, moderate or give suggestions... You helped us make the fanfic archive what it is today.

Cheers!



--Morning Angel on May 12, 2007 02:11 pm 4 Comments
Server Trouble
MTT has been grumpy in the last few days. We are looking into what is going on. We hope we can resolve the situation soon. Thanks for your patience!


--Morning Angel on May 09, 2007 08:18 pm 2 Comments
New Boards!!!
We decided to upgrade the boards, and here are our new and improved boards. We apologize in advance for the fact that you will need to sign up since it was too complicated to try to transfer our database, but it takes about 30 seconds to sign up. They're really snazzy boards, and we will hopefully continue to make them prettier. Since TWoP is constantly down these days, we thought it would be nice to have a place to chat right now, even though they're not perfect yet. Enjoy! Email us if you have any questions.

--Morning Angel on May 01, 2007 06:13 pm 0 Comments
Ratings

Okay, first and foremost, thank you to all of those who have heeded our request for spoiler warnings in summaries. Even titles of upcoming episodes can spoil others who have stayed away from any information about what is coming up next. We only have one more month to go so please be mindful of not spoiling other people's fun.

Second of all, I am sorry to say we have now disabled anonymous star ratings. I had pushed strongly to have that feature, but of late, we have had a few people emailing to complain about the ratings they've gotten. We looked into it and discovered that some people would rate the same chapter or a one-chapter story multiple times because they didn't agree with the overall rating. It was even sometimes authors giving themselves multiple ratings to bump up their number of stars. This kind of behaviour really defies the whole purpose. It is a shame for people who actually use the star ratings appropriately, but unfortunately, it looks like making people accountable for their reviews and/or ratings is the only way to minimize ratings abuse.

However, just to be clear, readers are allowed and even encouraged to rate different chapters of the same story with whatever rating they feel is appropriate. The problem only arose when the same reader was reviewing the same material (be it a chapter or a one-shot story) multiple times. The only thing is that readers will now need to leave a review, no matter how brief, to go along with their rating.



--Morning Angel on April 22, 2007 07:50 pm 0 Comments
Spoilers and Review Etiquette

Just over the past week, we've noticed that some authors are being a bit lax with spoiler warnings. As per the submission rules:

As much as possible, spoiler warnings are expected on all stories. For categories with serialized content, such as series of books or television series, spoilers are mandatory for the current season and/or most recent part. An appropriate spoiler warning to place in your summary would be: Spoilers for The Pilot. DO NOT do anything like this: Spoilers for the one where Jim puts Dwight's stuff in jell-o.

This includes speculation based on spoilers you've heard/read about for upcoming episodes. Episode titles of upcoming episodes are even considered spoilers for a lot of people, so please be very aware of this when you've written a story that contains spoilery content for an upcoming episode. Include warnings in both your story summaries and chapter notes. All you need to put is something simple, like "Includes speculation based on spoilers for upcoming episodes.", this will be more than enough to let spoilerphobes know to steer clear of the story.

On another note, it often comes up in discussion, about the tone of reviews of late. I think we are starting to see some that just more or less bash the pairing, instead of providing the author with constructive criticism. Constructive criticism is encouraged, but leaving a review to let the author know that this pairing made you violently ill, doesn't fall under that category. The author is invested enough in said pairing to write about them, so they are going to be understandably upset by the implication that what they've written about is bad or wrong. Opinion is one thing, but this is another. To clarify what would be good etiquette, and what would be poor etiquette to those who are unsure, I'll quote Kyrafic's example from the TWOP discussion the other day:

I do think there's a nice way to do this, and a not so nice way. I don't really have a problem with "I don't normally read Pam/Karen, but this was really fun" versus "EWW, Karen ugh I hate her. But good fic." It's like going over someone's house and criticizing their music or food or whatever. You don't have to like something, but ragging on it to someone who obviously does... just not in good taste.

More Than That does have a heavy Jim/Pam focus, but we encourage stories of all kinds, we want our authors to feel comfortable posting them here, and not fear being flamed for writing something that doesn't flow with the current fandom norms.

We're all here because we love The Office!



--sicokitty on April 11, 2007 07:52 am 2 Comments
More Grammatical and Usage Resources

One of the things I do in my real life is teach scientific writing. As such, I have accumulated a number of books and links related to spelling, grammar, and style. I figure I might as well share them since they may be helpful to you all.

1) The Elements of Style by Strunk and White. A classic for proper usage and sentence construction. There is even an online version available.

2) One of my favourite books on grammatical matters is Woe Is I by Patricia T. O'Conner. It's a funny book with chapter titles such as Comma Sutra: The Joy of Punctuation and Woe is I: Therapy for Pronoun Anxiety. I read it cover to cover, and learned so much about grammar in a way that I was able to digest and retain the information.

3) Dictionaries! The day I discovered the existence of online dictionaries was a great day. My favourite is Merriam-Webster , which I use several times a week, but I also use dictionary.com and thefreedictionary.com from time to time.

4) If you have ever read Tomato Nation, which I used to do assiduously for many years, you've probably heard of the bible of usage, Garner's Modern American Usage. I've yet to buy it, but Sars swears it is her bible on all linguistic dilemmas, and given how much I've learned about grammar and style from reading her columns, I believe her.

5) Two books that may be more relevant for academic rather that creative writing are Style: Toward Clarity and Grace by Joseph M. Williams and The Everyday Writer by Andrea A. Lunsford. Nevertheless, both of those books provide many tips to make your writing much more effective, concise, and precise.

I will continue to dig and pull out other resources, which I shall post later in the week. I hope this is helpful to some MTT members. :)



--Morning Angel on March 31, 2007 02:44 pm 4 Comments
Good Grammar Costs Nothing*

It's what you learn after you know it all that counts. ~Attributed to Harry S. Truman

Recent discussions have focused on various pet peeves, beta readers and the process of writing fanfic in general. It seems that an excess of grammatical errors can be a real deal breaker for some of our readers - causing them to give up on a story halfway through the first chapter.

At a minimum it should be standard for all authors to use spell check before posting a story. But what to do with those pesky things spell check will miss - like the use of your vs. you're, its vs. it's, too vs. to?

I had a question last night about the use of lay vs. lie. My betas were all off living their lives (or more accurately - watching The Office Marathon). I clicked on the following site to get out of my predicament. I just thought I'd share...

Grammar Girl

She has fantastic tips about punctuation, acronyms, and proofreading. I've been making mistakes I didn't even know about - and not just in my use of verb tenses (the bane of my existence!!!).

A typo or two is easily forgiven, but I think even if you consider yourself a grammar guru it never hurts to take a little refresher course. The quality of all our writing will be the better for it, not to mention the impact it could have to the level of enjoyment for our readers.

And let's face it. That's pretty much why we're here. :)

*Phrase can be found on a t-shirt sold over at TWoP.



--xoxoxo on March 30, 2007 01:34 pm 5 Comments
Another Challenge and Recommendation
Since we are getting a whole block of Office episodes tonight, I have the show on the brain. As such, I decided to add a new challenge courtesy of sorano916: Wedding Week.

I also wanted to recommend an older story: Randomness (Rated T) by Geinnob. It is a lovely series of drabbles well worth a read!

--Morning Angel on March 29, 2007 04:02 pm 5 Comments
New Challenge & Older Recommendations

Here is this week's challenge sent in by a MTT member: Arabian Nights. But as always, feel free to use older challenges as well to inspire new stories!

Back in the fall, I was often recommending/featuring again older stories. Since we have so many new members, I figured I should start doing that again. So for your reading pleasure this week, I recommend Random Scenes by colette (Rated MA) and Something Borrowed, Something Blue by cocare2001 (Rated K+).



--Morning Angel on March 25, 2007 03:02 pm 1 Comments
Fanfic Discussion
I just wanted to point everyone in the direction of a very interesting discussion about fanfic over at TWOP .

New or old, I think we can all gain some insight into the topics discussed, and the different people that compose the fanfic community here. Topic discussion includes: review begging, wips, betas, and the administration of the star rating system.

If you don't have a TWOP account, or do not wish to have one, please feel free to weigh in with your thoughts and theories in the comments section below.

--sicokitty on March 23, 2007 09:20 pm 15 Comments
Can't add a story?
Anyone who has been having trouble adding stories to the archive, when you email us to report you are having trouble, please ensure you provide us with the following info:

-browser (firefox, IE, safari, other)
-operating system
-method you are using to add story
-and if you are copy pasting from a word type program, please indicate exactly which program you are copying from

Thanks!

--sicokitty on March 15, 2007 01:22 am 0 Comments
Broken Code Part 2
I had to turn on a small feature that displays debug information at the top of the page. It is temporary, and shouldn't affect your browsing anymore than adding a bit of extra scrolling.



Some members have been having issue posting stories, and when I posted a support request to the developer peeps, one of the requirements is that this feature be turned on. This will help them help us in the best way that they can.



I'll be honest, I didn't even realise the debug thing was turned off, because it looks like there is a lot more wrong with the site than I originally thought. Hopefully it shouldn't be too long before we can turn it off again, and things can get back to normal.

--sicokitty on March 14, 2007 07:33 am 3 Comments
Broken Code
Bits of broken code appear at the top of many pages. We're working on fixing that. In the meantime, you can still use the site because the pages are still loading; just scroll down the pages to bypass that code.

--Morning Angel on March 14, 2007 02:21 am 0 Comments
Weekly Challenge
I've added another great new challenge, this one sent in by ficklevillain: Internet Fanbase.


--Morning Angel on March 10, 2007 05:17 am 0 Comments
New Challenge
A new challenge has been added: Those School Days.

--Morning Angel on March 01, 2007 08:36 am 0 Comments
Scheduled Outage
There is going to be a scheduled power outage that will affect the site this Sunday morning, February 25th, at 12:01AM PST.



In the meantime I will look into the trouble with uploading stories. If turning off tinyMCE appears to help, you can turn it off permanently in your profile.

--sicokitty on February 23, 2007 03:41 pm 0 Comments
Uploading Stories
Something weird is going on with the uploading of stories (as it is in posting these news). If you are having difficulty, you may want to uncheck the box next to "use tinyMCE". As far as I can figure, this may be the root of our problem. Unfortunately, sicokitty's computer has just decided to pass away so it will take a bit more time to fix this. Sorry for the inconvenience & thank you for bearing with us while we try to fix this over the next few days.

--Morning Angel on February 23, 2007 06:36 am 0 Comments
Tonight's Episode
TWoP is being slow and weird so you can head to our boards, and discuss the episode if you wish. :)


--Morning Angel on February 22, 2007 06:21 pm 0 Comments
New Challenge Added
Another challenge has been added: The Documentary Crew .


--Morning Angel on February 17, 2007 11:35 pm 0 Comments
Recommendations

Under "My Account" you'll notice a new link, "Manage Recommendations". This is basically a tool that will allow all registered members to recommend stories that aren't archived here.

All recommendations will require admin validation to ensure that there is no spam or abuse of the system.

I hope everyone enjoys the new tool, and as always contact us if you have any queries or problems.

ETA: until I get the skins edited with the new menu link, Browse by Recommendations. 



--sicokitty on February 13, 2007 01:57 am 7 Comments
New Challenge
A new challenge to start the week: Dancing Pam.

--Morning Angel on February 12, 2007 11:40 am -1 Comments
1000th Story!

Wow, what a milestone. We are barely 7 months old, and we have already a thousand stories archived. It's our very own administrator xoxoxo who had the pleasure to put up story 1000: The Rules of Love By: Michael G. Scott. Thank you to all our writers and readers for making this a fun archive to run!

Here's to a thousand more stories. Let's hope we continue to grow and that Pam and Jim stop making us despair over the state of their relationship . ;)



--Morning Angel on February 11, 2007 03:07 pm 0 Comments