Past Trials

Sentinel Fanfiction
Title:	Past Trials
Author(s):	Alyjude
Date(s):	2002
Length:
Genre:	slash
Fandom:	The Sentinel
External Links:	online here
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Past Trials is a Jim/Blair story by Alyjude.

Reactions and Reviews

When Blair was four, the man he and Naomi were living with (and, it's implied, his actual father) is murdered. Twenty-five years later, a man is finally arrested for the crime.

I've recced scads of Alyjude's stories, so you know that I like them. And if you like her writing and don't mind the issue below, you should check this one out. The case is interesting, the angst is present but not too heavy, and Simon is awesome.

Unfortunately for me, none of those things could overcome Alyjude's rampant abuse of dashes. On average, there is a dash (or two, or three, or (in one memorable occasion) *four*) in every third sentence. Nearly every thought has a dash or three. Most of the dialogue has multiple dashes, to the point that I thought that she had randomly decided to use dashes for emphasis because otherwise all of the characters sound like they're stuttering they pause so much.

I know, I know, it sounds silly. And it kills me that I have to pass on reccing an otherwise solid, epic-length story because of it, but I'm only halfway through the reread and I'm just not sure I can read anymore until I go in and delete every single dash in the darn fic (and I can't rec a story if I have to change something in the story just to be able to read it).

In short, if you are less of a grammar person than I am, you'll probably enjoy the story despite the dashes. I just can't get past them....Dashes usually aren't on my list of issues either (and I'm picky with grammar but not too picky -- there's a lot of other grammatical errors in this one that I just skipped over), but there are just so darn many of them. Hopefully if she revises this one she'll remove most of the dashes. I think that alone with dramatically improve the story.

[the author's response]: Trust me, when I revise this one, and I will

a lot more than dashes will be removed and/or corrected. And the dashes represent my brain farts. *G* I'm not ashamed to admit how lousy I was (and probably still am) at this thing called writing and especially my use of dots and dashes. Every time I paused in my brain - yep...dots and dashes.

Thank you for calling me on this one because I'd forgotten it and it's one I'd like to correct. I'll move it to the front of the list, Jane, because I'd value your opinion when done.

And feel free to rant on my stuff anytime - I need reminders of the stories that really have that kind of numb-braining crap in them!

It must be a slow day if punctuation quirks in an eight-year-old story rates a rant. Especially a rant that names names, instead of the generalizations you normally employ (wouldn't a rant against annoying punctuation have been sufficient?) Yeah, in this case I found it quite silly. I've seen recommendations where a caveat is added. Or don't rec it at all. But a rant seems overkill.

To be honest, I only posted this rant because I know a lot of people use Epic Rants as a rec comm. Thus I only rant specifically about stories that are either just barely, but not quite, good enough for a rec, or stories that are flat-out offensive and I'm warning people about them (this is usually the case in stories that don't label for rape). There are several authors (including Jane Davitt, now that I think about it) who report gaining readers after their story has been ranted about.