The Rant for the Year

A lot of you are probably asking, why is the update after five whole months so small? Well, for two main reasons: a) I'm not getting enough stories that are original or appropriate, and b) I'm not getting stories that people have bothered to proof-read. So I'd like to make a few things clear:

1: I'm looking for stories that don't repeat what is already on the site. If your story, for example, is about a boy who sort of randomly becomes a werewolf and attempts to deal with it, and doesn't have any significant plot other than that, I've got ten of them. If your story is about a guy who is slowly turned into a woman and begins to love sex and have lots of it, I've got twenty.

2: We are not accepting fan-fiction, stories with no transformative content, or anything with White Wolf trademarks in it.

3: I cannot read the attachments made by your proprietary word processor. Please send to me in text format. Even Word format will not work, because most people use things like SmartQuotes and other proprietary characters which I have to go through and replace to make it work on the website.

4: (And this is the most important): PROOFREAD YOUR STORY BEFORE SENDING IT TO ME! I had four stories that I had to edit this time in which the authors changed tense, from present to past, half-way through. Do you have any idea what a colossal pain it is to go through and replace half the verbs in a story because the author was too lazy to do it herself/himself? One author couldn't remember what his character's gender was (and no, he wasn't switching it on purpose), or the color of various physical features. That's just shoddy. That says to me that the authors don't care about their stories enough even to edit them before sending them in. The message I take away is that I shouldn't care enough, either, and this is the last time I'm doing it. If that means that I have two stories per update, so be it.

I apologise for sounding a bit cranky, but this was an extremely non-fun task. I took the time to edit these stories because I thought with most of them there was something worth publishing on the site behind the mess that was the formatting. Things to check for before sending stories in are: if you make sure it starts in present tense, keep it there. If it's in past tense, don't randomly switch to present. Watch for it's/its. It's is for "it is", and its is possessive. Watch for you're/your. You're is for "you are" and your is possessive. Likewise for they're/their. And I don't have any idea how people are confusing we're/were/where. Apostrophes do not go in any word that has an s at the end. If you're confused about this, check out this excellent link by Stephen Notley. Make sure you know how quotes work. "You are coming with me," he said. is correct. The comma goes inside the quotes and is not a period. These are the things that take up most of my time in fixing, besides basic spelling errors which are unforgivable in this modern age of spell-checkers and their ilk.

You may think I'm making a big deal out of it, but believe me, effective communication when writing is important. You have to be able to walk before you can run, and writing stories falls heavily under the category of running. Besides, I hear about it from you faithful readers whenever I post a story with grammatical errors.

I do care, and that's why I'm writing this. There's a lot of good stories out there that I'm going to be rejecting because they can't follow basic guidelines. I really want the TSA to be one of the best archives of transformation stories on the Internet. I don't want it to become another archive-everything type of place, where visitors have to sort through pages and pages of half-finished garbage to find quality writing. I want stuff that's original, creative, thoughtful, in-depth, erotic, playful, humorous, scary, or adventurous, or any combination of these. They must be well-written, though.

Anyway, thanks for being faithful readers and writers. If you've even read this page, you've done more than many have. Yours faithfully,

--J.T. Skunk