30 Days of Fan Fiction Meme, Day 16

16 – Summaries – Do you like them or hate them? How do you come up with them, if you use them?

I kind of hate them. Summaries are one of the reasons I'm a very poor candidate for success in traditional publishing, where a vast amount of making it out of the slush pile is dependent on writing a nicely enthralling, self-propagandizing summary of your brilliant novel. I don't sell myself well that way. Some native sense of propriety says it's a cheap trick to sum up the "brilliant" highlights of your own work.

Thus, regardless of the actual tone of the story, my summaries tend to be brief and functional and often a bit ironic. There are exceptions: I summarized my Charles/Erik fic as "young and in love," which is probably strongly correlated to why it's gotten a lot of hits. But it's more usual to get summaries like my Erik/Raven fic: "Forty years together, and it does seem a day too much." (This is for a fic that's actually quite serious and angsty.) All in all, my summaries probably lose me more readers than they gain. But I do get a laugh out of some of them. I don't know how I come up with them...

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