30 Day Fanfic Writing Meme – Day 16 and Day 17

I'm doing these two together because they are both things give me grief when I come to fill out the header for a finally finished fic.

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

Summaries are important. If your summary is 'Joe/Jane make out' I don't know if it's worth my while. If your summary is 'Joe dresses up in uniform and makes out with Jane' you're hitting a kink and I'll give it a look. If it's 'post episode four, Joe and Jane seek out comfort in each other's arms' you've given me context.

That said, I hate writing the things. I'm probably better at summarising other's works – part of my degree training involved writing abstracts – where I'm not emotionally connected to the work. I sometimes find it hard to outline the major themes or plot points without giving too much away or skipping over what I think is a small but important theme. And drabble summaries are especially difficult, summing up in one sentence a fic that's already just one hundred words :P

17 – Titles – Are they the bane of your existence, or the easiest part of the fic? Also, if you do chaptered fic, do you give each chapter a title, or not?

Bane. I favour one word titles and days/weeks later when I get a 'favorite' or 'kudos' for a fic and as such there's no other identifying information like 'x/y is my favourite pairing', I find myself wondering what the hell fandom that fic was in, let alone which fic in particular.

Not usually. Quotations and chapter specific summaries sometimes. But I've had enough problems titling the damn thing, without coming up with another six or more titles. They'd probably be things like 'In Which X Happens, To Everyone's Dismay' – which is just another version of a chapter tagline :D

Fic: Nothing But Blue Skies - one

Title: Nothing But Blue Skies
Fandom: Original fic
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 758
Prompt: for the 30 days of fiction meme prompt #30: write a scene saying “good bye”
Summary: A beginning, the signs of an ending; some people are harder to say goodbye to than others.
Warnings/Content: Mild verbal domestic quarrelling over one character's perceived 'unwarranted' behaviour.
Notes: Too long for the meme but I don't care :P This is the start of another novel I'll probably never finish. I started writing it as non-descript/Pan-American probably because most of my fandoms are American, but then I thought better of it, and wrote it as set in England, hence the mugs of tea :D

( You know I hate it when you do that )