Hi everyone!

I'm new to this site and don't have any stories up yet, and probably won't for a good while.

I like to review other people's stories, especially the well-written ones. One author in particular, robst, writes excellent Harry Potter fanfiction. If you want to see professional quality writing in a Harry Potter fanfiction, I recommend his stories. If your stories are well written then more people will read them, and you will get fewer negative reviews. And for God's sake, DO NOT CONFUSE THE WORDS DEFINITELY AND DEFIANTLY!!!!! I cannot even count the number of times that I have seen "defiantly" in a place where the word "definitely" should be instead. PLEASE CHECK THIS EXTRA CAREFULLY!. It is incredibly jarring to have the wrong word in a sentence, particularly mixing up pronouns like "he" and "her" or "his" and "hers". That REALLY messes up readers. So please, do us all a favor and actually proofread your stories instead of just using spell check and leaving it at that. If you really want to catch all your mistakes, ask a parent or a friend good with English (or whatever language you are writing in) to check your work. There are also authors on this site that offer to beta-read (another term for proofread) other authors' work, so there are options. For those authors writing in a different language than their own, I recommend the same thing. Online translators are fine for short phrases and such, but complete paragraphs and things like idioms that are not meant to translate literally are not always (indeed often not) caught and translated correctly. This is especially true for German to English and vice versa, Japanese to English and vice versa, and Latin to English and vice versa. In fact, the phrase "vice versa" translates into English from Latin as "conversely", but "conversely" translates into Latin as "vicissim" without a period or comma, and as "et e converso." with a period or comma on Google Translate. So be VERY careful when using an online translator program for your stories. On that note, is a pretty good translator program. I use it to translate Japanese Romaji into English when I encounter it in Naruto stories, and it usually works about 50%-60% of the time.

For those people who leave reviews:

A flame review, or simply a flame, is a review that scathingly criticizes the story or author without being constructive, essentially a rant. Flame reviews are extremely juvenile, and have caused more than one author to abandon posting on fanfiction.net (FFN). If you review a story, there are a couple things you should do. Firstly, leave a name. Even if you do not have an account, you should leave a name (not your real one, but a penname) in the space provided, and keep it consistent. Doing this keeps you accountable for your words, and prevents you from joining the community of anonymous flame reviewers who like nothing more than to insult an author constantly and incite others to do the same. And if you do leave a name, make sure if at all possible that it isn't the same as another user of FFN. I made this free account for this very reason, so that no other user could use my profile name. There are some reviewers who take someone's profile name and use something similar to it to review stories, making people think that the member left the review and damaging that member's reputation on FFN. DO NOT DO THIS! It is rude and slanderous and if you try this in any other media like written papers, radio, newspapers, etc. you can and will get sued for it. Only the freedom and anonymity of the internet allows people to get away with it. Be courteous, please. Back on track, the second thing you need to do in a review is to have a point to it other than "this is a bad/good story". Be specific in your praise or criticism, both help the author improve. If you catch an error, tell them, they may go back and change it or explain why it is not in fact an error. This happened to me when I saw what I thought was an mathematics error in a story and the author showed me how it wasn't actually an error. The third thing you need to remember when writing a review is to keep the language polite. Swearing profusely and calling the author names is what flamers (people who leave flame reviews) do, and again, only the anonymity of the internet protects them from discovery. Here's a tip; if you wouldn't put it in a letter to the editor of a magazine or newspaper, don't put it in an online review. If we as readers follow these guidelines, then the environment of artistic expression and sharing that is the FFN ideal will flourish.

Other Things:

Challenges:

Some authors like to post challenges, where they provide a story premise and ask other authors to write a story for it. This is actually pretty cool, since it fosters creativity and community on the site. I have come up with several ideas for stories over the last few years but never have time to write them because of school. So I may post a few of them here for other authors to use. Please leave me a PM if you decide to use any of my ideas and be sure to give me credit in your disclaimers.

Challenge 1:
Familiar of Zero/Naruto crossover: Instead of summoning Naruto, Louise summons Deidara of Iwa. Louise can only create explosions with her magic, and Deidara is an expert on explosions. I was watching the scene where Saito (Louise's familiar in canon) fights the army of 70,000 and I thought, what if Louise was fighting instead, what level of explosion could she use to take out the army. That evolved into the Naruto crossover. Conditions of the story are: Deidara can be any age, and can be part of Akatsuki or not. He also needs to be independent; that is, he doesn't just submit to being a familiar right off the bat. Remember he is a badass ninja who can blow up anything, he isn't going to take being summoned and bound to a child lying down.

Challenge 2:
Crossover Naruto and Majora's Mask involving the Uzumaki Mask Temple and the cursed Shinigami mask inside it.

Challenge 3:
The Land of Snow in Naruto: There is a reason it snows all the time. The gods turned the region into a prison to keep the Ancient Ones asleep. Thawing them out wakes them up. These Ancient Ones can be anything, from demons to titans to giants to Cthulhu's minions.

Challenge 4:
Crossover, Naruto and God of War. Kushina's chakra chains were used in conjunction with the Blades of Chaos, and Naruto has inherited them and her techniques from the forbidden scroll the night he steals it. I have seen similar stories to this already on FFN but not quite exactly the same.

Challenge 5:
One Piece/Tenacious D crossover. The "Will of D" is a reference to Tenacious D's "We are the D" line from their rock off with the Devil. Crackfic.