Reviews
Original & Uber Fiction
Fan Fiction
Click to subscribe to
BLURB Updates
Mission Statement and FAQ
(1) Will you write a review of a story I've written? Would you tell your staff to review my story?
Reviewers *will never be assigned reviews*, *asked to review a specific story/stories*, or questioned about what they choose to review...
We want our reviewers to feel free to review what most interests and moves them. Because we will have bards as reviewers, it's important to make it clear that we in no way encourage or discourage the reviews of our contributing reviewer's stories. To do so would put them in an awkward position and would impede our ability to recruit writers as reviewers.
(2) Why is there more than one review for that story?
Stories might be reviewed more than once...
Just because a story has been reviewed does not mean it can't or won't be reviewed again. Since there will be no collaborating between reviewers, more than one review of the same story may be turned in at the same time (as may often happen with stories that are newly posted to the Web). Both reviews will be posted. This speaks to the very strong BLURB sentiment that many varying opinions/recommendations are necessary in order to even remotely attempt a global view of the plethora of fan fiction on the net.
(3) What's the purpose of this site?
Filling a niche...
We're the middle ground between a One-Reviewer System and a Public Reviewing System, both of which already exist. Lunacy has been reviewing fan fiction pretty much single-handedly since the beginning of Xena Fan Fiction on the Web. Tragedy 88's Reviews are set up to allow anyone the opportunity to review a story (public reviews). We strongly encourage you to visit these sites as well. You can find the URLs of both these sites in our Links section.
We have many writers as reviewers, and this may be our most distinctive characteristic as a review site. Does a writer make a better reviewer? No. Nothing, per se, makes one reviewer better than another. And that's the point, after all. What makes a reviewer interesting is how they differ from another reviewer, and therefore, how they will see a story differently. In this respect, we find having writers as reviewers interesting.
(4) What are your views on fan fiction reviews in general?
Reviews as opinions...
Since reviews are merely opinions, and since personal preferences vary widely, how can we provide a site that recommends stories when the very nature of any recommendation is skewed and flawed to begin with, and is sure to always exclude a story simply by the virture of what has been included? The best answer, it seems to us, is to set up a list of reviewers that vary as widely as possible from one another. Though it will, undoubtedly, still fall short in some areas, we feel that this is probably as close as we're going to get to an ideal situation.
And so. . .
We hope that reading more than one recommendation for a story might be of interest to the potential reader. It gives them a larger well to draw from and enables them to make a better decision about what they're looking for in a good read. And, after all, isn't a good read all any of us are really looking for?
The BLURB Staff