Dunmurderin'

Part of the problem is that some of the people writing out there are just BAD writers. Back in the Mimeo Age, before the "I thought it up, I wrote it and I put it on the Internet" era of fan fic, most stories that were widely dissemintated were edited and re-written at least once before they saw the light of day. Nowadays, your erstwhile author can take out their grocery list, slap a title on it "Favorite-Fandom-Character's Grocery List', put it up on the Net and, shazam, their work is 'in print'. Then again, I suspect some mainstream authors with books on the Best Seller lists have done much the same thing, only they get paid for it. Bad writing is unfortunately not exclusive to fan fiction. The stuff that gets between hard covers may be spell-checked to death and have nice margins, but it's still a sow's ear trying to look like a silk purse. (Plus, I think there's a rule in the Universe, that if you have a book/TV show/movie with two guys/two girls in it, someone, somewhere will be writing "/" fiction involving them. I think it's tied up to the whole entropy, matter/antimatter thing. )