Ten Ways To Know You’re Reading A Fic By Tann

1. He seems to have the odd idea, doubtless as a result of his own particular literary tastes (formed largely by the perusal of Victorian and Edwardian authors as well as those of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods), that the best sort of writing is characterized by a certain prolixity of extended periods, with frequent digressions (such as those employed by Cervantes — speaking of whom, one is reminded of the odd fact that he and Shakespeare, though they died on the same date, April 23rd, 1616, nevertheless died ten days apart, as Catholic Spain had adopted the Gregorian calendar, whereas Protestant England, despising the new calendar as a papal invention, clung to the old Julian calendar and was thus ten days behind) which often have little to do with the fic itself.

2. He employs sesquipedalian locutions, perennially eschewing the terse for the orotund and grandiloquent.

3. He over-punctuates: colons, semi-colons, hyphens, dashes; he makes great — possibly FAR too extravagant — use of OVER-EMPHASIS.

4. Jokes depend either on puns so bad they pirahna-amaze-ya or literary or historical allusions so obscure that Martianus Capella would cut them from his De Nuptiis Philologiæ et Mercurii.

5. Il emploie des langues étrangères, specialiter, ¡Ay caramba! die Interjektionen; else, by my halidom, he maketh usage of antick speech or of verbal constructions involuted, contorted, aberrant as well.

6. “His stories, they are very dependent on the dialogue,” said the critic.
“Oh, are they?” I said, trying desperately to feign some interest.
“But yes,” replied the critic, “And figure to yourself, my sir, the characterizations of them, they depend on some turns of dialect.”

7. Landgrave Hermann explained to the young Saint Elisabeth of Thuringia that Tann’s writing was prone to feature Catholicism, Germany, and mediæval history and legend.

8. With a ghastly howl, the werewolf’s ghost revealed that Tann’s stories were often haunted by dark supernatural occurrences.

9. “‘There is in oc-... occasion elementals of saturn,’” read Dr. Bo’Udicca Jugurtha, Ed. D., who held a post in the U.S. Department of Education, “‘’specially on, um, pro-... prorgressive ideals, very oftten, for essample, in peda-.. pedagology. These is a typical characterization of oppressorive patri-... paytri-arch-ialism and capitolism, and is sometime a li’l bit heavy-handled.’”

10. His fics never get fi