Note: I no longer maintain herofiles. I may bring it back again, but not likely in the near future.

Please visit the Hero Files website and forums: . Now with radio alphabet conversion goodness!

Instead of a guide to the show or a fanfic archive, both of which have been done better by others, Hero Files is a collection of useful information and sources for writing better Hogan's Heroes fanfic. It's where to go if you need to check how to spell Langenscheidt, whether the word you want is "their" or "there," how many shillings there are in a pound, or whether your original character you're a bit worried about is edging into the land of the Mary Sue. Most of the technical issues I bring up in reviews, such as misspellings, bad grammar, and incorrect homonym choices, are covered on Hero Files so you don't have to make the same mistake again.

It also has a section called the Time Machine, which basically provides links to the sort of things the HH characters would be familiar with, so you can "travel in time" from our world to theirs. You can read the books that they read as boys, watch a newsreel, listen to a radio mystery ... in short, immerse yourself in that foreign country we call the past. Your writing will be better for it.

I found the stats page and discovered that people keep reading my profile, so I suppose I should put something in it. But what? In this connected world of ours, I am an oddly private person. My name, my age, my religion, even my favorite music ... all of the personal matters that people put in these things ... there are people who have known me for years who don't know any of those details.

It's not that I have anything to hide; actually, I'm a very ordinary person. But in my years online I have developed a severe phobia of being labeled. Even more than in the real world, many people seize on any label they can find and then mistake the label for its object. If I were to be tagged as "teenage urban Asian writer" or "middle-aged gay male writer" or "female born-again Christian writer" then people would read things into my words that only exist inside their own heads. They would see the label and assign to me all of the attributes that they associate with that label, whether they fit or not. And, all too often, when the label conflicted with reality, they would believe the label instead of reality. I have seen it happen too many times. So you will just have to read my writing without any handy pre-printed labels to stick on me.

Instead, since this is FanFiction, I'll stick to my opinions on fan fiction, and specifically what I like to read. (Note to the people who persist in choosing to misinterpret this: I am not saying that this is what all fanfic should be. Take careful note of the words "opinions" and "what I like" above.)

So what do I like as a fanfic reader?

I put good writing ahead of innovative ideas. A great idea is just that, a great idea. It isn't a story. An idea on its own isn't very entertaining. No matter how good an idea is, it can't carry a story on its own. Look at Shakespeare's plays. Their ideas are, in general, neither original nor particularly imaginative. Some, to be blunt, are forced, hokey, or downright lame. His genius was in how he carried through with those ideas. The playwrights he "borrowed" ideas from are forgotten today; Shakespeare's work is immortal because of what he did with those ideas. Closer to home, how many of the worlds we write in, how many of the canon stories that we love, are really such unique ideas from beginning to end? How many are simply ordinary ideas masterfully executed? Ideas are a dime a dozen (or twenty-five bucks a six-pack, if you believe Harlan Ellison); good writing is a rare treasure.

I want to see many dimensions of a character. One of the delights of fan fiction is that we can explore other aspects of characters we only see on screen in two-minute scenes and a handful of cliched lines. Human beings are endlessly complex, and I love stories that bring that out. How does the character who always wins act when he loses? How does the villain react when he becomes a victim — or how does the victim act when he gains the upper hand? How does a character appear to his enemy's eyes? How does he react when he sees a view of himself other than his own?

I like stories that could fit into the world without closing doors to other possible stories. I think that's why I dislike major character death (would you HH writers please quit killing Kinch!) (update: thank you HH writers for quitting killing Kinch!), marriage, or other permanent changes. This isn't to say that I want everyone back to their starting positions at the end of the story, like a reset chessboard, but I prefer to have them able to go on to their next adventure. As you can tell from my favorites list this obviously isn't a hard-and-fast rule, but it's definitely a big plus.

I prefer stories that are well-crafted. Insist on them, even. The "fit and finish" matters a lot to me. Continuity errors, stupid names, improbable coincidences, and of course Mary Sues, they all break the immersion. Getting the facts right is another big one. For me, at least, a great story can be wrecked by a character who uses the wrong word for something he's supposed to be an expert on. And yes, I know they did it in canon. The mutating airplane in HH#33 comes to mind; it's several different planes, including a Lancaster, but none of them is the Heinkel HE-111 bomber it's supposed to be. But we can do better. We're not limited by available sets, props, stock footage, or production budgets, we're not on deadline (except for you, Nina Stephens!), and we have the whole Web at our fingertips for research.

What don't I like? Well, I don't like slash. It just isn't my thing, and far too much of it seems to be badly written by moonstruck teenage girls. I don't like major character death. I'm not saying or implying that either is wrong, but I personally prefer to read something else. I can't stand Mary Sues (and I'll argue that they are wrong). What I hate with a burning passion is stories that seem to have been written by a borderline illiterate. Misspelled words, misused words, random capitalization, commas either sprinkled in like pepper (something I have to watch myself for) or left out entirely, and a total lack of the normal conventions of writing, such as the use of paragraphs, all can ruin a story. What that kind of unnecessary sloppiness says to me is "this author doesn't care about his own work." Even if you've never read a book in your life, find someone who has to proofread your story. Spelling checkers, proofreaders, beta readers, and FFN's "Edit Chapter" function exist for a reason; you should use them all.

A comment on reviews while I'm at it: It seems that too many people in FFN seem to feel that a writer's fragile self-esteem will crumple if everyone doesn't tell them how great their story is. Long ago, my mother told me that if a friend asks you how their new outfit looks and in it's horrible, tell them you like the color or something. I see a lot of that here. I've seen people trying to find something to praise in stories that appear to have been written intentionally badly, as jokes. I never liked the "tell them you like the color" approach because if I ask a friend how I look, I bloody well want them to tell me if I look like a clown before I go out in public like that! I'm old-school: Effort is nice, but results are what matter. Praising a story that is actually pure dreck is no service to anyone, especially the author. So those of you who are kind enough to take the time to comment on my writing, please tell me the truth. Don't just say you like the color. My ego will survive, and my writing will be better for it.

A nice piece by someone who said it a lot better than I could.

Recently, I came across an article on Cracked, of all places, entitled 6 Harsh Truths That Will Make You a Better Person. I'm not going to link it here because, being on Cracked, it contains the kind of language that is considered "adult" and unsuitable for teenagers, despite the fact that it's used primarily by teenagers rather than adults, but you can find the article easily by searching their site. It's rather long (they've gotta get their page views, after all) but the gist of it comes down to a few words:

It's not about you.

Nobody cares if you're a nice person. Nobody cares how hard you're trying. Nobody in the real world -- at least nobody who is not a close relative, if you're that lucky -- cares about anything but results. Apropos to fanfic, if you can write a good story, nothing else about you matters. And if you can't write a good story, nothing else about you matters either. People come to FFN to read good stories, period. I don't care if you're a talking dog; it's your story that matters. Nothing else.

If you ever become a famous writer, people might care what your favorite color is. But until you get there (a minimum of one book on the NYT bestseller list is necessary) nobody cares. It's not about you. It's about your story. So go write the best story you're capable of, in the best way you're capable of doing it. Then write the next one better. And who knows, if you concentrate on what you do, not what you are, you might get that NYT bestseller one of these days.

ADVICE TO WRITERS

1. GET A PROOFREADER. I cannot emphasize this enough. Nobody, not you, not me, not Adam Johnston (he won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2013) can do without a proofreader. We never see our own mistakes. We can't, because when we read the words, they act more as cue-cards than as text and we see in our minds what we meant to write, not what we really wrote. That's why you can look right at the same typo ten times as you revise and never see it, but it instantly jumps out at a friend who reads the story. So get a proofreader. You should also have a beta reader, and they should be two different people, but that's a whole other rant.

2. Truth is stranger than fiction. This is because fiction has to make sense. Truth can be strange, random, and pointless. Fiction has to be believable. Things have to happen for a reason, people have to behave in ways that are consistent with their character, etc. Reality has a freedom that fiction lacks. We know reality happened because it happened to us, no matter how improbable it was; fiction, since it's not something that happened to us personally, needs to be convincing.

3. Your characters are always the good guys. Even (perhaps especially) the bad guys. Whatever they happen to be doing, they have their own justification, or at least rationalization, for why it's the right thing to do, and why any right-thinking person would agree with them. The occasional druggie aside, nobody does bad things because they want to do something bad; they do bad things because, in their mind, in their world, those things are the right thing to do. Even if they do something "just for fun" (which is a very weak justification, story-wise; see #1) they have reasons why they feel they deserve to have that fun.

4. Your characters are always doing their best. Again, truth is stranger than fiction, and (as some of the half-baked stories that show up on FFN demonstrate) sometimes people don't put much effort into ... well, anything. But see #1 again: fiction doesn't work that way. If a character is doing something in a story, he has to be giving it his best shot. Having him do less than his best so you can set up a situation you want is a kind of deus ex machina, and if anything, it's worse than the usual kinds because it's being untrue to the character.

5. It's not about you. People want to read the story, not your story. That is, they want to read your fiction, not your life history. They don't care who you are, how you feel, or what you like. They just want to read a good story. So give them one.

6. Know what you write. No matter what you're writing about, someone is an expert on it. Just because you don't know how military radio procedure works, or what the effects of a head injury are, doesn't mean that someone else doesn't. They know, and your mistakes will break the story for them. You have the whole Web at your fingertips; look things up. Find out how they really work, and write accordingly.

7. Fit and finish matter. See #4 here: It's not about you. Nobody cares why you didn't bother to spell characters' names right or why your formatting makes their eyes bleed. Only the results matter. "Creative writing" is two words, and while the "creative" part might be hard to quantify, the "writing" part isn't. There are ways in which things should be written: capital letters go here, punctuation is used like this, etc. There is no excuse for getting that part wrong. Technical excellence can't save a bad story, but screw-ups can ruin a good one. People will not give your sloppy writing a break because you're such a nice person -- remember, it's not about you.

8. Criticism is your friend. Empty praise is your enemy. Knowing what's right might feel good, but it doesn't make your writing any better. Only knowing what's wrong enables you to fix it. If you want egoboo, get a puppy. If you want to be a writer, learn from your mistakes, learn from other people's mistakes, and never stop learning to become a better writer. The meanest flaming son of a beast on the Web is more helpful to you than your nearest, dearest friend if he tells you what's wrong with your story and your friend merely praises it.

(note: I rarely update this profile, so if you have a question that isn't answered in here, PM me)