I am currently writing a Naruto fanfic, "Common Sense", which receives updates approximately weekly.

I have somewhat of a plan and some scenes written for a Harry Potter multi-crossover series, but it will be many months, if not years, before I publish the first chapter. One fanfic at a time.

My one-shot, "Time Travel Story", is complete. Over. Finished. Yes, there's a lot left to your imaginations, but that's what keeps you smiling after you finish reading the story. It's just not a compelling premise for a multi-chapter plot.

My favorite stories are action/humor. If only FFNet had an "Action" category. I enjoy Super!main character stories, though I find Godlike!main character to be a bit boring. Harry Potter time travel fics are fun, Naruto time travel fics almost always suck. You'll find my reading preferences translate directly to the type of stories I write.

I subscribe to the Dr. Who theory of time-travel, in which you don't have to be nearly as careful about paradoxes as in other theories. See the 2011 "Space" and "Time" mini-episodes for the kinds of awesome shit you can pull under this theory of time-travel.

The Yankee Potter Challenge

Fanfiction writers, I challenge you!

Write a Harry Potter parody in which Harry Potter, Hogwarts, and the whole HP series occurs in the United States of America. In particular, everything is culturally American!

Here are the rules:

(1) – This must be a Humor fic! It must be funny! You can mock American culture and have fun with ridiculous stereotypes! Teachers who are hippies or speak like gangbangers, Dumbledore is a relic of the American Civil War, maybe even an old-west cowboy! (Just make sure his beard stays awesome.) Use various flavors of American slang! Make fun of the American addiction to coffee and obsessions such as big loud cars, world speed records, entrepreneurship, litigation, the environment, two-party politics, et cetera! I'm quite serious about Rule #1: good humor comes at a premium in the fanfiction community and you'll find that hilarious fics are rarer and more popular than lemony fics.

(2) – The fic is a study in culture! The more accurate your depiction of American culture, the better! Americans love to throw away tradition, so no broomsticks: have them fly something else like hoverboards! The food is all-American, meaning that, aside from apple pie and hamburgers, it comes from all over the world (except with the spicy food made less spicy and the sweet stuff made with corn syrup). No standard wizarding robes... actually, no school uniforms! Don't forget, wizards live a long time, so you've got people hanging around from every period of American history since the mid-19th century, and you can quite believeably give the wizarding world a culture that is a few decades behind the times... just not as much as the British. Points for adding a character who grew up in Britain and using them to contrast and mock the differences between cultures and the language. ("Lorry? What the frack is a lorry?")

(3) – Harry is American! Harry and his parents were born in America, and Harry is raised by the Dursleys in America! Note that he can come from any subculture in America: he can be a true-blue Yankee Doodle from New England, or a Native American from Arizona, or an African-American, or an Asian-American, a Hispanic, or, best of all, a mix of more than one!

(4) – Hogwarts is an American school. If you want to place it in Massachusetts, you can replace J. K. Rowling's "Salem Witches' Institute" with "Hogwarts". Or you can place it in California, Florida, the Midwest, New Jersey, literally anywhere! I recommend you choose an area that you, the author, are personally familiar with, to make it easier to write accurately about the community. As an American school, No Ancient Medieval Castles Allowed! Pick a more American architecture, like a massive mansion (haunted, of course) or a steel-and-glass skyscraper (in the middle of the boonies, LOL), or even, if you want to be boring, a completely ordinary 2-story American high school building in white-picket-fence suburbia. And Dumbledore is the Principal, not the Headmaster, and the teachers are called "teachers", not "professors"!

(5) – American magical creatures! Sasquatch/Bigfoot, jackalopes, the Jersey Devil, sewer alligators, chupacabras, thunderbirds... use the Internet for research if you need it. Doesn't need to be limited to the USA; you can grab mythical critters from all over the Americas. And there's nothing wrong with importing European dragons or making werewolves and vampires native to the New World as well as the Old World. Just – please, I beg of you – no goddamned sparkly vampires.

(6) – The entire central conflict of Death Eater vs. Order of the Phoenix / Light vs. Dark is no longer placed around "Pureblood vs. Mudblood", but something else, something American The whole "pureblood nobility" idea is Old World! So you need to replace the ideologies behind the conflict with something else, such as Native American shaman magic vs. European wand magic, or make it a classical American racial conflict (White vs. Black), a religious conflict (oh damn this could get controversial... if you do this, don't read the reviews until your story is complete). Or come up with something on your own! You can even make it something ridiculously stupid like "Dumbledore butters the bottom side of his toast while Voldemort butters the top" or "Voldemort and the Death Eaters wear fedoras and Dumbledore and his Order wear baseball caps"... and the characters on each side are all deadly serious while newcomers to the Wizarding World are facepalming like crazy.

(7) – Be Creative and Original! 'Nuff said.

(8) – Don't copy the entire challenge rules at the top of the fic. If you must copy the rules, just copy the bolded first sentence or two of each rule, and reference my profile for the rest. Trust me, your readers don't wanna see this shit, they just want to get to the story.

Yankee Potter went to Hogwarts riding on a hoverboard...

Stone Elbow's Rules of Fanfiction

1. Creativity is the most important component of any tale. Write something original.

2. Never repeat large portions of content from canon. If you do, you may find yourself guilty of third-degree murder by boredom.

3. Diction, grammar, and spelling are extremely important. A wonderful, creative and entertaining story can be ruined by horrible English. If you are not a native speaker of the language you're writing, get someone to proofread!

4. A good fanfic starts as a daydream you had after you read/watched some canon or another fanfic. You let your imagination run with it, and voila! Fanfiction.

Pet Peeves

– Authors who write fanfics for anime, TV shows, or movies, and write screenplays instead of prose. Symptoms of this problem are:

1. Using "Flashback Start" and "Flashback End" tags instead of using prose-style segues like "Harry thought back to when he was 8 years old..."

2. Authors describing visual effects which are clearly meant as directions for CGI artists.

3. Overly detailed descriptions of characters' clothing.

– Authors who write anime/manga fanfics in English, but use too many Japanese words. Some things, like the "-san", "-chan", "-kun", etc., suffixes, can lend a nice cultural flavor to a story. If you're writing in English, you have to limit it to terms commonly known to people who have exposure to Japanese culture but don't speak the language. Otherwise you may as well just write it in Japanese in the first place.

– Authors who just plain follow the canon storyline. Some of these are writing side-stories for other characters, stuff like that. It's boring because the plot is 100% predictable. If you're gonna write a Harry Potter/Avengers crossover, then don't freakin' write the New York invasion with every single scene identical, but with Harry stuck into the scene... it gives the feeling that Harry is a completely ineffectual character who makes no difference to the plot.

– Authors who straight-up plagiarise other peoples' fanfics without permission or attribution. Know that if you do this, I will hate you forever.

– Stories in which the main protagonist is romantically paired with someone he/she cannot or should not be able to respect. Examples include most Naruto/Hinata fics, some Harry/Ginny fics, literally all large harem fics, and pretty much anything in which Draco Malfoy is part of a relationship. Respect is the basis of any relationship. Trust is based on respect. (The "I trust you with my heart" type, not the "I trust you with my money" type.) Love requires trust. If you don't have respect, your relationship is based on nothing more than physical attraction, possibly with some mutual interests/hobbies thrown in, but nothing more lasting.

– There is good quality humor, and there is crude sexual innuendo. Innuendo can be funny and it has its place, but it's really cheap. If an author is incapable of using any other form of humor, it gets extremely boring after the first few chapters.

– Authors who use Author's Notes to tell their story. This is a really, really, incredibly, horribly LAME way to tell a story. Get your story to tell itself! Don't use an author's note to say, "Harry is 5 years old" or to explain a confusing point in the plotline, or even to describe a spell or jutsu. If it's important enough to interest the reader, it's important enough to work it into the story itself. Use foreshadowing to indicate plot plans. Have another character act as a foil and ask for a spell description, list it as a quote from a book, or even just write out the description in the middle of the story (you're allowed to do that when writing from the omniscient third person point of view).

Please review. I will read every review. I want to hear what you think, even if it's just one word! If you don’t like my story, write me a scathing flame of a review. If you can, make your insults witty and creative. If you can’t do that, write some shit anyway. Anything to increase the number of reviews on my fic, and thus the number of people who will find it using “Sort by Reviews”. MWAH-HAH-HAH-HA!