Stolen from persiflage_1, who stole it from nostalgia_lj in turn:

What would you say are the trademarks of my writing? What themes or quirks or turns of phrase have you noticed? What is it that makes a story by me -- well, a story by me?

A few, I can guess, but others ... well, I'd be curious.

General observations, none of which I'm sure will stun you:

1. There are quite a few pop culture references when your characters speak
2. Your characters go into great detail explaining their thought processes and beliefs
3. With CSFB! and his cast especially, there is the constant theme of "Order vs. Chaos" -and its pretty clear which side you're on!
4. There is strong anti-traditional, anti-authoritative vibe to your work.
5. You don't believe in destiny or "either/or" choices for characters

Yeah, I'll cop to all of these, with a possible exception:

> There is strong anti-traditional, anti-authoritative vibe to your work.

Anti-authoritative? Yes. Anti-traditional? Yes and no. My writing definitely reflects an alternative to "traditional values" in the modern sense of the term (one of my favorite puns is to describe CSFB! as having a "post-nuclear family"), but a lot of my concepts simply wouldn't exist without being strongly informed by other traditions (superhero archetypes and legacies, as well as tribal and classical mythologies).

The one I learned earliest in trying to use Dream: To capture what I feel is the closest I can get to authentic CSFB dialog, one needs to write his lines as run-on sentences. While it's not as immediately distinctive as Yo-speak or Ausgardian, I've always liked the free-flowing, hyperactive nature it represents.

And, of course, stylistically your stories often feature two characters debating a concept with a structured, almost-essay like work through of the issue.

At least I seem to be as self-aware as I thought, though.

> The one I learned earliest in trying to use Dream: To capture what I feel is the closest I can get to authentic CSFB dialog, one needs to write his lines as run-on sentences. While it's not as immediately distinctive as Yo-speak or Ausgardian, I've always liked the free-flowing, hyperactive nature it represents.

I've heard from at least two Parodyverse posters that I write online the same way that I speak in real life, apparently.

> And, of course, stylistically your stories often feature two characters debating a concept with a structured, almost-essay like work through of the issue.

Blame it on my primary exposures to serialized storytelling being the afternoon soap operas I grew up with (The Young & The Restless and The Bold & The Beautiful were the two my mom watched, back when she was the stay-at-home parent, so that's what I watched, too) and the "classic" comic books that I sought out, starting in college (old-school Marvel, from Stan Lee to Chris Claremont, could actually combine exposition with characterization in dialogue, a rare feat in their titles today), but I've always felt that a character's dialogue should tell you something, whether it's about them, the world around them, or the ways in which they see that world ... which, in spite of my attempts at a more "conversational" style, probably makes me the anti-Bendis.

Beyond that, I suppose I'm too much of a student of rhetoric to leave any character's socio-political platform unexplored.