On Other Blogs

Pen Pals

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TV Writer Paul Guyot talks about how important it is for writers to have other writers as friends.

The intangible. See, I can talk to my wife about story, and she
reads everything I write, but even though she actually worked with
writers for a living, understands story and structure, gives very good,
precise notes, there is still something altogether different when it’s
a writer talking with another writer. There’s some nebulous thing
that’s shared.

My advice to any "aspiring" writers, be it screen or prose, is to find yourself a writer buddy.

Just don’t date another writer. I’ve made that mistake.

How Hated Am I?

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I got this email today:

Do you realize that EVERYBODY in fandom hates your fucking guts you asshole?

I think it was from my Mom, but I’m going to answer it anyway. No, I had no idea. So, for fun, I thought I’d take a look at what some people are saying. Here’s a sampling:

From Jocelyn’s Other Desk:

Thy lips rot off, Lee Goldberg!  Thou jarring, fat-kidneyed scullian!  You speak an infinite deal of nothing!  […] Goldbergs one and all, thine sole name blisters our tongues.  Thou hath more hair than wit, and more faults than hairs.

From Nobody Knows Anything Blog:

I understand the impulse to write and read fanfic—you want to live in
this wonderful world as much as you can, and twenty-four hours a year
or one book every two years or whatever just isn’t cutting it for you.
There are several novel series that I am forever hoping will just happen to have a new installment at the bookstore every time I check. But
fanfic is like a steak dinner made out of meringue—might look the real
thing, but it’s not really going to fill you up.

From Dawn Rivers Baker’s Blog:

You know, it’s all very well to nitpick about the legal shimmies and shakes of fanfic,
but the legal stuff doesn’t cover what it must be like for the author
who feels violated by other people dipping their fingers into the
author’s creation. All you really have to do to "get" the author’s perspective is to ask a victim how it feels to have just been raped.

From Nick Mamatas:

Mystery writer and TV producer Lee Goldberg picks up a stick and whacks a hornet’s nest by taking on fanfic.
I have no dog in the fight; after all, what can I say? NOBODY had
better RIP-OFF my ORiGINAL CHARACTERS like … uh … Jack Kerouac and uhm Cthulhu and William S. Burroughs and and and…
However, I do like a good brawl, especially when everyone is so
obviously speaking past one another. "It’s illegal!" "It’s a hobby!"
"It’s illegal!" "It’s a hobby!" Haven’t these people ever heard of an
illegal hobby before? They sure seem to be acting like they run their
neighborhood meth labs.

Read more

Holly Lisle Says No to Fanfic

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Novelist Holly Lisle promises to prosecute anybody who circulates  fanfic based on her work because "fanfic writers demonstrate not just blatant disregard for, but
active antagonism toward, the wishes of individual authors on this
issue."

UPDATE (6-24-05) Holly posted this as a comment on another blog entry:

"Ten years ago, I was, if not wildly supportive of the idea of
fanfic, at least tolerant of it. A few fans asked if they could write
fanfic using my characters, I told them they could as long as they
understood that they could not publish it and that I owned all rights
to the characters, and that under no circumstances would I be willing
to read what they’d written.

Times changed, associates started having to take legal action
against people who were writing in their worlds without permission, and
I asked my fans to please discontinue writing fanfiction in my worlds.
Which they did.

There were some fanfic writers posting in these threads who said
they would respect the wishes of authors who stated clearly that they
didn’t want fanfic written around their characters or worlds.

So obviously there are still some decent people like my fans who are
writing fanfic, and I feel badly about having to post a harsh notice
informing all fanfic writers that under no circumstances will I condone
any fanfic set in my worlds, and that any such writing that IS done
will be treated as derivative work and prosecuted.

Looking at the quality of people posting here, however — people who
are actively hostile toward the creators of the original work, who hold
the rights of the original creators in complete disregard, and who
state that they don’t care whether the original creators want them
writing in their worlds or not — that they intend to do what they want
until someone forces them to stop — I’m confident that the posting of
my notice is necessary.

As for taking heat from the people who have chosen to use my
statements as an opportunity to vilify me — ah, well. They’ve also
done a pretty good job of disseminating my wishing across a number of
sites and boards, thus decreasing the chances that someone writing
fanfic in one of my worlds could claim ignorance of my clearly worded
hands-off post.

So, to all of you who have been spreading the word for me, my deepest thanks."

Novik Chimes In

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Naomi Novik, one of the two "pro-fanfic" guests on OPEN SOURCE, comments on the radio show and the discussion here on her blog.
To give you a sense of the bizarre logic behind her arguments, she believes
that writing reference books about television (like my book UNSOLD
TELEVISION PILOTS)  is no different than fanfic.

And the books in the last category profit off the creations of others
*without* authorization — because legally you don’t need to have
authorization to report facts. So in the venn diagram of ‘borrowing
characters to write fiction’ and ‘use without authorization’, where
fanfic writers are in the intersection, he’s got one foot in either
camp even while he’s going after the people in the middle.

Need I say more? Okay, a little more. Here’s how she feels about authors who object to fanfic about their work:

I realized after posting, that the joking remark above might seem to
imply an insult any author who does object to fanfic. Not my intention
— I do understand individual authors who feel strongly that they don’t
want fanfic on their own work out there. If an author feels an intense
negative reaction to fanfic on her work, that is a completely valid
feeling. I don’t think that it obliges people to respect that feeling,
but it’s not ridiculous, it’s how she feels, and I personally do
respect that reaction out of courtesy.

Courtesy?? What
courtesy? She isn’t showing authors any courtesy at all. She "respects
the reaction," but not the author.  Her attitude is basically this:
Fuck JK Rowling if she doesn’t like stories about Harry using his magic
wand to have sex with everybody at Hogwarts.  Anything she writes
belongs to me to use however I see fit.

Her arrogance and stupidity is mind-boggling. Between her, and the
guy who made the "We more emotionally attached" comment, I think you
get a pretty accurate picture of the fanfic community and how they
think. Scary, isn’t it?

(I was amused, though, but her inadvertent acknowledgement of the central hypocrisy of fanficcers. If someday fanfic is written based on one of her
novel, she won’t read..

  …any of the fanfic anyway (just not worth the
potential legal headaches), so what difference does it make to me?

That statement says so much. Fanficcers see absolutely nothing wrong with stealing the work of other writers, even if it the author of the work is opposed to it, but
would sue any novelist or TV producer they think may have stolen something from their
fanfic.  Their work should be protected, it’s everybody else’s that up for grabs…)

Last Round-Up for Western Writers of America?

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On the eve of the Western Writers of America’s annual convention, legendary western novelist Richard Wheeler laments the state of the western genre…and the wisdom of the WWA’s decision to "drop its professional requirements for membership."

This merely formalized the practice of admitting most
anyone, regardless of the strict bylaws, which had been going on for
several years. So the organization switched from being a classic guild
looking after professional members to being an open-membership group.

Recently it was noted that Library Journal, which scrupulously
publishes the winners of various awards given by author societies, had
not included Spur Awards in its listings for some while. Apparently it
deemed the WWA awards to be beneath notice, which is a good indication
of the fate of the western novel. Maybe the LJ has a point: many of the
Spur judges no longer have true professional credentials, so the Spur
Awards are increasingly fan-given or wannabe-given awards rather than a
selection made by professional peers.

WWA is booming, actually, now that anyone can join. It has around 600
members, publishes a flossy magazine, sets up booths at trade shows,
and is prosperous. And there is no lack of books written by members,
even if these are often print-on-demand titles from vanity presses, or
more commonly, works published by spare-bedroom presses, some of which
do not even have ISBN numbers or bar codes, and thus are not
distributed by larger booksellers.

I am wondering where it will all lead.

That’s a good question…and one the Mystery Writers of America might ponder before they ever consider loosening their membership requirements.

“We Are More Emotionally Attached”

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Fan fic writers have no deadlines, networks/producers/actors to please,
and often have a better grasp on the characters and their history than
the tv writers usually because We Are more Emotionally attached.

The incredible stupidity of that blog comment tells you all you need to know about fanfic writers…and the tenor of the "discussion" on NPR’s OPEN SOURCE (the comment above comes from their blog). The radio show did a terrible job yesterday exploring fanfic —  and I’m not
just saying that because it was 45 minutes into a one-hour show before
the bewildered host remembered I was there. 

I think that the guests and listeners on both sides of the fanfic debate would agree that the host was woefully unprepared for the discussion.  He didn’t have a grasp of what fanfic is and seemed to be stumbling around blindly in search of a point or an angle (something his producers should have prepped him on more thoroughly beforehand). He was unfocused and, therefore, so was the discussion, which is why I’m not at all surprised by his baffling "post-game analysis" of the show on the OPEN SOURCE blog:

The poverty of fanfic is its confinement by television and what seem
the limited stock of Star Trek characters—and the bodies of Charley’s
Angels. But the courage of readers who, all along, have been
reimagining outcomes and dialogue and motives is awe-inspiring. I guess
it is just as well that we waltzed right past all those confounding
lit-crit riddles of post-modern textuality. Naomi Novick tried to tempt
us with a sweeping dismissal of authorial intent, and I cheerfully let
it go.

What is he babbling about? I was on the show and I can’t make sense out of it. By the way, I was the only fanfic naysayer invited to participate (and then only included in the discussion as a brief after-thought).  He spent the bulk of the show talking to the two dimwits who felt there’s no difference between a modern retelling of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE and STAR TREK mpreg fic (for one thing, the authors the fanficcers are ripping off are still alive)  So it’s no surprise the host ultimately comes out in favor of fanfic…or at least his blurry notion of it.

Common sense about music makes me wonder why any of it should be
copyrighted. Music is not something human beings own; it something
people love, make and do every hour of the day, socially and alone. So
much of the music I love is recreated: like Brahms’ transcription of
Bach’s Chaconne for left-hand-only at the piano, or Chucho Valdes’
reconception of Chopin’s Preludes as jazz. Up with imitation, then, and
the geniuses who can make it original.

James Reasoner in the Flesh

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JamesreasonerbillcavalierBill Crider pointed me to this newspaper photo of novelist James Reasoner (left) and Bill Cavalier (right) participating on a panel at Robert E. Howard Days, a salute to the CONAN author hosted by his hometown of Cross Plains, TX:

Fans and experts alike agreed Saturday that Robert E. Howard, the Cross Plains
fantasy writer who took his own life at the age of 30, would have become a giant
in his field if he had lived. The question, though, is exactly what field that
might have been.

I saw something in that photo I’ve never seen on a panel dias before. A can of OFF. Now that’s class. At least it wasn’t RAID.  (Click on the photo for a larger image).

“A Heavily Subsidized Hobby”

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Think of this as a companion piece to the "Day in the Life" post here a few days back. Author Harley Jane Kozak talks today about money,  contracts, and the work-a-day life of  a writer.

I was offered a contract this week. Actually, I was offered two. After a year of writing “on spec” as we say in Hollywood, that was pretty exciting news. It’s not that I made no money this past year; there were  those first two books, and I still get residuals for the acting work I did in my previous life (another six  bucks for that 1986 Highway to Heaven episode) but it’s safe to assume that I spent a lot more than I  took in. Would that I could say the same about calories.

So, when I sold a short story to Ms. Magazine, and was offered a two-book deal from Doubleday on the  same day, I called my husband at work to tell him the good news.

“Great!” he said. “How much?”

I told him.

Silence on the other end of the phone.

I could hear him mentally dividing the book advance by two (two books in two years), then subtract taxes and agent’s fee, then add up babysitting costs, marketing and promotion . . .

“Can you ask for more?” he asks.