Fanfic

She Really, Really Cared

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Tari Akpodiete pointed me to this posting on BoingBoing:

SF writer Lynda Williams sez, "My daughter (18) cared SO much about the ending of the Animorph series ‘selling out’ the readers that loved it with a nasty ending, that she has taken a whole year off school (sigh! be careful what you model!) to write an alternative ending as good as the books ever were! And she did it despite knowing it had to be considered fan fic and couldn’t be a way to start a writing career — just because she really, really
cared."

She took a year off school to write fanfic? Good God, how stupid.

I’m sure some of you will say that I’m being a jerk, that the girl took a year off to hone her writing skills and complete a novel.

And to you, I say, it’s fanfic.  I can see how you might write a short piece of fanfic for yourself  (ie not posted on the Internet or distributed to others) as a writing exercise. That could be useful and instructive. But spending a year toiling on a fanfic novel? That’s just pathetic.  It’s one step removed from becoming a Jareo.

It’s shame her mother, a professional writer,  couldn’t have given her daughter better guidance instead of encouraging her in this masturbatory and pointless pursuit (and, worse, being proud of it). 

Williams could have taught her daughter something about intellectual property, copyright and the importance of respecting the creative rights of other authors. It doesn’t say whether the work was posted on the Internet…but I hope it wasn’t. But if it was, I hope that Williams didn’t congratulate her daughter on that, too.

Williams could have encouraged her daughter to channel her passion for "Animorphs,"  and the way she felt the story should be told, by creating an entirely original work of her own that perhaps embodied the same ideals and explored the same themes. That would have been a worthwhile, enriching, constructive use of her time, effort and passion.

Wouldn’t it have been great if Williams’ daughter took a year off and ended up with a finished novel of her own?  Now that would be something to be proud of. 

But an 18-year-old spending a year on fanfic?

I wouldn’t be proud of that. I’d be embarrassed. 

“Please, please plunge your magnificent Starsky in my eager Hutch…”

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Pmg_ds_promow_flower
Every so often, I check out my stats to see how readers are finding their way to this blog… which is how I discovered Hurt/Comfort Recommendations , a site that explores the s&m fantasies of fanficcers who like to see their favorite characters beaten, injured, or stricken with a deadly disease and then sobbed over and soothed, preferably while the characters are nude and sticking their tongues in each other’s orifices. There are several "essays" about hurt/comfort on the site and recommendations to fanfiction like this:

Picking Up The Pieces by Annie (Starsky/Hutch, NC-17)-
This is the definition of yummy for me 🙂 It follows a rather typical
plotline (that I am certainly guilty of following in several stories,
myself) but the overpowering hurt/comfort elements and adorable
characterizations really save this. The hurt at the beginning is
wonderful- it’s got all the elements that I adore. And when the comfort
portion comes around, it does so with understanding and emotion and hot
hot sex. Who could ask for more?

Here’s a sample of the yummy:

"No?" Starsky queried. "How many guys who didn’t love you would touch
you the way I do, as often as I do? How many guys who didn’t love you
would hold you in their arms and let you puke all over them after you’d
been hyped on Horse, huh?" Starsky smiled to take the sting from his
words but his eyes were grave and steady. "How many guys who didn’t
love you would be so glad when they found you alive pinned under your
car that it was all they could do not to kiss you then and there? Huh?
Tell me, babe. How many?" He leaned forward and slowly pressed his
mouth to Hutch’s, placing the lightest of caresses there.

I’m ready to puke and I’m not even hyped on Horse.  Just imagine her take on how Huggy Bear earned his name…

You Just Know This Idiot Loves FanFic…

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My brother Tod has a weekly feature on his blog in which he skewers the "fucktards" who write Letters to Parade seeking answers from the fictional Walter Scott. Well,  Tod could probably do the same with some of the people who write to TV Guide.

Take Susan A. Davis of Newport, Vermont for example.

She’s peeved about the season finale of CSI, which showed Grissom and Sara in bed together in the closing moments of the episode. TV Guide called it a shocking season finale. But since I only watched two episodes of CSI this season, I didn’t realize I was supposed to be shocked. I just figured the two characters were doing the nasty monkey together now. I wasn’t shocked. In fact, I didn’t care. But let’s get back to Susan A. Davis of Newport, Vermont. She wrote:

The writers ought to sit in a corner with their faces to the wall and chant the following: Don’t mess with canon. Don’t mess with canon. Don’t mess with canon.

"Canon" is a term that fanfic writers like to use to refer to the backstory established in the TV shows, movies, books and comics that they are ripping off.  So what makes Susan A. Davis of Newport, Vermont a raging fucktard is that she doesn’t seem to grasp that  she was watching  the actual, original, CSI tv show…not reading CSI fanfic or CSI/X-Files cross-over fic or CSI slash fic or even the William Petersen Real Person Slash Fic that she probably loves.  Because if she did comprehend that she was watching the actual, original, CSI tv show, then she’d know that canon is whatever the creators of CSI say it is.  The writer/producers decide who the characters are and what they are going to do…they create the canon.

You may not like what the writer/producers come up with, you may think they’ve jumped the shark and fucked it, too… but it’s what’s happening on the actual, original, CSI tv show, which is still written and produced by the same folks who did the pilot, and that, Susan A. Davis of Newport Vermont,  makes whatever they do "canon."

So, I submit that Susan A. Davis of Newport, Vermont, should sit in a corner with her face to the wall and chant "I am a fucktard, I am a fucktard, I am a fucktard…"

Fan Fliction

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The New York Times reports today that lots of fans are making their own STAR TREK movies and episodes — which I hereby dub fan fliction– and that Paramount has turned a blind corporate eye to it as long as no one tries to make a buck from their work.

Up to two dozen of these fan-made "Star Trek" projects are in
various stages of completion, depending what you count as a
full-fledged production. Dutch and Belgian fans are filming an episode;
there is a Scottish production in the works at www.ussintrepid.org.uk.

There is a group in Los Angeles that has filmed more than 40 episodes, according to its Web site, www.hiddenfrontier.com, and has explored gay themes that the original series never imagined. Episodes by a group in Austin, Tex., at www.starshipexeter.com,
feature a ship whose crew had the misfortune of being turned into salt
in an episode of the original "Star Trek," but has now been repopulated
by Texans.

"I think the networks — Paramount, CBS — I don’t think they’re
giving the fans the ‘Trek’ they’re looking for," said Mr. Sieber, a
40-year-old engineer for a government contractor who likens his "Star
Trek" project, at www.starshipfarragut.com, to "online community theater."

"The fans are saying, look, if we can’t get what we want on
television, the technology is out there for us to do it ourselves," he
added.

And viewers are responding. One series, at www.newvoyages.com,
and based in Ticonderoga, N.Y., boasts of 30 million downloads. It has
become so popular that Walter Koenig, the actor who played Chekov in
the original "Star Trek," is guest starring in an episode, and George
Takei, who played Sulu, is slated to shoot another one later this year.
D. C. Fontana, a writer from the original "Star Trek" series, has
written a script.

I’ve seen "Star Trek: The New Voyages" and, as I posted here in December, I was very impressed:

The acting and writing are cringe-inducing but everything else is
amazing. I can’t believe what these imaginative and extremely talented
film-makers were able to accomplish on a shoe-string budget (though it
helps to have the FX pros from STAR TREK ENTERPRISE over-seeing the
effects).

[…]Watching the first two episodes of NEW VOYAGES makes you realize what
ENTERPRISE should have been:  a return to the STAR TREK we all fell in
love with. Note to Paramount: It’s not too late. 

Attacking Copyright

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One of the big arguments fanficcers like to make is that copyright is too restrictive and that the rules should be loosened up. Once something is published, they argue, it should belong to the world.

The fanfic take on copyright is one championed, oddly enough, by proponents of Google’s effort to digitize books into their database. The New York Times ran a piece a week or two ago in which Wired contributor Kevin Kelly argued in favor a digital library that would make all books available for free to people around the world. He believes that the original purpose of copyright was to give authors an incentive to keep working, but that now that intent has been warped to benefit the commercial interests of corporations. Books, Kelly argues, should now become public domain shortly after publication for any derivative use you can imagine. On this issue, he wrote, in part:

But the 1976 law, and various revisions and
extensions that followed it, made it extremely difficult to move a work
into the public commons, where human creations naturally belong and
were originally intended to reside. As more intellectual property
became owned by corporations rather than by individuals, those
corporations successfully lobbied Congress to keep extending the
once-brief protection enabled by copyright in order to prevent works
from returning to the public domain. With constant nudging, Congress
moved the expiration date from 14 years to 28 to 42 and then to 56.

While
corporations and legislators were moving the goal posts back,
technology was accelerating forward. In Internet time, even 14 years is
a long time for a monopoly; a monopoly that lasts a human lifetime is
essentially an eternity. So when Congress voted in 1998 to extend copyright an additional 70 years
beyond the life span of a creator—to a point where it could not
possibly serve its original purpose as an incentive to keep that
creator working–it was obvious to all that copyright now existed
primarily to protect a threatened business model. And because Congress
at the same time tacked a 20-year extension onto all existing
copyrights, nothing–no published creative works of any type–will fall
out of protection and return to the public domain until 2019. Almost
everything created today will not return to the commons until the next
century. Thus the stream of shared material that anyone can improve
(think “A Thousand and One Nights” or “Amazing Grace” or “Beauty and
the Beast”) will largely dry up.

Sara Nelson, editor of Publishers Weekly, took exception to this and I agree with her views. She said, in part:

Such a suggestion, frankly, disavows the amount of work—the
amount of time!—it actually takes to create a book, not to mention the
lack of financial reward that comes, even in this era of inflated
advances, during that sometimes lifetime-long process. Why shouldn’t
generations of Joyces or Morrisons or, more pointedly, Richard Yateses,
benefit from the work that the authors scraped by to produce? Believing
that your book could become a source of enlightenment for generations
is a great thing, of course. Knowing that it might provide some comfort
for your own great-great-grandchildren ain’t such a bad incentive
either.

[…]Yes, it’s hard to keep track of copyright, especially when
publishers (who, essentially, "lease" copyright from the author)
disappear and morph and merge, as they do […] But as books become digital files that
require few warehouse fees, and the whole notion of "out of print"
becomes moot, copyright should be similarly simplified: it should rest
with the author, or his descendants, for way longer than they both
shall live.

Your thoughts?

Back to the Future Vampire Fanfic

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Tales to Astonish has stumbled on some truly bizarro fanfic:

Does anyone else find Back to the Future fan fiction strange?

Would you find it stranger if all of the characters were vampires?

I would, but then again I write Matlock/Star Trek fanfic in my spare
time, where they’re all towering robots from a dark cybertronic
dimension.  Who am I to judge someone for having strange passions?

I couldn’t resist something as unbelievably inane as  "BACK TO THE FUTURE vampire fanfic"…so I had to take a look:

I’m Flaming Trails, the web-mistress.
You’ve probably guessed from the title of this web page that this isn’t your standard BTTF fan fiction fare. It isn’t.
I don’t generally write the more "normal" fan fiction. My areas of
expertise are vampire versions of Doc Brown; worlds that don’t contain
Clara, Jules, or Verne; intense angst; and humor stories that would
make poor Doc wake up screaming.

Me, I’m Flaming Entrails, and my area of expertise is writing "Desperate Housewives Time Travel Lesbian Porn" that would make poor Eva Langoria wake up screaming.

(Thanks to Andy for the heads-up!)

The Jareo Hits the Fan

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The Lori Jareo flap has begun drawing the attention of the mainstream print media after raging in the blogosphere for the last week. As the Dayton Beach News reported:

After it was pointed out by writer Lee Goldberg and spread around by a
growing network of bloggers it became very obvious that Ms. Jareo’s
circle of friends, family, and acquaintances was about to include the
entire LucasArts legal team. Reading the assorted posts this weekend
was like standing amongst a crowd of people watching a swimmer
cheerfully strap on raw meat before diving into the shark tank.

The newspaper notes that her biggest critics were fanfiction writers themselves, who worried about the implications for them of her stupidity.

When you know that what you
are doing is, at best, tolerated by creators you respect who can make
you stop at any time, you get very annoyed when someone walks up and
slaps them. All it would take is for enough authors to start yelling:
"That’s it, everyone out of the pool," and the online world of fan
fiction would fade away.

The more likely result, as Publisher’s Weekly notes, will be more intense scrutiny of POD titles by online booksellers. So far, only one person has come out publicly in support of Jareo, NPR commentator Lev Grossman, who dubbed her an "unsung hero" of the wired universe.  Jareo has remained silent.

No HOPE for this Fanficcer

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Lori Jareo, a self-published author, is selling her fanfic STAR WARS novel ANOTHER HOPE as a print-on-demand title on the Amazon and Barnes & Noble websites. Apparently, neither Amazon nor Barnes & Noble looked at the book before they listed it for sale.  Jareo talks about the obvious copyright violation issues in a Q&A on her website:

Q: Having set Another Hope in an already existing universe, I find myself wondering if there was any concern on your part regarding copyrights?

No, because I wrote this book for myself. This is a self-published story and is not a commercial book. Yes, it is for sale on Amazon, but only my family, friends and acquaintances know it’s there.

Q: I also wonder how far a writer is allowed to write in a world and to use characters introduced by another author?

If it’s not a commercial project, I don’t see any problem.

It’s not a commerical project…but she’s selling it on Amazon and Barnes & Noble (and offering it for sale on her website). What a moron.  She even had the chutzpah to copyright her novel. She offered this disclaimer on the book:

The characters in this book are trademarks of Lucasfilm Ltd. The publisher of this book is not affiliated with Lucasfilm.

As if those two sentences would make it okay to publish and sell a STAR WARS novel without permission from Lucasfilm, the rights-holder. The stupidity of the author and her publisher (which is herself) is mind-boggling.

I’m told by sources in-the-know that LucasFilm and Ingram, one of the nation’s largest book distributors (and the folks who supply B&N and Amazon) are now aware of the infringement and aren’t happy about it.  I don’t think you’ll see this fanfic listed on Amazon or Barnes & Noble for much longer.  And in the wake of this embarrassing episode, I believe the major online booksellers will be seriously rethinking their system for listing P.O.D. titles…

Now, if you will excuse me, I have to get to work on my self-published sequel to THE DAVINCI CODE. I don’t think Dan Brown or Simon & Schuster will mind.

UPDATE 4-21-06: Lori’s ANOTHER HOPE site has been shut down. That was fast. Lucasfulm must have hit her like a nuclear bomb.

UPDATE 4-22-06: How many different ways can you call someone stupid? Check out what the blogs are saying about Lori Jareo. Images

Here’s a sampling of some of the blog headlines:  "The Stupid Is Strong With This One," "Behold: The Greatest Story of Stupidity Ever Told," "I Bet She Finds Our Lack of Faith Disturbing," "Feel The Stupid," "The World’s Stupidest Human," "Soooo Amazingly Stupid," "Good Lord, How Stupid Can A Person Be?" and "Face Palm, Head Desk, and a Generous Smattering of WTF?"  GalleyCat reports that she even listed her fanfic STAR WARS novel in her bio for a poetry conference!

In this case, the fanfic community and I are in total agreement.

UPDATE 4-26-06: ANOTHER HOPE is no longer listed on Amazon. It’s still listed on Barnes & Noble, but with the note: "A new copy is not available from Barnes & Noble.com at this time." I have to wonder how anyone at B&N could have read the material submitted for the ANOTHER WORLD listing and  not  realized that it infringed on Lucasfilm’s trademarks and copyrights. Here’s the B&N listing:

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