Here you'll find the rantings of a blogging fool and sometimes writer. My more personal posts, including progress reports on my various writing projects, are Friends Only. General posts on writing are Public. Please see my user profile for my other LJs and my friending policy, and browse through the sidebar for nifty goodies and useful info.

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Writing only leads to more writing. (Colette)

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Visitors from 1/30/05:

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Thanks to someone posting the link on rasfc, I offer this article on The Wall Street Journal Online:  Rewriting the Rules of Fiction. I'm not sure that fiction's being rewritten so much as the way fiction is published, reaches its audience, etc. But when The Wall Street Journal notices fanfic and writes about it, I think it's safe to say it's no longer a secret. ;)

I had a lightbulb moment as I got into bed last night about my love/hate relationship with slash fic. And it was so simple, I'm not sure why it had eluded me for so long. The key is whether or not I can believe in the slash as an AU.

I've recently become addicted to comic book slash set in the DCU (DC Comics's superhero universe, known as the DC Universe). This AU assumes bisexuality for many characters and specifically for Roy Harper and Dick Grayson. And my first reaction, of course, was "ick." Because I've been reading about these characters for 47 or so years out of my current total of 53 years of life and that's pretty much nearly all my reading years so far. I think there was a year or two before I "graduated" to superheros after the Walt Disney and related children's titles. I was, of course, concurrently reading Classics Illustrated, Archies, some Romance titles, and such fare as Millie the Model and Linda Carter, Student Nurse, as well as some other titles that have faded from memory, thankfully. But superhero comics were my main comics love and remain so today.

I first encountered fanfic well before I heard of it, when I wrote it during the late-'60s and early-'70s as a way to keep having adventures of my favorite, cancelled TV shows. Then schoolwork took up my time and I didn't write fanfic again til 1980 when a friend and fellow Man From UNCLE lover said she'd read some MFU stories if I wrote them. So I wrote them. They were mostly spy stories, just like the TV show had been. Eventually, I discovered zines, got more into character development, and found slash.

I read some wonderful slash. A lot of early K/S was great. Well written stories with lots of emotion and story wrapped around the sex. And I discovered some laughable slash. To wit, the Hawaii Five-O story with McGarrett and Dan-o sending out for pizza after. But mostly, I had to tell myself it was all AU (alternate reality, for the uninitiated) or I would never be able to buy it. I grew up seeing these characters as straight and while I've known openly gay people since college in the early'70s, I never picked up on any suppressed sexual tension between characters of the same sex. Starsky and Hutch were just buddies in the feel-good manner of their time.

I couldn't write slash because I couldn't believe it. I had to create my own gay and bi characters so I could write that aspect of sexuality. And I enjoy doing so, even as I lost interest in reading slash because I've lost interest in reading most fanfic. I do have a couple of dozen zines to read, slash and straight, so there is still fanfic in my future.

I discovered comics fanfic much more recently, thanks to the internet and looking at fan sites for my favorite characters. Some were straight only, but some had slash. Roy and Dick? Nah, can't believe it. But I'm a curious sort and had to know what these folks were doing with the characters. So I read a bit and got hooked. Now I'm like a junkie who needs her nightly fix.

So, what happened? I couldn't figure it out, until last night. AU, of course, but in comics, AU is the norm despite DC's frequent reboots and attempts to end the parallel Earths it created over the years. The best part of the DCU when I was growing up was the multiverse. It was wonderful seeing all the versions of Superman and Batman. So why not gay versions?

Stargate's universe has established that alternate universes exist, so the right setup there can make slash rather plausible. Different versions of the guys, no problem. And once you buy into the concept, any show would work. All that would then be required is good writing, good plotting, good and believable characterization. Make me believe it.

The comics realm has a leg up, however, because in the DCU, at least, the multiverse is there, even when it's not, when everyone thinks it's gone. Because it can always start up again. And as we learned in the recent Crisis, after the previous Crisis destroyed the multiverse, it had come back.

One theory is that every decision point can have more than one choice. And each choice made can spawn another universe. What if I do X, what if I do Y? X leads to one universe, Y leads to another. But you need that starting point, the first two universes where the chioces are made, setting things moving forward and ever splintering. Is this possible? Who knows? But thanks to DC's multiverse, it's been in my reading mindset in comics since I was 12 or 13 and read the first or one of the first JLA/JSA crossovers. That's when I knew, in fiction, anything is possible.

I wrote this entry for Presto Speaks! but thought it appropriate for this blog, too, because of my references to fanfic (yeah, that again), so I'm reposting it here. Sorry to bore anyone who reads both blogs. ;)

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Been reading and seeing a lot about mashups, that webcentric mixing of different things to make something new, in both blogs and the mainstream media. Most folks online with a minimum of geekness know about the music hybrids (Beatles and Beastie Boys, for ex) and now the vids (Brokeback Mountain spoofs that include the Brokeback to the Future or whatever that clever "movie trailer" was called) which can be found on YouTube among other sites. Even the hilarioius politic spoofs from JibJab, which have used actual songs with animated silliness of political figures, is a mashup of a sort. Actually, it's just like songvids and filk, which I'll get to in a minute.

There are web app mashups, too, of course, probably hundreds now that use Google Maps to locate such diverse subjects as hair salons and crime scenes. And thousands of others that use other apps.

The key, of course, is to combine what exists to make something new that can be educational, informative, or just plain fun. And it seems to be a natural human impulse. There are people who will create from scratch, taking raw materials and making art or music, literature or film. The raw materials are paint, clay, found objects, practically anything for the artist, musical notes for the composer, words for the writer, and film, words, performers for the filmmaker. There are others who work with materials not so raw. They start with someone else's music, someone else's pictures, someone else's words. Some people work in both ways.

I first encountered songvids and filk in the mid-'80s when I attended my first fan (science fiction, fantasy, tv and film media fans) con. Songvids took advantage of the relatively new tech of video recorders to use an existing music track, usually a popular song, played over a mix of scenes recut from movies or tv shows to reflect the chosen song. Filkers usually take existing music (from public domain to more recent works) and write their own lyrics. Not unlike what Allan Sherman did and Weird Al Yankovic does. Filk at its most serious is a form of folk music; at its funniest, it's parody.

Even fan fiction, taking existing characters and writing new stories with them is a form of mashup when one considers the core concept behind mashups. All that has changed is that technology has made it easier to do more with the concept. That some web companies use open source and encourage mashups simply shows that today, the idea of this is more understood and accepted, but then again, a lot depends on whether or not people are making money off their mashups, I suppose.

I can't explain the impulse to create using someone else's work as the core of your own, but as someone who wrote fanfic at one time and who appreciates a good song parody, as well as the tech mashups that make information more accessible, I can see how someone can be inspired by what exists. Sometimes, that inspiration leads us to try something similar in a new context. Sometimes, we simply want to take what exists to a new level or to explore some aspect of it.

In fanfic, I asked myself what-if questions about the characters someone else lovingly created and brought to life. Those characters were real to me and I wanted more with them. More stories. More adventures. More delving into what made them tick.

I'm no poet or lyricist, but I can imagine hearing a tune and other words popping into my head. When I was a senior in high school, my English teacher assigned us to write song parodies for Thomas Hardy's Return of the Native. Not being composers, we were expected to use existing songs and write our own lyrics. I don't remember enjoying another English assignment more.

I understand and sympathize with the creators who see their works getting away from them, financially and creatively. But mashups in one form or another are part of the fabric of our lives, online and off, and they've been with us for a very long time. They enrich our lives, and if well done, reflect well on the originator of whatever formed the basis for the mashup in the first place. Think about your online experiences and consider how many sites and services you use that are a form of mashup. They are truly wondrous. But at their heart, they're nothing new. Humans have been mashing things up probably for as long as there have been things to mash.

From the May 1, 2006 issue:

Sara Nelson's editorial on Little, Brown and the Kaavya Viswanathan (How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life) plagarism scandal mentioned something I hadn't seen about it before, not that I was reading the articles and blog entries all that carefully because the whole subject of plagarism these days is getting tedious and almost too commonplace, which is rather depressing. But in her editorial, Nelson mentioned that the copyright is shared by Alloy Entertainment, a known book packager. She says, in conclusion:

"We've known for years that publishers, probably including Little, Brown, have long employed freelance editors and 'book doctors,' of which packagers are just an institutional version. But Little, Brown has to resort to this? Realizing that a major house is willing to pay major money for a book that executives knew was going to require major works smacks of something majorly disturbing. It suggests that even the most well-bred publishing houses are not as desperate to find promising writers and great novels as they are to find attractive authors (preferably with interesting backstories) with whom they can match up test-marketed, packaged stories. And then they can take all the credit.
"Or blame, as the case may be."

And then, on the following page, I saw this headline: "'Star Wars' POD Fan Fiction Flap." Yes, my dear fl and other readers, Lori Jareo, who has been the subject of many a blog post re: her Another Hope, SW fan fic novel, made Publishers Weekly!

Not much new here, and PW did a nice job explaining fan fic in brief (though they said it comes from fans of "fantasy empires," which, I suppose is accurate since all fiction can be called fantasy, even cop shows). But I enjoyed this item:

"The book was published via Jareo's own print-on-demand company, WordTech Communications, which previously specialized in poetry. WordTech's books are available through Ingram, which is how Another Hope ended up on Amazon."

And this, re: Jareo's claim her book wasn't commercial and only her friends and family knew about it:

"Lucasfilms thought otherwise, and asked for the book to be removed. Before it was taken down by Amazon, the book at one point ranked at #13,371 in sales."

Wow, that's a lot of family and friends (oh, and acquaintances). Sheesh.

I especially like this quote about fan fic from Keith R.A. DeCandido, author of many a tie-in novel:

"I think it'll hae a much bigger effect on POD publishers. Book distributors and book vendors now have to be more careful with the product they get from them."

Y'think? And he has an LJ! kradical

If you have any interest in the fanfic debate, you should read this entry in Making Light as mentioned in my previous post. I just read through it and Teresa Nielsen Hayden said it so well.

A couple of quotes...

"Storytelling is basic to our species. It’s one of the ways we parse our experience of the universe. Whatever moves us or matters to us will show up in the stories we tell, whether or not we have a socially approved outlet for those stories."

"Of course, it would have to be a modern definition. In a purely literary sense, fanfic doesn’t exist. There is only fiction. Fanfic is a legal category created by the modern system of trademarks and copyrights. Putting that label on a work of fiction says nothing about its quality, its creativity, or the intent of the writer who created it."

She makes mention of Geraldine Brooks' March, a pro riff on the father of the young women of Little Women. Sure, there are no copyright issues there, and the book is pro published. Which leads to a few thoughts.

Brooks doesn't have to fear being sued for copyright or trademark infringement. Fanfic writers, be they amateur or pro, also have no such fear if they write using characters also out of copyright. And plenty of fanfic has made it into pro print, including retellings, ie "West Side Story" from "Romeo & Juliet" which are often taught together and even have appeared in a paperback together. Because, in essence, that's what such writings are. They eminate from "what if...?" questions, and those questions can stem from the given characters, situations in the original story (the fanfic writer feels not all of the story was told or a plot hole needs fixing, etc), or the urge for more adventures similar to the one told. And probably dozens of other reasons because each fanfic writer will bring his or her own experience and interests to the project.

When people denigrate amateur fanfic, they might simply have issues with people using their published characters or that of other living writers or the heirs of writers whose work is still in copyright. But if no profit is made, if the stories are merely being shared (even with a price tag if it's used to pay the printing and shipping of zines) out of love for the "borrowed" universe and a love for writing and playing "what if...?" games, the problem is a legal one and an iffy one at best, especially if the stories are being shared for free online.

But too often, denigrating fanfic is done to cast aspersions on the quality of the writing. Hell, we folks who have written and read and those who continue to write and read it, know it's amateur time. We know some are wonderfully written (and many of those writers are now pros) and some are drek, but if our favorite character is being tortured, then comforted by his partner, we don't give a rat's ass about the quality because we're getting something out of the thing that makes it worth our time. And yes, sometimes we're disappointed and sometimes we don't get our desired satisfaction. But the same can be said about pro novels that failed to live up to expectations, which are higher because a pro publishing house is behind them. be they original universes or stories, shared universes, or media tie-ins. And it's pretty clear that pro novels vary widely in quality and bestsellers aren't necessarily the best written books.

The quality of fanfic and the legality of fanfic are two different issues and should be discussed as such. My feelings on the legality are clear. Don't make a profit from it. And if it's your characters showing up in fanfic, be happy you've created characters people care so much about. You've affected readers in a way only a minority of writers manage to do. Be proud. No one stole something if you've released it into the world. As soon as I read your book, it and its characters are mine as well as yours. And that's a good thing, provided I like them.

What Teresa Neilsen Hayden has to say about it. After I've had time to really read it, I'll probably have some comments, but for now, I wanted to get the link in here.

Not to mention a black eye. st_crispins posted about this idiot. Lori Jareo has a Star Wars book she wrote for fun on Amazon. She doesn't think anyone would mind since she's not making a profit and no one but her family and friends knows it's there. Well, Lori, honey. I got news for you. The blogosphere, including LJ, knows all about it now. And I hope Lucasfilms slaps a Cease & Desist order on you before fan fic writers get a worse rep than we/they already have in some circles.

Which just proves one cannot underestimate the ability of some humans to be stupid, especially in a public venue.

My comments on green_knight's lj post about the re-emergence of the Robin Hobb rant, where there was a balance of pro and con comments.
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Fan fic happens. It's been happening for a very long time. It will continue to happen whether Robin Hobb or anyone else likes it or not. It's done for fun. It's done because folks want more adventures than the original creator is giving them. It's done because folks are inspired by the original and because they're curious and creative.

Fan fic used to be mostly underground. The internet has merely provided a more public delivery system than zines did.

Some writers understand this. Some writers used to write fan fic, big name SF and fantasy writers like Melanie Rawn and Susan Matthews and Jean Lorrah among others. I know because I read their fan fic.

Some authors understand that once their stories make it into print, once their characters hit the printed page, they no longer belong solely to their creators. They get reinterpreted by the readers. I almost never envision characters as described. I form an image in my mind from the first time a character appears and am then surprised when the character is described because I just about never get anything "right." I'll read things into a story that others won't and the writer never intended and other readers will read other things into it the author never intended. T'is the nature of the beast.

Some authors understand this and some understand the human impulse to discuss these contrary ideas of a book or movie or tv show and to take the next step to imagine a further adventure. When I was a kid, I acted them out with friends. When I got a bit older, I wrote them down.

Whether Robin Hobb likes it or not, people will write fan fic, maybe about her characters, definitely about other writers' characters. Ranting about it won't change it. Nor would a lawsuit, especially when no profit is made from the fan fic and there's no way to prove her books sell less well because of it. If anything, they might be selling more as more folks become aware of her work thru fan fic.

She can rant all she likes. It's her right. But I would think more of her if she'd be a mensch about it and take it with humor and grace because the folks she's putting down might be sitting next to her at a SF con panel someday.

This blog essay is a wonderful rebuttal to Robin Hobb's rant against fan fic (yeah, that topic is back). Link from st_crispins.

And, as I said in my comments on the post:

I suppose I should add that I've read one of her books, one she wrote under the name Megan Lindholm. It was excellent and co-authored with Steven Brust. The book is The Gypsy and is an urban fantasy. Now, one might say that the quality of the writing came from Brust, but I've read that it was a full collaboration and I can't imagine someone of his stature writing with someone who couldn't carry her weight or who had no talent.

She's also not a nobody. She has many books in print, under both her pen names. She's been profiled in Locus. I've even encountered her online on a writers message board. She was posting under the Megan Lindholm name. So she's someone I've liked and admired, which makes her anti-fan fic rant that much sadder. It's also very disappointing.

I debated with myself (and that was sure entertaining) whether or not I should bother with this, but my fan fic roots go back 25 years and even if I'm not writing or publishing it anymore, it's still part of me. So FWIW, it seems a fanfic writer thought she should charge for her fanfic writing, and found out fandom is not to be trifled with.

Fandom has its faults, including many who see nothing infringing in what they do, but they are usually smart enough to not call too much attention to themselves, and nothing can attract the wrong kind of attention like the profit motive.

And of course, that fanfic hater Lee Goldberg couldn't wait to get all over this here. I first saw mention of this on John Scalzi's Whatever. And there's more here from nihilistic_kid.

The person at the heart of this flap seems to be cousinjean but I can't get onto the actual entry. Seems to be protected, so I assume it's Friends Only. Oh well. I read enough of an excerpt, though I understand she's given up the plan.

The thing is, even if real life is getting in the way with its pesky requirement that you pay for things like food and shelter, you don't try to get that money by accepting payment for your fanfic, no matter how tired you are of having people ask when the next story in your fanfic series will be done, and no matter how much you enjoy writing that fanfic. And when you do try something like that, you should expect to be slammed. IMO, of course, and well, apparently in the opinion of many others. Many many others.

This is the sort of thing that helps bury the rep of fandom which the world at large already doesn't hold in the highest of regards.

Wonderful discussion over on executrix' LJ re: fan fic and copyright. (I tried to do the friend link thingie, but it wouldn't put it in the right place and kept extending the underlining to what I typed next. Wonder if that's a Firefox glitch.) My comments are on there. I read through the essay carefully and found it an amazingly through, cogent look at the issues though the scope is a bit narrow for space considerations. Well worth reading for anyone involved in or interested in fan fic.

Thought I'd post the next group of spammer names I've collected.

• Mohammed Keys
• Rick Drake
• Lorna Whitehead
• Vernon Wilderson (I think Lorna and Vernon would make a lovely couple.)
• Derick Bravo
• Reed Maynard

Finally, not working on my SF novels has been interesting. Took a while (two months now) before my mind started to wander back to them. Now I'm mentally running through possible scenarios for January, mostly what to do if Deb can't work on the WIR then. How would I revise it. Get beta readers and work on the sequel while waiting for their comments? Get right to revising the WIR, then get beta readers? Take my chances on revising on my own, then submitting the ms somewhere? If I revise, I'm wondering what I should do first. Start from page 1 and work through the thing? Do the problem areas first? (These are the action scenes mainly.) And if I revise, maybe I should get one of those word counters. I know the total (110,000 words) so I can keep count of how many of them I've revised already. heh.

I think it's good that I'm thinking about them again. For a while, I thought I'd lost interest. One thing that occurred to me as to why the non-Mars book is a problem for me, aside from the fact that I have to create that universe from scratch and I'm unsure of what I want it to be, is that the Mars books are very real to me now, that universe is real. I like Mars. I like all the things we built up for it. I don't want to set that aside now to work on something else entirely. Our Mars universe has become a playground in a fashion similar to how certain TV shows became a playground for me when I was writing fan fic, only I get to create lots of new characters to play with there.
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Found this from executrix by way of Diane Duane's Out of Ambit. It's very long and there aren't paragraph breaks, so I'm going to copy it into Word and format so I can read in hard copy. But I thought I'd pass on the link for folks who are interested.

maubast posted the link to this, on  ashkitty 's LJ, in the comments to another post here, so I thought I'd bring it to the foreground. Apparently, this discussion has been going on for a bit, inspired by an essay by Robin Hobb. The heart of the issue here seems to be the ethics of fan fic.

Hobb helpfully defined fan fic for us, so we're all clear on how she's using it: "Fan fiction is fiction written by a ‘fan’ or reader, without the consent of the original author, yet using that author’s characters and world." Well, duh. I'd define it that way, too. When there's consent, it's called tie-ins. Or the shared universe permutation. She then felt the need to explain what "without consent" means. Really, Ms. Hobb. It's not a lack of understanding here; it's a lack of caring on the part of the fan fic writers, at least most of the ones I've known. A few were genuinely ignorant of the concept or that it would even be an issue.

She then goes on to say, "Fan fiction is like any other form of identity theft. It injures the name of the party whose identity is stolen. When it’s financial identity theft, the thief can ruin your credit rating. When it’s creative identity theft, fan fiction can sully your credit with your readers."

Except that unlike financial or other identity theft (and it's often more than financial; some folks have had trouble proving they really are who they are after their identity has been stolen), where there is never any good done, and there's never even a neutral zone, fan fic can enhance the worth of the writer by increasing his or her popularity. It kept Star Trek going. It's kept The Sentinel a popular property, and it's kept Man From UNCLE popular enough that a new movie is under consideration (a long, painful process not worth discussing here). In fact, if the UNCLE co-owners, aka Warner Bros, would take advantage of the situation and release the show, all the episodes, in DVD, they'd sell like hotcakes. And the other half owner has no problem with fan fic, nor did the man she inherited it from, Norman Felton, one of UNCLE's creators.

Hobb continues with, "Anyone who read fan fiction about Harry Potter, for instance, would have an entirely different idea of what those stories are about than if he had simply read J.K. Rowling’s books."

Except that Rowling has no problem with fan fic, just with fan fic that goes against her principles. If kids can be prevented from reading such stories online, ie with password protection, she's been okay about it, or so I've been told by people doing HP zines. It was the print ones that couldn't be kept out of children's hands that she's against. She's never had problems with the gen HP zines.

Every reader will bring something different to a written or filmed work. They're gonna talk about it amongst themselves and even game it whether the author knows or not. Fan fic has been around for decades; it's not going away. it simply came out of the tunnels and crawlways. The internet brought it out into the sunshine and now everyone seems to know about it. If not for the outing of fan fic, Ms. Hobb and all the others who are acting so outraged and violated might not ever have known about it, same as the UNCLE owners were oblivious to my best friend and I playing UNCLE after school back in the late-'60s. We made up our own stories. We had fun. Same as I did many years later when I wrote up stories and shared them with some people. Okay, over a hundred when print zines were all there were and a good Star Trek zine could sell into 4 figures if it stayed in print long enough. I never wrote or published Star Trek. But I was writing fan fic long before I knew it had a name or that anyone else was doing it.

There's a lot more, but this got my blood boiling and I stopped reading after it: "'Fan fiction is a good way for people to learn to be writers.'
"No. It isn’t. If this is true, then karaoke is the path to become a singer, coloring books produce great artists, and all great chefs have a shelf of cake mixes. Fan fiction is a good way to avoid learning how to be a writer. "

Well, thanks for nothing, Ms. Hobb. I've tried reading your books (well, one of them) years ago and couldn't get into it. I didn't think it was all that good, to be polite. But I've watched a lot of fan fic writers develop their skills over time. Unlike singing, where you're stuck with your voice and in my case, a tin ear, writing is a skill that can improve with practice, and fan fic is a comfy environment to get that practice. You don't have to deal with rejection, since you can always find a zine to print your story. Then you get edited, by someone who knows what they're doing if you get lucky. You get comments aka feedback on your story when the zine gets into print, sometimes, even useful feedback. And as in my case, you get to work on story elements one at a time. I started working on plotting since most of the characters were already there for me. Later, I worked on the "guest stars," and got experience building and developing characters of my own.

Even with art, you can improve by doing, even by coloring in coloring books or tracing cartoons (I did that). They help train your eye and your eye/hand coordination. Not everyone will improve, but then, not everyone improves with years of art school, either. It still takes some talent and a lot of hard work, and not every method will work for every writer or artist or singer. Ms. Hobb comes across as a snob and I have no respect for her. She's entitled to her opinions, but when they denigrate people out of ignorance, then I get hot and bothered.

Writers write. Whether they're at Ms. Hobbs' level or not, they're still writers. Whether they're pros, aspiring pros, or hobbyists, they're still writers. And they can improve by writing anything they work at.

She makes some good points in her essay, but as with Lee Goldberg, they get lost in the inaccuracies. When you don't know what you're talking about or at least, don't know enough about it, it really hurts your arguments for or against something. In this case, she lost all credibility with me with the above quoted bits. And with this one, at the end:

"I will close this rant with a simple admonition.
Fan fiction is unworthy of you.
Don't do it."

As if her admonition would hold any weight with me, if I still were writing fan fic, or with anyone currently writing it. As if she's a fair judge of worthiness. I don't regret one day of the 15 years I wrote fan fic. And I'm sure the pro authors who wrote fan fic and now write their own novels and those who are writing tie-ins professionally thought it was worthy of them to write fan fic. Jean Lorrah for one. I can name a few others, mostly in the SFF field. And when the only difference between fan fic and tie-ins is the consent, well, that negates pretty much most of Robb's other points. It is real writing when printed in a fanzine or posted online if it's real writing when a publisher pays money for it and sticks it in Barnes & Noble. Same as writing spec scripts for TV shows to get a job writing a TV show is being a pro by playing with someone else's creations.

Which brings me back to ashkitty , who made some very good points, including some I didn't make here because this thing is already too long for human consumption. So go read it, if you haven't already.

Yep, Lee Goldberg is at it again. Poor guy has become a lightning rod for anti-anti-fan fic folks. And I can't feel sorry for him. He certainly deserves it. Of course, he's hearing from folks who agree with him, too. And everyone is entitled to his or her opinion. But to belittle fan fic writers for enjoying a hobby is as wrongheaded as saying people who can't do become teachers. Teaching something  is often much harder than doing that something. Not only do you need to be able to do it or at least know or understand it, you then need to convey it in a way that allows someone else to learn it.

Fan fic writers are having fun. Since when is that something to sneer at? They're really not hurting anyone. Sure, there are writers who don't like seeing anyone else writing their creations. I get that. I'd probably feel the same way should someone write something using my characters. But it is not akin, as Dawn Rivers Baker said, to being raped. I'm sorry, but these writers whose works are being used/borrowed are not victims. Fan fic is not preventing them from earning a living and it damn well shouldn't make them afraid to leave their home, or even to write anything ever again. Rape of the mind? Sheesh. She makes it seem like those of us who wrote or are writing fan fic are psychically invading writers's minds and sucking out their creative energy or some such. And in using such an analogy, it weakens the horror of rape, not dissimilar to the politician who recently got into hot water for comparing US treatment of terror suspects in Gitmo and elsewhere with the Nazis and their concentration camps. And again, confusion over copyright vs trademark comes up. The content of the fan fic stories belong to the fan folk who wrote them. Only the borrowing of the characters is in question, maybe some very specific fictional place names or character/background details. Change those names and some relevant details and you have an original story.

And there are plenty of pro writers out there who I'm sure understand perfectly well what fan fic is. They wrote it. If any of them oppose fan fic now, they would be hypocrites. And more and more, pro writers will come out of the fan fic ranks. I don't usually name the ones I know, but here are a few: Jean Lorrah, Susan Matthews, Melanie Rawn.

Same as dress designers can't stop cheaper clothing lines from mimicking their styles (not to be confused with knockoffs that pass themselves off for the originals, albeit at lower prices) for lower income consumers, neither can writers really do anything about fan fic. It's been around for decades. It's just more visible now, thanks to the internet and desktop publishing. And the sooner folks realize and accept this, the easier it will be for them to ignore the stuff and move on.

Some fan fic freaks me out. MPreg for example. (If you have to ask what that is, you probably don't want to know) But if that's what some people want to write and read, that's their business. I don't have to read it. Hell, I don't even have to look at it.

But at its heart, fan fic keeps interest in a show or movie or book series or even a show (ie, "Phantom of the Opera") alive. It helps keep fans interested, fans who will buy any sequel the original creator cares to give them. Fans are hungry for more adventures of beloved characters and theyoften use this form of writing to hone their craft and as a springboard to write original fiction. Why does this have to be so difficult for some folks to understand or accept?

Here's someone who gets it. This post on Smart Bitches Who Love Trashy Novels goes after another stupid comment in the "discussion," that of a commenter on Goldberg's blog who compared fan fic with masturbation (like that was a bad thing).

riemannia took exception to a different person's equally stupid comment. I'll be friending her (or him?). Anyone who understands fan fic deserves my attention.

Other issues brought up have to do with treating stories and characters as children, that fan fic undermines how you raise those children and gives them values you never intended. The counter to that was that essentially, children grow up and leave and become individuals with their own values. This also ignores the fact that readers interpret writing. Every reader will see the work through his or her eyes, through their personal biases. A number of writers have expressed, on message boards and in interviews, how people tell them or write reviews claiming their books are about X when they were supposed to be about Y, or even nothing in particular. Once the writing leaves the nest, it's up for interpretation. It no longer belongs wholly to the writer, except in the legal sense of copyright which covers the actual words. Any writer who doesn't want to lose total control over their creations shouldn't seek publication, IMO.

And of course, no one seems to mind the official tie-ins. Those legal usages of other people's characters is still fan fic; it's just sanctioned and the copyright holder no doubt gets a cut of the action, along with the trademark holder and so on. Payment makes such "mind rape" go down easier, I suppose. And suddenly, "fan fic" becomes "real writing."

I could go on, but perhaps, I already went on too long. I just get so steamed by this guy and this attitude. Just because I'm ready (more than ready) to move from fan fic to pro (I hope) fic, doesn't mean I don't appreciate fan fic, what it meant to me and continues to mean to everyone involved with it.

The conversation has been heating up over in the comments on A Writer's Life. Makes me long for the days when fan fic was below the radar, just something we fan fic writers did as a quiet little hobby, like a secret club. Now it's everywhere and everyone is weighing in.

And so many of the opinions in the comments are beyond silly. Someone suggests fan fic is derivative. Well, duh. Then again, so are media tie-ins and half the shows on TV. Nothing like having a TV show or movie succeed to get Hollywood to churn out things just like it, things that are.... wait for it.... derivative.

Quick, raise your hands. How many people here know or remember from school that "West Side Story" was a modern version of "Romeo and Juliet." Even better, the two get published together to make it easier to assign both in class (or they were a dozen or so years ago when we stocked them at the library). So the character names were changed and the families became the gangs. Big deal. It's the same story. At least fan fic writers write their own stories and just use the characters.

Anyway, rather than repeat my next two long comments on that entry, just click the link above and go read. Some other folks had some interesting things to say about the issue.

I was following links on Bill Crider's blog and ended up finding this. Crider's blog, btw, is wonderful.

Here is my response, which is also on the entry's comments page:

I wrote fan fic and read it for 15 years, fan fic based on TV shows. That was how I learned how to write and how I met the people I now write original material with. I also wrote a couple of fan fic pieces set in the DC Comics universe for the DC-approved Teen Titans APA (limited distribution to people on a list) back in the early-'80s). I started writing fan fic as a kid because I wanted more adventures of my fav cancelled TV shows. I got hooked on it. I could concentrate on stories and plots cuz the characters and setting already existed. Many years later, I was ready for the challenge of creating my own characters, having had a taste of that by writing the "guest" characters in fan fic.

My understanding is that it's not so much a copyright issue as copyright protects the words, not the ideas, concepts, etc. The problem is trademark infringement as the characters and name of the property usually have such protections.

Fan fic has never hurt sales or ruined box office, but rather has increased the interest and kept interest alive, ie Star Trek. In fact, ST fan fic was anthologized professionally back in the '70s in books called Star Trek: The New Voyages. A fan fic writer I know also wrote an actual Star Trek (original series) episode. Lucasfilms has been pretty okay about fan fic, too, provided characters aren't maimed, killed, or slashed. If you need to ask what slash is, you don't know much about fan fic.

What is troubling is that in the old days of print zines only, it was easy to stay under the radar and now with the web, it's all out there and the new generation of writers who post online seem oblivious to the idea that they don't own the rights to the characters they use. I attend a couple of fan cons yearly and know many of these people, cuz the same attitude has filtered into print zinedom.

BTW, a lot of pro writers (the ones I know write fantasy and SF) got their start in fan fic. I even had a story or two in zines with their stories. Jean Lorrah, who has written ST tie-ins as well as her own SF series, is the one who's been public about it so I don't mind mentioning her by name.

BTW, JK Rowling has a lot of problems with fan fic, at least in print zines. I know people who got Cease & Desist letters from her lawyers; the most recent was a few months ago. Warner Bros is sending out C&D letters on their properties, too, which includes Man From UNCLE, the subject of an upcoming revival movie, which is a shame cuz the former half owner, Norman Felton, was a friend of fan fic. So is his air, but Warner has more clout.

Fan fic will keep on keeping on, even if it has to go underground again, back to print zines passed around on a circuit, APAs, encrypted files, and the like. After all, it's been around for nearly 40 years that I know about, starting with Star Trek. At least Sherlock Holmes fan fic is ok. I believe that's public domain. :)

Blogger is being cranky. I'm so glad I blog with more than one blogging service.

A friend who distributes fan fic print zines got a cease & desist letter from Warner Brothers. Their intellectual property includes UNCLE. Now, I understand and agree with the desire to protect copyright. I am, after all, a writer, too, and have my own original characters.

But fan fic has helped keep interest in shows and movies and book series alive. I discovered fan fic back in 1982 and it had been going strong well before that. UNCLE zines have been around or media zines with UNCLE stories have been around for at least 30 years. Warners hasn't or won't issue UNCLE DVDs (and the previous owner released only a fraction of the series on VHS), but they want to stop zines. Hey, those pesky zines will kill off interest in the new UNCLE movie they keep planning to make. Nevermind that fans will go see it if it's good and stay away if it sucks. Has nothing to do with zines or other fan activity.

Way back when, print zines were relatively safe, under the radar. There were print catalogues and for highly sensitive material (usually slash and other x-rated material), there was the circuit (printed stories passed from fan to fan). Now there's the internet and everything's changed. Print zine publishers advertize online. And copyright holders are digging in their heels. Odd, but I haven't heard of any online fan fic sites getting C&D letters. Anyone know if any have?

The more shows and movies and books that get pulled, the fewer print zines there will be. Already, J.K. Rowling and now Warners have been on the warpath, hunting down zines. Who will be next?

And I think it's a shame. Fan fic is where I got my start writing, first for myself, then in print. Print zines got and still get edited, usually, in some fashion. Online fan fic doesn't usually look as if anyone edited it before it gets posted. And that cuts down the chance for the writer to learn, to hone his or her craft.

Sometimes, I love change. Computers have been one of the positives. I've gone from computers filling a room to having a desktop and laptop. But other change isn't so positive. Losing something fun feels like having my heart cut out, even if I haven't read or done zines in years. But I was always an UNCLE fan and wrote UNCLE first. I feel as if I've lost a friend.

Ellen has posted an update on her discussion of the Id Vortex and slash and I want to comment on something she said in response to a question re: the toolbox of fan fic writers. Quoting is done in fair use for review and discussion purposes.

This is what I said in the comment thread: I think a large part of it is simply the beta process-- that we can write these stories with someone looking over our shoulders and pointing out "Yes, it's very hot, but there's no reason for him to do that."

This surprised me given that I always see pro writers thank people in an acknowledgments section and I've always believed at least some of those thanked were "beta" readers. Also, many pro writers over the years, who never wrote fan fic, are members of critique groups and have had beta reading done routinely. Feedback has been a factor for longer than fan fic has existed, I'm sure, and isn't in any way limited to fan fic, so this factor is a non-factor IMO.

I think another part of it is-- maybe not simply the fact that we're using other people's characters, but the sort of characterization work that using existing characters requires of us.

Again, I don't see how this is a tool in the fan fic toolbox other than for fan fic. It doesn't work once you move to writing for a pro market. If you do tie-ins, you have to follow the show's bible, cutting down your characterization work for those characters. For original work, you're doing what any writers do. You're building characters. They can be gay, straight, indifferent. It's up to the writer. Fan fic writers who don't work on developing "guest" characters might have more trouble with this and therefore, making the transition to writing original fiction.

That is, in original fiction using some of these storylines, the story gimmick can really overwhelm characterization-- if the main character has been created solely to experience the big Id Vortex-y gimmick, soul bond or slavery or whatever, she all too often becomes just a vehicle for the reader's identification-- and that's if the writer's fairly decent; she can become a complete authorial stand-in all too easily. The other characters, meanwhile, often exist not to further their own agendas but to inflict the gimmick on the main character.

Fanfic doesn't let you get away with that-- the kind of questions that we're trained, through the beta-process, to ask are all designed to keep that from happening, to keep your characters from becoming Canon Sues. If you have to keep asking, at every step, what one specific character, whom you've seen in a lot of settings, would do in your story's situation-- What would Kirk do as a slave on Vulcan, or Percy do in a Muggle sex club, or what have you-- it forces the story far enough back from the edge of the vortex that it can retain some structural integrity, even if it's still in a very tight orbit around that vortex-- even if the Gimmick From the Id is the whole reason it exists.

This really intrigues and confuses me. The id vortex gimmick thing, for one. It might be a slash thing. For me, there are characters first and what I want to put them through. If a plot can be called a gimmick, so be it.

Maybe it's a generation thing. As a fan fic writer, I never had beta readers. As a potential pro writer, I do. The original fic I write with some friends is always read by all of us. And the most improtant thing is always: Does the story work?

It's a writing thing. Perhaps the difference isn't fan fic writer vs non-fan fic writer, but the various reasons why people write ANYTHING. What they bring to the writing as individuals. What they want to accomplish with it, for themselves, an audience, as a creator or someone just trying to scratch an itch. And given some fan fic, especially slash, I've looked at in recent years because a friend reads it, fan fic is getting away with a lot, though the writers and readers of it might not see it that way. But I sure do. I'd never try to write some of it for the pro market. It would never work.

If she or any fan fic writer thinks asking if the characters would do something keeps it from falling over the edge, she has a different idea of the edge than I do, because to me, off the edge is where slash resides. Those stories fell off the edge upon creation.

And any writer of original fiction who isn't doing that, who isn't keeping what their characters would or wouldn't do in mind, is likely to have it show in the story and the story won't work.

Further, I contend that I know my characters, born of my mind and heart and psyche, better than any TV show character I ever wrote because they were born in someone else's mind and were then interpreted by other writers, directors, the actor, etc. The best I could do was offer my interpretation.

Writers of erotica start with the premise of id satisfaction and manage to do very nicely without a fannish background or context. And for me and many others, fan fic's benefit has been as a set of training wheels, apprenticeship, or minor leagues of writing: a place where we could/were able to practice our craft, learn how to develop characters, grow plots, set scenes, and bring the various elements together. It's where we first got feedback and learned we can reach an audience, id vortex or no. And interestingly, I write original gay characters, but I never wrote what I would ever consider slash (the taking of TV characters and putting them together sexually with someone of the same gender).

I know in the other post, I said I would discuss this in brief, and this is in brief. I could probably go on about this for days.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden posted a link on Making Light to this LiveJournal entry on slash and shame or lack of shame in fan fiction. There's a bit of a discussion going on in the comments on the LJ blog about the entry, too. Go read. I'll wait.

Okay, then. My thoughts, briefly because I don't have much time now. And I seem to recall discussing this here before, but this new ongoing blogosphere discussion is a good excuse to revisit it.

The show I went through puberty with (age 11-14) was The Man From UNCLE (MFU). Star Trek, the show mentioned in the above linked LJ, was on concurrently and I watched it, but MFU was the show that my libido apparently focused on.

I never thought of the male leads together. I didn't sexualize THEM. I viewed them through a growing sexual awareness that, no surprise, focused on ME. Teens are notorious for being egocentric and I was no exception. I fantasized about Illya and ME. Not Illya and Napoleon. As an adult, I can look at that and realize there would be no fun unless I was a participant in the fantasy.

At the time, I would get all warm inside whenever Illya got hurt. I didn't understand it. Then my worldly-wise best friend W, whom I met in junior high when we were 13, explained it to me. Suddenly, it all made perfect sense. And anyone who has ever read a Mary Sue story, with Mary Sue Wonderful fixing the Enterprise with a hairpin, knows that Mary Sue Wonderful is a stand-in for the author because Mary Sue Wonderful often if not frequently or near always, gets laid by the author's prefered male hunk on the show that's the subject of the story.

I think developing sexuality is a factor in much writing, in how a writer makes choices re: what he or she will write about. I don't know that I agree across the board re: the shame factor, that fan fic:

"But in fandom, we've all got this agreement to just suspend shame. I mean, a
lot of what we write is masturbation material-- not all of it, and not for
everyone, but. A lot of it is, and we all know it, and so we can't really
pretend that we're only trying to write for our readers' most rarefied
sensibilities, you know? We all know right where the Id Vortex is, and we have
this agreement to approach it with caution, but without any shame at all."

And I just don't see this, not for me. I never agreed to suspend shame. First, there's nothing shameful re: writing or reading "masturbation" material. Freudian interpretation of fairy tales, after all, are quite sexual, or so I recall from my psych classes back in the '70s. (What did you think little Hansel and Gretel throwing the evil old witch woman into the oven meant? Let alone eating the candy off her house?)

Second, while I've read slash (purely for the titilation factor, born out of an intense curiosity), I find much I don't like. Shame was not usually a factor, though I would call some of it shameful, if it wasn't so laughable. A particularly ridiculous Hawaii 5-O story from the '80s comes to mind where, after fucking, McGarret and Dan-O send out for pizza. Other things about slash and even some non-slash fan fic that I find shameful is the feminization of some of the TV characters, leading me to wonder if the author is identifying with a male character she then needs to make more like herself. And I gotta start wondering why.

Third, I don't think about my audience when I write, and certainly not when I wrote fan fic those 15 years. I wrote the stories I wanted to read. I wrote adventures that included the guys having sex with the woman du jour if it fit the story. I wrote more episodes of my favorite shows, a way to add to the stories available to me, especially for shows that were pre-VCR and therefore not available to me except in reruns (and in the case of MFU, the books that were pro published). Star Trek continues apace in books, which might be why I never felt the urge to write it myself. And for cancelled shows, it was a way to keep them alive.

And my focus always was on the male characters I had crushes on. If anyone else wanted to read my fan fic stories, that was great. And when I got comments like the one I got from a friend that she didn't like one of my stories much because there wasn't much of Illya in the story (I was indulging my newfound appreciation for Napoleon once I'd reached adulthood), I decided that many if not most fan fic readers were reading for a very different reason than I do.

And so we've got all these shameless fantasies being thrown out into the
fannish ether, being read and discussed, and the next thing you know, we've got
genres. We've got narrative traditions. We have enough volume and history for
these things to develop a whole critical vocabulary.

and

And I'm just kind of flailing now and going "Fandom is cool! Squee!" but,
really, I wonder what the effect on, if not mainstream literary fiction, at
least on mainstream genre fiction is going to be when the number of
fan writers
taking that toolbox with them into pro writing reaches critical
mass-- which I
think it's going to, in the next decade.

Many fan fic writers have been pro published, some of which might've written
slash (I don't know). But in any case, I see a bit of loosening up regarding
sexuality in books, though this has been coming from writers who did not, to my
knowledge, have a fan fic background. All writing falls into genres at some
point and any hobby or common interest will lead to a vocabulary to discuss it.
I learned many fan fic lingo, but at some point, I became an outsider. No longer
a writer of fan fic and no longer much of a reader of it, I've had the lingo
evolve and pass me by. I never did learn much of the slash lingo, either.

But ultimately, what pro publishing will allow to be used from that fan fic writer's toolbox will depend on the publisher and what the editors see the reading public buying and accepting. And not all fan fic writers have that toolbox. Some of us just write fan fic the way we wrote original fic. It might be considered fannish by some, not by others. It's not my concern. Writing the best thing I can is my concern. At most, I think my way of writing relationships, friendships, comes from my fan fic. But that's a chicken and egg sort of thing. Because how I wrote that in fan fic mostly came from me. It's what led me to love certain shows, certain characters, certain relationships. It's what led me to see what I saw in those shows. And what I saw never looked like slash.

Is Ellen on to something? Maybe, for a number of fan fic writers, yes. But for all? I'd say, No. But for those it fits, it says a lot, I think.