I feel no great desire to save the right wing from a predatory enterprise such as this. They are already besieged by so many parasites (the church, madison avenue, et al) that no amount of intercession will save them from themselves.
Also, I believe townhall's biggest market will be cranky business owners who think that they know it all because they've run a business. I have run into those folks before -- they're just itching for some kind of validation of their ideas, and preaching to their employees lasts only so long.
Don't get me wrong: in the general scheme, I support anybody who wants to write a book and share it with the world. Good or bad, the more discourse, the better. Even a lousy, ill-conceived political commentary is better than another citizen who sits in front of a TV and drools.
Heck, in the course of researching their manifesto, they might come across some actual facts and learn something.
I find myself wondering (like some of the commentators on Joss' piece and the posting here) if the core of this behavior isn't so much gender based as it is control based. A group attempts to maintain control, and singles out subgroups (women, minorities in the culture, other external groups) for repression.
Seems to me that if you can demonstrate your power over one group, other groups will tread lightly around you.
I will be amazed if this site subsists for more than a year without vicious takedown demands from copyright holders. For every corporation who is enlightened enough to see that fanfiction helps to propagate a brand, there are three who regard it as a threat. Hello, Fox, I'm looking at you.
Plus, where's the fun in fanfiction if it has a corporate sponsor? No one wants to go see the dance band at the school gym... they want to sneak out to the punk rock show in someone's basement.
And the site is very web 2.0 in a grim way. As a web designer, I'm already sick of the 2.0 look. Can we move on to 3.0, with puppies and flowers?
"And reality has a known liberal bias."
Re: Eowen. I believe her father charged her with rousing their people to victory. She made do in a pinch. It's all in the Silmarillion, somewhere.
Re: Apache. Cheesy, yes, but so much more real than the garbage today's kids listen to. And they won't get out of my yard! Also, if I grew out my porn stache and my white man's fro, I'd resemble the grinning fool. So I judge not.
I have been researching a novel on a post peak-oil United States. In it, I get to indulge my and my friends' fond wish that Cascadia will be born.
But maybe now is the time to act! Portland has a wicked army of urban bicyclists who can get downright surly if need be.
The Coast Guard seems to serve as a major weapon in the war on drugs, such as it is. I think, if pressed, that is the rationale they would use for arming the cutters with machine guns.
Though, of course, guns can be aimed at anyone.
Surely I am touching on an idea that came up somewhere within the epic, but I had to get my two cents in. Please bear with me if some of these ideas are painfully obvious. I overslept and missed a few months of internet-time this morning.
Coming from the world of music back into the world of fiction, I often find commonalities in the behavior of musicians and writers. The activities are similar: lots of time spent alone working on your craft, in order to prepare it for presentation. Both strive to be original yet work within established boundaries that the audiences will recognize. If you go too far afield (see John Cage or James Joyce) you will lose some of your audience who haven't the wit or patience to follow you.
I had been writing on and off in the 90s during college, before the rock and roll bug bit me on the picking hand. By the time I resumed the quill in my mid-30s, I was fairly rusty. I wrote a NaNo novel which will never see the light of day. I realized it was not going to be publishable, and that I needed more practice.
Where I got a lot of practice was writing "fanfic" (I put quotes around that because the characters are my own, but the setting is provided by the game; I supposed that's splitting hairs) about the characters I was playing in the City of Heroes game. In fact, I'm responsible for forming the two game organizations that Mercedes Lackey mentioned above.
This all came about quite organically. I was only interested in amusing myself and practicing writing chops -- much like (music analogy follows) practicing Led Zeppelin covers with a band that writes its own material. You pick up tricks of the trade by imitating another writer/composer. I've heard advice that retyping a famed author's story will teach you oodles about how they wrote it.
And, to be sure, Jimmy Page doesn't give a toss if my band whips out "Immigrant Song" for an encore. If anything, he'd be pleased at the tribute. If U2 performed it on a world tour, he'd expect royalties, of course -- Harry Fox would hunt Bono down. The rest of us are below his radar.
Writers are old, no offense. Having taught older folks at a community college, -- most of them from the print industry, catching up on the new desktop publishing programs -- I noticed they were leery of the implications of the new technology. These folks were concerned about protecting their jobs, and for good reason. The internet threatens to alter the nature of publishing, by which writers are paid for their work, just as desktop publishing altered the nature of the printing business. The mass availability of fanfic via the internet (remember when fanfic was xeroxed booklets? Neither do I) is the intrusion of chaos on what was a semi-orderly process. If I made my living from the old style of publishing, I'd be very anxious about how the new changes to the distribution of information would affect my ability to sell a printed page.
What we've been learning from the music industry, however, is that the internet amounts to a powerful, technologically enhanced version of "word of mouth." Mp3 trading and MySpace have been used to promote albums to the top of the charts, such as Radiohead's Kid A, a concept album with nary a hit on it from a band with only a cult following. Three weeks before it hit the stores, the label released the mp3s to fan clubs and online outlets. Mp3 trading created such a buzz that Radiohead debuted at number one, taking everyone by surprise. This was accomplished without a massive advertising budget, mind you. Writers should be VERY interested in Radiohead now.
Cory Doctorow used this idea to boost sales of his "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom", and was insightful enough to explain the phenomenon: advocacy. A free book in the hands of a fan creates free advertising. The fan reads the work, loves it (you hope) and recommends it to five friends who share the same taste. Her opinion as an advocate of this type of fiction carries far more weight than a reviewer in Locus. I myself have shared mp3s of new bands with my friends, who then attended the concert and bought a CD.
Fanfic, I believe, will serve a similar purpose in this century. To be imitated is the highest form of flattery... and advocacy. No one will confuse my (hypothetical) fanfic story "Fear and Loathing in Valdemar" with one of Misty's works. Will it satisfy their Valdemar craving? Unlikely. Rather, it will serve to heighten their eagerness for official word from Valdemar.
Misty and I have talked often about fanfic, the nature of it, what to do with it, and especially how to harness that energy. If someone likes your invented universe enough to write a story in it, they certainly like it enough to recommend your books to their friends. The danger, as you have been exploring, is how to protect the writer from potential losses of income -- which I remain unconvinced of -- and legal hassles.
I had an interesting taste of the writer's fanfic dilemma. One of my characters who was a part of the participatory writing projects Misty mentioned had a reputation as a ladies man, and had engaged in a romance with another writer's character. I became bored with the arc, and pulled him out of it -- whereupon the injured party's husband wrote a piece without consulting me where my suave bachelor was punched in the face. Here was a fascinating example of social interaction overlapping with fiction. It was like being shown a drawing of a stick figure labelled with your name, and sporting a knife in the head, by a classmate in third grade. Prole art attack, as The Fall would say. I was both appalled and flattered by the incident, so I can't say I'm unsympathetic to the feelings of the writer who unearths slash fiction about their protagonist and Dick Cheney.
Ironically, I am now going to go learn the guitar riff from Zeppelin's "Moby Dick," which, as far as I can tell, isn't really about whales, unless you count John Bonham's drum sound.
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