If the author writes the book while living in the Pacific Northwest, it also becomes eligible for the Endeavour Award. (This is not necessarily trivial; winning the Endeavour is worth $1000.)
As far as I can tell to this point, there's still too much dust in the air to discern the exact nature of the explosion.
It's clear that Andrew Burt -- acting in his role as SFWA Vice President and ePiracy Committee chair -- and Scribd were in communication with each other. Now, there are SFWA members who've granted permission for its ePiracy Committee to act on their behalf with respect to unauthorized electronic distribution of their work, so in and of itself this shouldn't be cause for alarm.
It's clear the list of works arising from the communications between Andrew Burt and Scribd was broader than it should have been as far as any sort of copyright enforcement was concerned. That's certainly a problem.
However:
As the discussion here indicates (including but not limited to C. E. Petit's #58), there's a lot of room for questioning whether either Scribd or Burt (and, by extension, SFWA) acted consistently with DMCA procedure in formulating the list and/or taking down works thereon.
There appears to be room to chastise Burt/SFWA for delivering a procedurally faulty DMCA notice. But it seems to me that if one buys this line of logic, one must also chastise Scribd for accepting and acting on the faulty notice as if it were legitimate.
There is more clearly room to chastise Burt/SFWA for generating an inappropriately broad list of improperly posted works. Again, though: one must also blink at Scribd's blithe acceptance of that list -- especially in the context of the procedural DMCA objections raised above -- and its failure to vet the challenged works before actually taking them down.
The remaining question is the degree to which Andrew Burt's actions reflect (a) the informed will of SFWA's officers/Board, or (b) his own initiative in attempting to carry out the stated mission of the ePiracy Committee he chairs. Which of these is a more accurate formulation isn't yet clear (my strong personal suspicion leans toward (b), but that's as yet unsupported by direct evidence).
So while the present brouhaha doesn't make SFWA look good, it seems to me that there are any number of shoes potentially undropped as yet, and that there is a lot of room to point Arrows of Stupidity[tm] in any number of directions, by no means all of which lead to SFWA's doorstep.
#310: Much of the seeming unconstitutionality of Wizarding government may be explained by various components of the Statute of Secrecy, enacted (if I recall the brief mention in Book 7 correctly) somewhere back in the 1600s. That piece of legislation appears to have implemented the Wizarding shadow-government, and also (by implication, anyhow) the action by the Wizarding population to physically hide themselves from the Muggle world. There are indications that this has involved major modifications to sizeable chunks of local spacetime -- thus there's room for Platform 9-3/4 at King's Cross station, there's no large hole in satellite maps of London where Diagon Alley and its associated buildings ought to be, and any Muggles that happen to go camping near the Forbidden Forest do not get eaten by spiders, trampled by centaurs, or whomped by the Whomping Willow.
#365: One other possible variable in the population equation lies in the assumption that all members of the Wizarding population are, in fact, practicting wizards and witches. What we see of Wizarding folk in the books tends to promote this assumption, but I don't think it ever quite comes out and says so firmly. Thus one might argue that there is a large class of Wizarding citizens whose innate power levels are too low to go into active magical practice (much as not all Muggles are qualified to become Olympic athletes). If that were the case, then the "everyone attends Hogwarts" tradition could then be read to mean "everyone whose powers are strong enough to need formal training". Yes, this is stretching, but it's one of the easier ways I can think of to simplify the population problems.
#184: You speak in strange tongues which my computer steadfastly refuses to interpret for me.
[I presume this is ROT13, and this computer and associated software are new enough that, so far as I can tell, the only case in which I can read ROT13 is when it appears in someone else's NNTP newsgroup post -- I can't even create ROT13 text automagically.]
203: The assumption that the overall education at Hogwarts is poor presumes that we've actually seen the full curriculum, which is demonstrably not the case -- note that there is in fact a course in Muggle Studies (formerly taught by one Professor Burbage, who becomes Nagini's dinner at the end of Chapter One).
More likely, we have not seen classes in any number of mundane subjects that would be dull for Rowling to write about and equally dull for us to read about. Hermione's breadth of knowledge, to some degree, suggests that she's been paying attention in some of these classes.
#164: "the Asian girl from one of the Bond films" -- if we're talking about the Brosnan-era Bond, that's almost certainly Michelle Yeoh, not Lucy Liu. (Liu was an Angel in the big-screen Charlie's Angels movies.)
One series I followed that's always struck me as Not Quite Finished was the cycle of Celtic/Cherokee contemporary fantasies by Tom Deitz that began with Windmaster's Bane. It always seemed to me that those were building up toward something that was still a novel or two away at the point where the books stopped appearing.
#34: Lots of potential Harry/Hermione during Ron's absence, of course. Probably Luna/Draco during the former's imprisonment at Malfoy Manor (someone may possibly attempt Luna/Ollivander, because fandom is warped that way, but there won't be much). Probably a wide range of Aberforth material -- I'm thinking Aberforth/McGonagall may be the lead pairing there, but who knows?
#43: Rowling certainly did lay down a good many clues ahead of time, but it seemed to me that both Dumbledore's back story and the lore of the Deathly Hallows showed up in this book more or less out of left field. Both worked decently well in the context of the present book, but I think the overall series would have been strengthened had both matters been more clearly foreshadowed early on.
#10/#58: More to the point, the epilogue silently raises at least one other question of wizardly medical/social practice -- namely, the astonishing patience of all four principals in waiting at least seven years from the end of the main action to have children. (First-years Albus S. and Rose are necessarily eleven; James, to whom his parents wrote thrice weekly the prior year, is almost certainly twelve and the oldest of the five kids.)
Three or four years I can see, especially given that Ginny's younger to start with (and that in all likelihood, Harry, Ron & Hermione do after all need to complete their seventh-year studies). But seven years? Especially for Hermione & Ron? The mind boggles.
#39: Yes, but one of the long-standing minor mysteries in the Bliss saga is the mysterious connection between John's family and the Emersons, and there's at least a hint that MPM may address that in the upcoming book.
#45: Aha, a kindred soul; I too like Jacqueline best of all MPM's series sleuths. My private theory is that Jacqueline is in fact the unnamed editor of the Emerson manuscripts, and I keep hoping that this might ultimately lead to a novel in which Jacqueline and Vicky end up crossing metaphorical swords....
#1: Except not precisely; the author reports that she has a further Amelia novel under contract (though there will be a new Vicky Bliss book first).
Now based on previous comments, the forthcoming book will most likely be set somewhere in the interior of the series chronology. Nonetheless, we apparently still have an Emersonian manuscript to look forward to....
Oh, and harking all the way back to disclaimers, herewith one that I think is at least as amusing as all the fanfic examples quoted above:
>> Based on the characters created by Carolyn Keene
Where did I see this? Last night in a theater lobby, on the Hollywood studio poster for the upcoming Nancy Drew movie.
Coming in rather late:
Item: One technical legal point that I haven't seen touched on yet -- directly, at any rate -- is the distinction between writing fanfic and distributing it. Writing fanfic, in and of itself, is not a legally prohibited activity; where most of the legal problems noted above arise is in the act of circulating the work thus produced. [This has at least some bearing on the responses to Jo Walton's concerns far upstream.]
Item: Many posts upstream dance around a theory I've been formulating for awhile now -- namely, that to the extent that storytelling can be divided into two types, the most useful distinction is not "fanfic" vs. "profic", but rather "shared/collaborative creation" vs. "individual/singular creation". Examples of shared creations: most film/TV; role-playing games; live theater; most comics (particularly the Marvel & DC superheroic universes). Examples of individual creations: most "original" prose fiction (reading "original" as "created & copyrighted by a named author"), such as Jo Walton's novels. Note that even this distinction is blurrable, as when the author of an individual creation (Rowling, Rice) licenses film rights.
The shared-vs.-singular distinction provides the best context I've found for grappling with the issues Jo Walton raised. It also makes explicit a handful of premises that I have found some pro writers are reluctant to acknowledge:
(1) One cannot reliably evaluate the quality of shared-creation storytelling based on its economic origin. There is fanfic with good storytelling values; there are also pro tie-in works with poor storytelling values.
(2) The "itch" to create seems to come in two distinct flavors; some people (like Jo Walton, above) find pleasure in creating their own worlds, while others find pleasure in contributing to shared visions -- and these urges also operate independent of any pro/fan distinction.
(3) Today's commercial publishing and media landscape -- not surprisingly, considering -- is taking more and more interest in shared-vision storytelling as a for-profit enterprise. The rise of role-playing "house universes", the expansion of tie-in fiction well beyond SF/F, and most recently the FanLib venture all speak to this.
#111: Incorrect. One of the Mooninite signs was found in Portland, OR several weeks ago, and was blinking merrily away at the time.
Four suggestions:
Esther: Esther Friesner (script), Lynn Johnston (art)
Job: James D. Macdonald (script), Trevor von Eeden (art)
Daniel: (a) Phil Foglio, OR (b) J. Michael Straczynski (script), Keith Giffen (art)
Heh. My college paper bought a brand new phototypesetting system -- Lord, it would have been in the summer of 1981, between my sophomore and junior years -- Compugraphics it was, consisting of one tall blue box (half the size of a TARDIS, but about the same shape) and two "mini-disk terminals" for typing in stories -- these looked rather like oversized Kaypro computers, consisting of a box with a small monochrome CRT, a vertically set diskette drive, and a keyboard sticking out of the front. The blue TARDIS pylon was much as Teresa describes -- you'd walk the diskette across from the terminals, stick it in the drive in the pylon, and shortly thereafter the font-film would spin, the pylon would hum, and presto! (I forget now whether you had to take the paper drum off to the darkroom to develop, or if typeset copy issued forth wire-service-like out of the pylon in a stream of black and white glory.)
The college in question being located in Walla Walla, miles from anywhere, they sent us the machine, a stack of 3-ring binders with the manuals, and a lady who spent a couple of hours telling us very generally how the thing worked; we thereupon pretty much taught ourselves to use the machines.
All of which turned out to be useful several techno-generations later, when I realized that the HTML I was formatting for Web pages bore a striking resemblance to the markup language the Compugraphics machines had been using way back when.
The second of Karen's is Blake's "Tyger, Tyger!"; I think the first may be Longfellow's "Village Blacksmith", but my memory of the original is a trifle vague.
And that will teach me to underestimate this gallery -- Kate is, of course, also correct. (I had thought the second one might fake folks out for considerably longer than ten minutes....)
John's first one is Sherlock Holmes ("A Study in Scarlet," perhaps?).
Correct, of course. I didn't think that would last long.
The other one seems very familiar,
This is as it should be.
but I can't place it. LeGuin?
Not even close. But I sense hysterical giggling in the background....
I have other things I should be doing, but temptation must sometimes be yielded to. Herewith two offerings -- one classical and not too difficult, one much more obscure that I couldn't resist in this gallery.
* * * *
"Frodo Baggins, Gandalf the Grey," said the Gaffer, introducing us.
"How are you?" he said cordially, gripping my hand with a strength for which I should hardly have given him credit. "You have been in Bree, I perceive."
"How on earth did you know that?" I asked in astonishment.
"Never mind," said he, chuckling to himself. "The question now is about fire-letters. No doubt you see the significance of this discovery of mine?"
"It is interesting, alchemically, no doubt," I answered, "but practically—"
"Why, man, it is the most practical mystico-sorcerous discovery for years. Can't you see that it gives us an infallible test for lost Rings? Come over here now!"
* * * *
Night had come to Hobbiton in the Shire. Night, but not darkness or quiet. Snatches of cheerful talk and lively music spilled out through open doorways, and the low gurgling of briskly flowing river-water never stopped. Gandalf the Grey – tall and thin, with pale silver hair tucked back from a face too sharply planed for handsomeness – strode through the crowded square with a wizard’s fine disregard for the village-bound locals. The locals, in turn, took note of his purposeful air, and of his heavy walking staff gripped in a leather-tanned hand, and let him pass.
* * * *
Jim McDonald: Have you considered the reputable PoD outfits, like Wildside Press or E-Reads?
Not attempting to speak for Yog the Eloquent -- but I suspect that Wildside at least is the wrong place for those Bad Blood novels.
Thing is, the existing professional small press/POD market (in which Wildside is one of the defining players) is geared more toward collectors and affluent readers than toward YA and popular-audience readership.
(Part of the complication with those books is that they were part of a market niche -- teen horror -- that has more or less vanished in the years since the books originally appeared, and been almost entirely supplanted by media tie-in lines targeted specifically at teen readers.)
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 1 |
| 2007 | 12 |
| 2005 | 1 |
| 2004 | 29 |
Total: 43 comments. View all these comments on a single page.
The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by John C. Bunnell:
Show all comments by John C. Bunnell.