Ooh, Shiny!

Mostly because I've been writing, and when I do blog it's over at my author site. But if you'd like to see my take on the whole Diana Gabaldon vs. fanfiction kerfluffle, you can head over here.

Looks like she took all her stories down. I don't know whether it's because I reported her to ff.n, or whether the gals at stop_plagiarism got all up in her business or what, but I guess it doesn't matter at this point.

In a way I'm kind of sad, just because I realized at dinner last night that not only was she plagiarizing, she was also violating copyright, since POTO is in the public domain and No Return has been formally published (ISBN and everything!). It would have been sort of fun to threaten her with legal action, but alas, chérie, it was not to be. :-P

...6,500 words!

Maybe it's writing as therapy. Who knows? Who cares, at this point?

Erik and I went to see Terminator Salvation on Friday night. While I had a few issues with how some things were handled, overall I enjoyed it very much. I also came home with a raging plotbunny that wouldn't leave me alone. Since I'd already planned to spend most of the weekend avoiding Erik's family, I figured this was a good time to get writing. Frankly, I didn't want to have what happened with Star Trek happen again -- I had what I thought was a great idea but waffled around, thinking, 'Oh, I should read the novelization first," and didn't do anything about it. Then I find out someone's already started writing a fic with the same basic idea. While I know our stories probably would have been very different, I didn't want people thinking that I had ripped off someone else plot idea (it would have gotten a bit tedious to keep dragging my husband in as a character witness to vouch for the fact that I'd discussed the idea with him over dinner right after we saw the movie for the first time). So anyway, long story short, I sat my ass down in the chair and got writing. I think 6,500 words in two days is pretty good (especially for me, since my output has been rather, erm...spotty...lately).

I wrote the story as a standalone, but there's certainly room to go on with it. I'll probably just wait to see how it's received. Here's the link, if anyone's curious:

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5085862/1/

But for now, it's probably time to go to bed. :-o

I'm going to blather about writing and fanfiction, so I think I'll put the rest of this behind a cut so as not to inundate the good people on my f-list who don't really care. :-P

( Lightbulb moment! )

My mother is now out of the hospital, but she has been moved from her apartment in her retirement community to the wing where people need 24/7 care. I can see why that was necessary, but it's definitely not a good sign. At this point all I can do is thank God that at least she is in a financial position (thanks to my brother, who is the trustee of her estate) to be able to afford all this specialized care. He's going to follow up on Tuesday with the staff at Regent's Point to see if they think she's OK to go down to Thanksgiving at my sister's house. We might have to get her a wheelchair. Luckily, Gunther has a big trunk.

After seeing a post in harmony_bites' journal about the Stocking Stuffer Author Auction on the Support Stacie LJ community, I decided to sign up. Basically, fanfic authors sign up to have people bid on getting a holiday-themed story written just for them (each author lists the fandom(s) he or she is willing to write in). This is all to raise money for Stacie's chemotherapy. It sounded like a great cause and a lot of fun. I know money is tight, but if you've got any extra and would like to put it to good use (and get a story written just for you), I urge you to visit the comm for more info.

Finally, in the "I got no words" category, there is, well...this. I'll admit I laughed my ass off, but you might not want to click the link if you squeam easily,

Mostly because while I have a bunch of crap going on, I just can't articulate it in writing right now. I'm hoping by the end of the week I have some stuff in my life straightened out, because if I don't, I'm either going to kill somebody, end up heavily medicated, or be jobless. Possibly all three.

Anyway.

MEME!

Give me one of my own stories, and a time stamp sometime in the future after the end of the story, or sometime in the past before the story started, and I'll write you at least a hundred words of what happened then, whether it's five minutes before the story started or ten years in the future.

All of my fanfic is here, in case you need a refresher. This also applies to my original stuff, for those of you who might have read any of that. :-)

I think it's a new record: 4,800 words in five hours. Don't ask me where that came from, as I was feeling blocky once more and then...boom!

So yeah, Quality of Mercy has been updated. I thought I'd write half today and the rest some time during the week, but somehow it all came pouring out this afternoon. Have no idea whether it's any good, but at least the chapter is done.

Now I can cheerfully have steak and cabernet. Yum.

Wow...I actually wrote 3,300 words yesterday. Not for Quality, alas, but getting that much out in a day when you haven't written anything for two months is such a relief.

I actually had sort of an insight about the whole writing thing last night...or at least the fanfic aspect of it. Now, I love reviews. Love, love, love them (except for the wtf?? sort like the one where this gal left a dissertation on Fett's "real" family in the EU novels or whatever instead of making one comment on the actual content of Mandalore's Son. Guess she missed the whole "I know this is AU" bit in the author's notes). However, when I feel as if I'm writing for an audience, I start putting pressure on myself. I start worrying if more than a week passes between updates. It's ridiculous, because as much as I like to keep my readers happy, it's not as if they're paying me for this stuff. It's not as if I have any true deadlines except the self-imposed ones in my head. However, when I miss one of those "deadlines" (for whatever reason), then I begin to beat myself up mentally for blowing it, and then I get all clenched, and it gets harder and harder to write. Of course, having major rations of shit dumped on me, like struggling through the crap of early pregnancy only to miscarry after all that misery, really doesn't help.

When I finished my last couple of fics before starting on Quality of Mercy, I told myself I wouldn't write more than one at a time because the load just got too heavy. However, I'm thinking now that was probably a mistake. At least when I'm writing two stories at once, if I get blocked on one I can switch over to the other or vice versa. And if it takes me two or three weeks or even a month to update, that's OK, too. This is just a hobby, after all, and though I don't have kids I do work full time and have a house and a husband to take care of (not to mention trying to have a social life on the weekends in between doing all the damn laundry). It's certainly not as if I'm lying around all day thinking, Oh, woe is me, I need to write but can't!

So I guess the moral of the story is that I need to be a little less hard on myself.

And you know what? Writing that 3K for my silly Star Wars story yesterday was fun! I'd almost forgotten what that felt like.

"Moral indignation:
jealousy with a halo."

--H.G. Wells

How did that come up? Following more fun hijinks on Fandom Wank, this time about a certain gentleman named Lee Goldberg who apparently thinks fanfic writers are Satan, or at least on the same level as muggers and rapists. Step this way for the wank!

He went into vitriol-spewing mode after discovering OTW, whose birth I sort of witnessed here on LJ but whose organizers seem to have come down with a mild case of the batshit crazies (guess that sort of thing is contagious). The whole thing arose after the great Strikethrough Debacle here at LJ, paired with some hatred of FanLib.com and its ohnoes! mercenary bent. (I think FanLib sucks and don't post there, but that's just me.) At first people were simply talking about coming up with a large, multi-fandom archive with the great technical features of ff.n without all the asshattery and serial systems failures. I thought that was a great idea. However...

...now it seems almost as if the founders of OTW want to say that fanfiction and fanfic writers have equal rights when it comes to copyright, etc., basing their whole argument on the idea that fic (and fanvids and fanart) are transformative rather than derivative in nature. Not only do I not agree with that position (yes, fanfic, art, etc. may transform certain events, characters, and what-have-you, but at bottom it still has been derived from a source work), but I also think the gals at OTW (who claim that fandom is mostly female and feminist...guess that writes off all the guys I knew at theforce.net who write Star Wars fics) might as well have painted a bulls-eye on fanfic writers. We get ignored because (with a few notable exceptions, who were quickly stomped on) we know the rules. We don't try to make a profit off our work. We give credit to the original creators of the novel/film/TV series/anime our fics are based on. But if we try to claim that we have an equal footing with the creators of those work...well, then, I can see that opening a nasty can of sand worms.

I love writing fanfic (obviously). It allows me to explore ideas and concepts the original writers either never got around to or which are simply too "out there" in terms of how the characters were visualized by their creators to have ever been written by those authors. I know I've learned a lot about writing during the past three and a half years, which is about how long I've been writing fics (except for Dust of Empire, which was started many years earlier but abandoned for a goodly span of time). I think it's a valid form of writing -- at least the thoughtful, well-researched stories that help to expand the authors'/creators' original worlds. Derivative literature, whether it's Wide Sargasso Sea, Wicked, or 'Til We Have Faces, is accepted in literary circles...as long as it's based on work that's out of copyright. So do people like Lee Goldberg only hate fanfiction simply because it's a threat to copyright, and not because it lacks artistic merit? To hear him argue it, he'd say he hates it for both reasons. But I get the impression it's more because he's afraid it might hit him where it hurts, in the wallet (he writes tie-in novels for TV series such as Monk). I guess what he does is all right because even though it's derivative, he has a contract from the studio to do so. Following that line of thought, I guess he'd hate Dust of Empire up until the moment Lucasfilm Ltd. decided to license it. :-P

I don't know where all this is going to end up. Part of me is really hoping that OTW dies on the vine, because I could see that organization stirring up a shit-ton of trouble for those of us who are in it just for fun. But even if the whole sorry mess results in lawsuits and crackdowns on fic archives, I won't stop writing my stories, even if they end up being just for me (well, me and anyone who wants me to email the updates to them). It would be a sad day, though, and I hope it never comes.

Well, I'm at the tail end of two of my fics -- after I post the next update to [Poll #960331][Poll #960331]