(no subject)

[shadowkat]

1. News's continues to be...difficult to watch. And impossible to discuss without falling into rant mode.

Apparently the NRA has a fandom. Who knew.

2. Making progress on story, which I think takes place in the same world as published novel. It's not a sci-fi so easier to write in some respects.

3. Saw Lucifer tonight.

I loved this episode. Even the procedural, which I admittedly lost track of...half-way through, but so did the writers.

There's a bit in the episode that concerns a fanfic writer of a favorite YA sci-fi series -- who states how the writer loved his writing, and the publisher did too, and he'd even helped her finish her book, when she got writer's block. Or so he thinks.

And... well...

By the way? Writers of books do not read the fanfic of their own books, or admit to it at any rate. Nor do their publishers or editors. Any more than television and screen writers do. Why? Copyright issues. They are all terrified the idiotic fanfic writer will sue them for stealing an idea. This has actually happened, so not a far-fetched fear. There's another even more obvious reason -- nothing is more guaranteed to give you writer's block than reading someone else's take on your characters or a plot point you came up with and seeing it on paper by someone else. A lot of us write stories because no one else is writing them, if you read someone else writing your story or something similar, why bother?

I like fanfic fine, but from a publishing and professional writer's perspective -- it's troublesome.
Urslua Le Quinn famously despised fanfic, as did Anne McCaffrey, and several others -- mainly because you have another writer out there taking your characters, your ideas, your world and creating their own fic off of it along with a readership who is eating it up. Instead of buying your books, they are reading the fanfic. Ouch. Which I can sort of understand -- if you are writing fanfic based on a novel verse, because same medium and hello, infringing on the brand.

But if it is fanfic based on a television series, movie, or comic book -- in which hello different medium --- then that's slightly different. OR if the work in question is completed, you aren't continuing it or moving forward --- and/or have died and your estate is collecting royalities, then who cares if they are writing fanfic? It's not like it is going to interfere or change your story any.

Also, there's something to be said for the fact -- that once you publish your story or throw it out there, it's not really yours any longer. The conflict between owning a story and allowing people to interact with it, learn from it, and discover it...remains a dilemma. At least to me. I mean, on the one hand, I don't want anyone playing with my story and characters but me, but on the other hand -- if they don't play with those characters then they aren't truly interacting with the story and it does not live outside of the pages in which I placed it. Then again, do I want it to live outside those pages? But if I didn't want it to...then why publish it in the first place?

Similar to the dilemma -- do I want people to only have access to and be able to read and enjoy my stories if they pay me for them? Or do I just want them to be able to read them? Or a little of both. (Obviously I've decided a little bit of both -- since I keep doing free Kindle campaigns and have given it away here and there. I'm not writing for the money. There's something to be said for "playing or rather writing real good for free".) Another thing Ursula Le Quinn was famous for? The statement that writer's had ridiculously large egos. Maybe that's my problem? My ego isn't that large. I don't need to be famous or have accolades. I just want to write my stories, have the time to do so, and share them with the world.

They are movies playing inside my head, in stereo-surround sound. Is it so bad to want to write down the movie, so I can see it and taste it and feel it, and then share it with you? Just not sure about doing it for free. Maybe it isn't the sharing that matters but the process of getting to that point?
God only knows.

Anyhow..sorry for the sub-tangent. Back to Lucifer.



In this episode, Lucifer stopped being overtly annoying for once and more like he was last season.
Also we're back to the Chloe/Lucifer flirtation -- where he does something nice for Chloe.

I like how the series continuously plays on the fact that Lucifer and Maze's roles in life were to bring out or shine on the truth in things. Light-bringer = Lucifer or Morningstar. He shows us the truth, whether we like it or not.

And neither like being lied to. Both are painfully honest, almost annoyingly so. To a degree people don't tend to take either seriously.

Truth is often overlooked, it seems.

Also the whole thing about the writer, writing about her high school friends, unable to get out of the past, stuck, and killed by a type-writer, the very thing she used to tell lies from truth. She embellished the truth.

Plot? I got a bit lost with the procedural, mainly because the show was really more interested in following the relationship drama. Oh, well, at least they showed that it was not the "love triangle" that Maze was upset over, but that Linda and Amen were lying to her about their relationship.

Chloe's advice to Lucifer is to not live in the past, like the writer had. You can't rewrite it after all -- any more than she can rewrite her past. Lucifer decides -- oh wait, I can. I can go back to the beginning and change what happened. That will remove my friend's curse. But won't it also unravel everything else that came after?

Like I said? I got a bit lost with the plot. The writers aren't the best at plotting. Just saying.
Granted, only saw it once, and I was a little distracted by physical issues -- my back is bugging me and I have restless legs at the moment.

Lucifer's dream was interesting. Why couldn't he save Chloe in the dream? It's almost as if he's afraid that if she finds out -- who he is --- he loses her. Perhaps he will.

Hmmm.

Comments

[oursin]

I was actually touched and charmed when people started wanting to write fanfic of what was then my ongoing blog serial (now being self-published in ebook and POD) - but as it was appearing in that form, it was already interactive in ways that more conventional media aren't. At least since the days of Victorian serialised fiction, when overhearing two people saying they couldn't stand a character, Trollope went off and killed her in the next episode.

[shadowkat]

Yeah, but you don't think the same way as many sci-fi writers do. The academic writers actually like fanfic and are touched by it -- they are looking at it from a different perspective. The fictional writer, whose ego is wrapped up in work that is not often well-praised, gets frustrated by it, because often it will pull their story in a direction they didn't want to go or the story they were channeling or telling wasn't supposed to go, in order to appease the marketing people or publisher. See Trollop. I doubt he wanted to do it, was most likely persuaded by the publisher. Conan Doyle hated Sherlock Holmes and killed him off. But was persuaded by the publisher to bring him back -- too frigging popular.

Ah, I found Ursula Le Quinn's stance on fanfiction (which I don't agree with - I agree with you and Joss Whedon, who said once your work is out there it's meant to be played with, but I also negotiate construction contracts for a living not make money off of books I write (I write books, I just don't make any money off of them):

What is your policy on fan fiction set in your worlds and using your characters?

It’s all right with me — it’s really none of my business — if people want to write stories for themselves & their friends using names and places from my work. But these days, thanks to the Web, “stuff for friends” gets sent out all over the place and put where it doesn’t belong and mistaken for the genuine article, and can cause both confusion and real, legal trouble.

As for anybody publishing any story “derived from” my stuff, I am absolutely opposed to it & have never given anyone permission to do so. It is lovely to “share worlds” if your imagination works that way, but mine doesn’t; to me, it’s not sharing but an invasion, literally — strangers coming in and taking over the country I live in, my heartland.

This applies, of course, to fiction only. I have given permission to all sorts of script writers, playwrights, musicians, dancers, etc. to use my stuff for performance pieces, and collaborated happily with many of them. That’s different. That’s a gas! Collaboration is one thing, co-optation is another.


I don't know if I'd see it differently if I made my living writing novels as I intended to do. I am sort of glad the universe had other plans for me.

[yourlibrarian]

You mention several interesting issues raised in that episode. The first is that the author was writing RPF (and not even well cloaked RPF since, conveniently for the plot, she didn't bother changing anyone's names). Given the setting for her book some things would presumably have been changed but apparently she was merely adapting actual events and people.

The second was that while a lot of the fanfic's details weren't explored, presumably what the author gained from her fan's story was that her series had been getting away from what she had intended it as and, perhaps, that her enthusiasm had waned exactly because of story drift. Seeing it reflected back to her made her see that more clearly.

The show spent no time dealing with either of these issues but it does seem like a rare case of seeing fanfic raised at all, and of a what's a problematic canon to begin with.

[shadowkat]

Yeah, that's what interested me in the episode as well. It really was an episode directed at the fanfic and non-professional writing community. And sort of winking at it in an odd, devilish sort of way. Even the use of the old-fashioned type-writer which her publisher throws at her head, because she's not writing the more marketable ending or the ending that would meet the fan needs and make the most money.

Also, the RPF fanfic that is cloaked because it's in a science fiction setting, but that's the only cloaking. The characters are basically real people thrown into that setting. Which is Real Person Fanfic in a nutshell. And you don't bother to change their names. (I read some of it back in the early 00's via LJ and other areas linked to it in the Buffy fandom. ) Always found it to be a bit more skeevy since, well, real people. But it's been done forever. Joyce Carol Oats wrote an RPF about Marilyn Monroe, and someone did one on Abraham Lincoln a while back.

The second was that while a lot of the fanfic's details weren't explored, presumably what the author gained from her fan's story was that her series had been getting away from what she had intended it as and, perhaps, that her enthusiasm had waned exactly because of story drift. Seeing it reflected back to her made her see that more clearly.

Within that...is a rather heavy commentary on how marketing, sales, studio execs, publishers, and to a degree even fans ...change the story or rewrite it in a way that services their needs, even if it's not true to the story itself and feels false to the one channeling or telling it. The writer got writer's block because her story was no longer hers, the publisher and fans were changing it into something that no longer felt true to her and as a result she got stuck. I actually think the same thing happened to George RR Martin with Game of Thrones. He knew where he was going, but it got adapted and changed by others and he lost the thread and couldn't get it back again.

It's actually why a lot of writers despise fanfic -- because it can kill their story. Without necessarily meaning too. Note -- the fanfic writer, without meaning to, not only killed the writer's story, his fanfic which the publisher preferred inadvertently led to her death. The innocuous icecream -- which Ella said might remind someone of synthetic fluid (ie fake) - connected to the fanfic writer who wrote about an action oriented robot ending, far more marketable from the publisher's perspective than the writer's actual ending.

Death by fanfic.

It's hidden in the subtext of the episode, but there. And the reason why so many professional fiction writers hate fanfiction. Although not so much marketing folks -- because from a marketing perspective, fanfic is a gift from the gods.
I find it interesting that the writers are commenting on it -- because obviously it is the show's writers, and they hid it, almost buried it. Television writers fear fanfic also, because they fear being influenced by it. (There's a real case that happened during the Buffy series, where a fanfic writer was claiming that Whedon changed something because a previous ending had been similar to a fanfic this guy wrote. I vaguely remember it and not sure I can find it again. But it explained why they don't read fanfic. If you want to get a job as script-writer on a show, you submit a script for another show. Drew Goddard submitted one for Six Feet Under. You do not do it for the show you are applying to, because they can't read -- because they are afraid of that happening.)

It also fits within their general plot -- Lucifer wants to rewrite his father's book. The writers of Lucifer, much like the ones behind Supernatural, see God as a writer of sorts. Lucifer has decided the way to get back at his father, is to go back and rewrite history. Chloe says you can't. But she doesn't realize Lucifer is the devil and can, to a degree.

[yourlibrarian]

It also fits within their general plot -- Lucifer wants to rewrite his father's book. The writers of Lucifer, much like the ones behind Supernatural, see God as a writer of sorts. Lucifer has decided the way to get back at his father, is to go back and rewrite history.

Oh good observation! Yes, I think you're onto something there.

And let's not forget there's plenty Bible fanfic out there as well ;)