Swan Tower

Many years ago, I remember hearing an incredibly vague story about some fanfic writer who sued a professional author for writing a book they claimed was too similar to a pre-existing fanfic.

I suspect that was the product of this story going through a game of Telephone, with details being dropped at every turn. Jim Hines, Hero of the Revolution, has dug through the dustbin of the Internets to try and ascertain the actual facts of an incident in the early 90's, involving Marion Zimmer Bradley and the fanfic writer Jean Lamb. Why? Because when arguments come up concerning fanfic, sooner or later somebody ends up trotting out this particular tale, often in moderately warped form (though rarely as warped as the version I heard). So it's worth taking a step back and asking, what actually happened there?

We'll never know for sure -- particularly since, as Opusculus points out in one of the posts Jim links to, the incident almost certainly involved one of MZB's ghostwriters, and none of the likely candidates has given a detailed account of the events. (Neither has Lamb, possibly -- as suggested somewhere in the comment threads -- on advise of counsel.) But if you're interested in the boundary between fanfic and profic, and what kinds of legal issues can arise when something wanders across that boundary, definitely read Jim's post, and follow the links if you have the time. At the very least, the story is not quite what folklore has made it out to be, and so the lessons to be taken away from it are not necessarily what you think.

Or at least what I thought, since I was operating from a very warped version of the facts. So I owe thanks to Jim for the breakdown.

John Scalzi is valuable once again. This time he's discussing what you can do to help the real victims of this publishing slapfight -- "real" in the sense of "people who are losing something, right now, that they can't afford and aren't going to get back." Amazon -- which still hasn't put back the buy links, last I heard -- is losing sales, sure, but they can survive it. Ditto Macmillan, though their survival is less easily assured. And readers can buy the books elsewhere, or pick them up from Amazon once this mess is resolved.

For authors, though, every reader that doesn't buy their book represents not just lost income, but the possibility that whichever subsidary of Macmillan publishes them won't offer another contract in the future. Because when contract time rolls around, the bean-counters are going to look at how their previous books have sold. And for some, the losses they've been incurring since Friday -- much less any of the ill-conceived boycotts flying around -- may break them.

I bring this up because of a post by Jay Lake, where he describes the attitudes and assumptions he's seen on the Kindle message boards. The list is really disturbing to anyone working as a writer -- well, see for yourself:

1. Authors are greedy
2. Authors are rich
3. Authors hate ebook readers
4. Authors control pricing
5. Authors control what their publishers do
6. Authors should be punished for what their publisher does
7. Authors are taking orders from their publishers' PR departments
8. Authors should self-publish, because they'll make lots more money that way
9. Authors don't know what they're talking about
10. Authors aren't necessary
11. Authors are bullying Amazon

My thoughts on this are, once again, rather long, so they're going behind a cut.

( It's almost enough to make you cry. )

Somehow, to these people, we are an obstacle, rather than the source of their enjoyment. We have vast amounts of power, and we want to use it for our own unnecessary aggrandizement; and in the pursuit of this goal, we are using that power to beat up on poor, defenseless Amazon, which wants nothing for itself but the good of its Kindle customers.

You know what? I kind of want to live in that world. Ship me off to the universe where I'm rolling in money and telling my publisher what to do, where I can bully an enormous corporation and then walk off whistling to do some more not-work. It beats the reality.

Short form, for those who haven't heard: Macmillan (publishing conglomerate that includes, among other companies, Tor) allegedly told Amazon (you know who they are, I imagine) that they wanted to price their ebooks at $15, and Amazon, in refusing to cooperate, has stopped selling Macmillan's books. Not their ebooks; all of their books. As in, right now you can buy the Wheel of Time used from third-party sellers, but not from Amazon.

Oh, and undoubtedly this has to to with the iPad thing -- Macmillan is one of the corporations that struck a deal with Apple for the iBookstore.

Cory Doctorow has a good analysis of what that means, and I think it's a good analysis even if you're not usually on board with his copyright agenda (as I'm aware many people aren't). Shorter Cory: Macmillan's $15 thing is dumb, but what Amazon did is a hell of a lot dumber, and either way it's like two bull elephants going tusk-to-tusk while the rest of us, the writers and readers, get trampled underfoot. This is the consequence of the conglomeration of publishing, and it really isn't a good thing.

Lots of other people have commented. John Scalzi here and here, Jay Lake here and here; also Jim Hines, Cat Valente, Janni Lee Simner, others I'll undoubtedly see when I open up my Google Reader, and more besides.

At the moment? I'm waiting for more information. Nothing's certain at the moment, not even that the pulling of the books was done by Amazon rather than Macmillan (though it seems very likely). Lots of authors have pulled the Amazon links from their sites. I haven't done that yet, mostly because a) there are a lot of them to pull and b) we don't have the full story yet; I'd be pissed if I went to all that work only to learn something that paints Amazon in a better light. I'm not real optimistic about that, mind you, but I figure it doesn't hurt to wait another day or two. Once I know for sure what's up with this, then I'll make my decision.

But I gotta tell you, Amazon's done some kind of craptastic things in the past, and adding this one to the list does more than put a bad taste in my mouth. As Jay says, what they appear to have done isn't precisely wrong -- they're within their rights to decide which products to stock -- but the implications of it are deeply troubling. Amazon isn't just a retailer; they dominate the audiobook market, and have been trying to lock down the ebook market, in ways that aren't good for any of us. They've tried before to use that weight to strongarm publishers into doing things their way (insert industry neepery here, of a lower-profile sort), and if they succeed, we're all going to lose.

That is, a debate about short fiction, not a short debate about fiction.

Jay Lake linked today to a "Mind Meld" up at SF Signal, where they had a number of people weigh in on the purpose of short fiction. The responses were thought provoking, both in the "yes, what she said" and "what crack are you smoking?" kind of way.

It starts with Gardner Dozois, whose answer reminds me of nothing so much as the "interviews" football players give after games, where they spout off the standard talking points: just focused on the game, gave 110%, couldn't have done it without the rest of the team, etc. I've seen his answer again and again -- but I've also seen things calling into question the validity of that answer, on a small or large scale. "[Short fiction is] still where the majority of readers find new writers whose work they enjoy" -- really? Then why aren't the subscription numbers higher? Or to put it differently, how are all those thousands of people who don't read short fiction finding all the new authors busting out today -- especially when many of those new authors don't write short fiction in the first place? "For writers, short fiction is still the easiest way to break into print" -- I've seen this one debated all over the place. Break into print, sure, given the many semi-pro and for-the-love markets out there, but there's been evidence to suggest you have better odds of selling your first novel than getting a story into, say, Asimov's. Ultimately it's an apples-to-oranges comparison, and finding equivalent metrics for both is harder than you think. "Even today, the best way to break in and establish a professional reputation is to write and sell lots of strong short fiction" -- best? According to what measurement? It isn't best if short fiction isn't your natural forte, and one solid novel will establish your professional reputation pretty quickly. Sure, editors may offer novel contracts to really well-known short story writers, but they also offer them on a regular basis to people who have never sold a short story in their lives. The days when "build a rep with short fiction, then try a novel" was the standard path to a career are gone, by most evaluations I've seen.

Ellen Datlow repeats some of the same points, but usually with a phrasing that makes the fallacies more obvious: "Publishing short fiction is still the quickest way to recognition for a terrific short story writer." That's very nearly a tautology: be awesome, and people will recognize your awesomeness. Publishing a novel is the quickest way to recognition for a terrific novelist, too. She also brings up the one that always annoyed me, before I learned to write short stories: "short fiction remains the best breeding ground for new writers because the form provides a smaller canvas with which to perfect their craft." Sure -- if a smaller canvas is your thing. But if it isn't, then you'll be stunting your chances of development by trying to force yourself into a smaller box. And writing short fiction won't teach you to write a novel; at their best, the two forms influence each other, teaching lessons to carry across the divide, but as Jane Yolen pithily puts it down-page: "First, what short fiction is NOT. It's not training-wheel fiction. Authors don't practice on short fiction, nor do readers. It is a singular writing and reading experience." (Mike Resnick hits the same point.) I think the standard advice does a disservice to those who are naturally inclined toward longer lengths -- as I myself was, for many years.

But the responses further along contained some thoughts I found very apt. First of all, as several people pointed out -- Jonathan Strahan, Andrew Hedgecock, Rich Horton -- the question of vitality or lack thereof needs to be split into two parts, artistic and economic. The short story market is not thriving financially. But artistically? Absolutely. I think there's no question that our genre has matured a great deal, to the point where we're now positioned to try all kinds of boundary-pushing experiments. And that is a way in which short fiction can be like training wheels: I wholeheartedly agree with the many people who said that it's the perfect venue for trying out something new, whether it's a different genre, a new setting, or an unusual voice. (Case in point: "A Mask of Flesh." I can get away with a Mesoamerican short story much more easily than a Mesoamerican novel.)

Short fiction has a valorized position in our field, especially in SF (as opposed to fantasy). I don't think that's a bad thing, but it gets up my nose when people then take that too far. It's the difference between John Klima's response and Gardner Dozois'; John presents it as "here's what I like about it," from which I can generalize that other people share his opinion, whereas Gardner presents it more as some kind of universal truth. But it's not a truth for me, or for many of the writers I know, who didn't follow the Standard Path to Success -- which suggests it's not half so standard as advertised.

Regardless, though -- an interesting set of answers, and worth reading through if you're at all involved in the field.

I thought about reposting this poll here on my own journal, since I know people are less likely to click through a link to take a poll elsewhere, but then I'd have to do the work to collate my data with Mindy's. So instead I will ask all of you to take a minute or so and go fill out Mindy Klasky's poll about book promotion, and which kinds of things have induced you to buy a book. She put it up because a group of us author-types are discussing how to promote books effectively, so the data will benefit a large number of people, myself included.

We are entirely moved out (of the old place) and moved (transported to the new place). Now we just need to finish moving in, i.e. unpacking.

As a result, I have some brain with which to think. And I'd like to talk about something that came up on Deep Genre, to whit, the increasing tendency for newspapers and the like to cut out their book review sections.

This seems problematic insofar as it can be read as a barometer of public interest in books -- which I'm not convinced it is -- but as a phenomenon in its own right, you know what? It doesn't bother me.

I'm a part of the generation newspapers have failed to attract. I've never subscribed to one, though I will read the NYT or some such online when interest strikes. (This is an enormous problem for newspapers as a whole, and one they don't yet seem to have found a good solution to. Their circulation numbers are dropping steadily as their older readers die off and they fail to replace them with young ones. And they're cutting their book reviewers partly as an attempt to cut costs and keep their businesses afloat.)

So I've never looked to newspapers for book information because I've never looked to newspapers for much of anything. One of the few exceptions, when I was growing up, were movie reviews, and therein lies my second reason: I regularly saw the newspaper reviewers pan movies I quite liked, so while I would still read them for entertainment value, their opinions didn't mean all that much to me. They failed to convince me of their credibility and authority. Why, then, should I care what their book reviewers had to say? I can find book reviews online if I want them.

But, you object, are the two really comparable? Am I really willing to accept the opinion of BookLover612 as just as valid -- or moreso -- than that of the professional reviewer?

Actually, yes.

If I'm looking for in-depth critique, especially of an academic sort, then I won't look to BookLover612 or somebody writing for the local newspaper. But if I'm looking for an opinion piece -- which, face it, is what most reviews are -- then the criterion that matters most to me is, whether the reviewer's taste is like my own. This is more likely to be true of a person I find online than in the paper, if for no other reason than because I read genre fiction, and mainstream publications often give my books short shrift -- condescending reviews when we get reviews in the first place. Honestly, I get most book opinions from friends, not from authority figures of any kind. And if I look to strangers, I'll look in places where I know they like the books I like. (The danger, of course, is that this becomes insular, that I'll never be exposed to anything new. But given the range of places from which I get these opinions, and the impossibility of anybody's taste being identical to my own, I think more that I get exposed to a fluctuating fringe of stuff that's an easy step or two from what I already like, instead of so far afield that I won't bother picking it up.)

In the end, what I feel we're losing here is a level of cultural arbitration: a limited set of authoritative voices telling people what they should and should not like. It's an uncharitable interpretation of what newspaper book reviews are/were, perhaps, but that's the major thing I can see newspapers giving us that random blog reviews can't. And even then, we still have loci of authority, with organized review sites and the like.

So it doesn't really bother me. But I'm curious to hear what other people think.

I liked this icon (courtesy of deedop -- it's available to take, right?) slightly better than timprov's "Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Wretch," though the phrase in that one's good, too.

Where, you ask, did these phrases come from?

From this little rant. Will Shetterly posted it, but the thoughts aren't his, so don't flame on him. And oh, skip the first half to two-thirds of it. The actual content starts around the "In another way, too" paragraph.

So read that. And then reflect that the fellow writing it is the current vice-president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.

He's an SF writer, and he hates the Internet.

And that, in a nutshell, is why younger writers see SFWA as an irrelevant waste of their time and money. Also why we younger writers need to join en masse and drag the thing kicking and screaming into the next century.

(No, I haven't joined yet. But I'm going to, and soon. And boy howdy is it going to be interesting if Scalzi gets elected president.)

If you aren't aware of the Great Cassandra Claire Fandom Implosion, I won't inflict my own summary on you. This post will be sufficiently prefaced by saying that the million and one analyses and responses to that situation have sparked me to lay out my own thoughts on fanfiction. This will take a while, so you might want to get a snack first.

Point #1: Fanfic is illegal. Got that? This is the opinion of several people whose legal knowledge I trust, though I'm interested in learning about it for myself, and hope to sit in on a class this semester that will cover those kinds of topics. But you're borrowing someone's intellectual property when you write fanfic, and even if you don't make money from doing so, it's still against the law. This point is often missed by people who can't be bothered to pay attention.

Point #2: Having said that, any number of writers (both in print and media) are okay with you writing fanfic. It may be illegal, but it isn't worth anybody's time and money to sue you; a cease & desist letter tends to suffice when someone gets upset. And frankly, fanfic is a way for readers/viewers to engage more deeply with a story, and can even serve as a kind of grass-roots publicity, so just because it's illegal doesn't mean it's a bad thing. This point is often missed by people who feel persecuted when you tell them how the law works.

Point #3: The only thing that differentiates what we call fanfic from works such as Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is intellectual property law. Stop and think about it for a moment: they are the same thing. They just fall on one side or the other of the legal divide. In both cases, one writer is taking someone else's story and doing something with it. Maybe the story's a fairy tale and doesn't have a specific author; maybe it was written four hundred years ago and the author's long dead. Doesn't matter. You're still engaging in the same activity. The difference is your legal right to do it. Nothing prevents a work of fanfic from being as clever and witty as R&GAD, but the world tends to pass moral judgment on the former, and not on the latter. This point is often missed by those who want to claim that all fanfic is trash, but Stoppard's okay.

Point #4: Moving into the realm of opinion, I feel that it's good manners to respect the creator's wishes with regards to their intellectual property. If they don't mind fanfic, go for it. If they do mind, then be polite and stay away. If they don't mind fanfic but they object to certain kinds (frex, their underage characters having sex), then write about other things. Is there any force that can stop you from writing whatever you want? The same forces that can stop you from writing fanfic at all, which is to say that it probably won't happen (see point #2). But just because the author is willing to let you climb the fence and swim in her backyard pool doesn't mean you should pee in it.

Point #5: There is also a difference between fanfiction and plagiarism. The categories are fuzzy ones, of course, existing on a continuum. The small amount of fanfiction I ever wrote was generally of the sort where it took place in a world created by someone else, but involved my own original characters, perhaps with cameos by canon characters. I tended to be more interested in the possibilities of the setting than anything else. Other people write mostly about canon characters, perhaps with a Mary Sue or less irritating original addition. Maybe they cross one fandom with another, producing a Buffy/Highlander crossfic about the two groups of Watchers being the same. Maybe they allude to other fics. Maybe they even quote things. You hit the "plagiarism" line when you're Cassandra Claire, lifting not just characters, not just quotes, but extensive lines and scenes from other sources and not attributing them (then basking in the praise of people who say your ideas are so original and you write so well). I haven't followed that whole debate in full (I'm not sure any human being can, and I've not really tried, though I'm anthropologically fascinated by it), but what I have read included enough side-by-side textual analysis to persuade me that she did indeed rip off Pamela Dean and other writers far above and beyond what gets winked at in the illegal activity called fanfiction.

Point #6: If you're writing fanfiction to improve your craft, it will help you -- up to a point. You can refine your prose, dialogue, pacing, etc. as much in a fanfic story as anywhere else (provided, of course, that your dialogue isn't stolen wholesale). But it won't do much to help you develop characters, settings, and other large-scale elements of the craft. Its inherent intertextuality may get in the way of you learning to write a story that stands on its own. If your eventual goal is a writing career, there's nothing wrong with fanfic in principle, but there will come a time when you'll be better served devoting that time and energy to original work. And fanfic publication probably won't help you sell your own work, with two exceptions: one being work-for-hire media properties (where it may indeed net you a contract, if that's what you really want to do), and the other being (again) Cassandra Claire, who has landed a novel deal, apparently at least in part on the strength of her fanfic writing. (This, as you might guess, is a source of much of the brouhaha, and I fully expect to see the blogosphere descend on her first book like a pack of rabid weasels, waiting to catch her if she's plagiarized again.)

Point #7: How do I feel about this relative to my own position? As I said, I used to write a little fanfic, but not much; mostly I wanted to chase my own ideas. I haven't written any in years, though my mind will occasionally play with it for amusement. If Doppelganger fanfic or something based on a later book of mine starts appearing on the web, I will be flattered by the attention, and I'll probably let it go unless somebody tries to make money off it. I will not, however, read it, partially because I could subsequently stir up trouble if I later wrote something that resembled said fic, and partially because it would weird me out, watching someone else write about my characters. (No offense to y'all, but you'd probably get them wrong, relative to what's in my head. It's the nature of the beast. We don't see them the same way.)

Point #8: Hmmmm . . . I think I've hit everything I wanted to say for the moment, though I may return to this at a later date. Fanfic is a huge and complicated subject, with many byways I don't find particularly intelligent or attractive, but I issue no blanket condemnations against it. Just the occasional specific one, against specific acts of idiocy.

"Kerfuffle" is such a great word.

I've said before that my usual mode of feminism is to wander blithely about doing whatever it is I feel like doing, happily oblivious to factors that are supposed to be oppressing me into not doing said thing. I won't claim it's the best mode in the world, but it works for me.

So apparently one of the things I've been oblivious to is a perception that F&SF (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, for those not eyeball-deep in the field's jargon) is unfriendly to women writers and/or readers. As in, they publish substantially more men than women (a verifiable statistical fact), and perhaps publish fiction of a more "masculine" type (an evaluation that's being vigorously debated in many places). This all came to my attention through a pair of posts by Charlie Finlay.

The chain goes thusly: Fewer women send stories to F&SF than men. Fewer women are published in F&SF than men. (Side tangent on the chain: this may mean fewer women read F&SF than men.) This creates a perception that F&SF is not friendly to women. Therefore, fewer women send stories to F&SF than men.

Watch it go round and round.

Charlie's suggestion to fix this is to schedule a day (August 18th) for a hundred women to send stories to F&SF. I haven't waded through the morass of responses to his suggestion, but I did make a comment I decided I wanted to elaborate here, namely, that I have no particular interest in participating. Why? Because I send to F&SF all the time anyway. I have no fewer than thirty-four rejection half-sheets from them (some from JJA, some from GVG), and I'm expecting my thirty-fifth any day now. Some women may have given up on subbing there due to a perception that they aren't welcome, but I'm not one of them. I could send in a story that day, but I don't really see that it would constitute much of a message.

I'd be more interested if the campaign was to get a hundred women who have given up on sending stories there, or who never tried at all, to send something in. Reportedly both John and Gordon have said they would like to publish more women, but they don't get enough subs from them. Provided they're telling the truth (and I'm happy to grant them the benefit of that doubt), then we don't need to be sending a message to F&SF. We need to be sending a message to the women who are avoiding it. (And, perhaps, F&SF needs to send out a message of its own -- but that isn't in my control.) Bombarding F&SF, not with women as a blanket category, but with voices they haven't been hearing, strikes me as a more meaningful response to the situation.

One way or another, once "Selection" comes home, I'll be polishing something up and adding to their slush pile once again. If I've felt unwelcome there (i.e. those thirty-four rejections), I've attributed it to my lack of writing skill, not my gender.