incidents and accidents, hints and allegations

"Proof? There are times when logic is its own proof!"

—Arnold R. Brown, Lizzie Borden: The Legend, the Truth, the Final Chapter, as quoted by truepenny.

Dear professionally-published authors who despise fanfic of their own works,

So you despise fanfic of your own works. It revolts you on a visceral level. Okay. It would be rude and pointless of me to suggest that you shouldn't have a gut-level emotional reaction, because, after all, it's gut-level. And I may even sympathize or agree with you.

But because you are a thinking being, you get to choose what you do, as opposed to how you feel. And in that respect, I suggest you should do the following:

• Say, "I do not want fanfic of my own works to be written. In any event, it would be unwise of me to read such fanfic, so if any exists, please do not tell me about it.";
• Don't read any fanfic; and
• Sic your publishers on any fanfic of your works that is being published for the fanfic author's own profit (an extremely rare occurence).

Nothing else.

Because here's the thing about non-commercial fanfic: you can't stop it.

With regard to the practicalities, fanfic is not, as a category, illegal in the United States. Anyone who says otherwise is misinformed. (A useful resource is the Fair Use Overview of the Stanford Copyright & Fair Use Center; see also this 11th Circuit decision about The Wind Done Gone, "a fictional work admittedly based on Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind.") Thus, your legal rights may not be clear-cut with regard to any given story.

(NOTE: I am not hosting a discussion about the legal status of fanfic, because: (1) I've seen more than enough prior instances of it; (2) I don't have time to moderate it; and (3) not to put too fine a point on it, but: I'm right.)

But even if a particular fanfic comes nowhere close to fair use, the Internet is such that—between anonymous posters, pages not indexed by search engines, restricted-access sites, and the like—trying to get and keep that story off the net could be an enormous investment of time and resources on your part, with little guarantee of success. Not only that, but if people hear that you're suing a fan who wrote a non-commercial fic, they're likely to start writing new fanfics in response. I'm not expressing an opinion on the propriety of that, just pointing out that it's a genuine possibility.

More fundamentally, if people are writing fanfic about your works, then their imagination has been sparked by your works; they have been moved by the same impulse to engage with a story that runs through all of human culture. People gossip about their favorite characters; become fascinated by unexplored characters, locations, histories, themes, implications; imagine what would happen next, or if, or instead; and critique every aspect of a work. Sometimes this takes the form of passing in-person conversations, sometimes of blog discussions, sometimes of scholarly works, and sometimes of stories. (Sometimes, even, of critically-acclaimed, award-winning, professionally-distributed stories.) I would be astonished to hear that your own writing never was influenced by this impulse—I say this not to suggest that you've been writing fanfic all along, but to point out the strength and universality of this impulse. (For an eloquent and lengthy discussion discovered just as I was about to hit "post," see Jonathan Lethem's "The ecstasy of influence: A plagiarism" from a few years back.)

You can be revolted by the idea of fanfic of your own works. But you are so unlikely to be able to stop it that you are better off saving your time and energy for other pursuits. Put your position on the record as above and then do your best to ignore it.

Finally, I particularly urge you to not revile fanfic on the grounds that much of it contains sex [*], when your own works, first, are full of sex, some of it involving characters not of your own creation, and, second, were inspired in part by Dr. Who. Because not only have you insulted some vocal fans of your books, but you look a bit foolish to boot.

[*] ETA: a response from the author in question.

ETA 2: the author has deleted the posts in question; the text is archived here.

Sincerely,

Me

Dear Suzanne Brockmann and J.D. Robb,

Please do not call the eyes of people of Asian descent "exotic." "Exotic" means foreign and unfamiliar, and in your present-day and near-future American settings, people of Asian descent are neither.

Very truly yours,

A reader

For those unfamiliar, Brockmann writes the Troubleshooters romantic suspense series (booklog); Robb (a.k.a. Nora Roberts) writes the near-future In Death mystery series (booklog). Both are obviously committed to having a diverse cast of characters (particularly Brockmann). I absolutely believe they did not have any racist intent in writing their character descriptions.

And yet Brockmann describes a character in Into the Fire as having "eyes that revealed his part-Vietnamese heritage with their exotically graceful shape," and Robb repeatedly describes a recurring character as having "exotic almond eyes" (to quote the website excerpt of the forthcoming book (PDF)). And every time I see those references, I think to myself, "No, neither I nor my eyes are foreign, thankyouverymuch."

Good intentions are important. But they aren't sufficient.

(Brockmann uses "exotic" about other characters too, ones thoroughly white, at least; I think Robb tends to keep it for foreign things.)

Besides picking carpet for the new library and making appointments for HVAC maintenance and tax preparation (exciting, I know), the concrete parts of last week were mostly ( FutureBaby stuff (daycare visits with religious digression; echocardiogram) )

All these ultrasounds do make me wonder how difficult it was to get medical ultrasounds started, because many of what the doctors and techs call really clear pictures are, to me, grainy blurry blobs. Obviously medical science knew a good deal about anatomy, but it would have no way of telling how any given heart was constructed and thus what, precisely, an ultrasound of said heart was showing—right? And the 2D view of a 3D thing is so odd, especially when the depth changes with a little shift of the wand . . . anyway, learning how to read ultrasounds must've been an interesting process.

* * *

Between the workshop earlier in the month and the brief I drafted after I got back, I've been thinking more than usual about my writing process. There's generally a point when everything suddenly falls into place and the whole case crystallizes into a couple of sentences—which almost always comes later than I'd like [*], but from there, writing is easy (or, at least, no longer like pulling teeth).

Thing is, I think of this as "breaking the back of the case," which I picked up unconsciously from David Henry Hwang's afterword to M. Butterfly. Which is a pretty nasty metaphor, and not that accurate for me either, but it seems to have stuck. Do you all have different metaphors? Does this happen to you when you're writing nonfiction? Fiction?

[*] I wish I could consciously monitor this process, and could therefore determine how much of the time leading up to this moment is actually needed and how much is just plain old procrastination. I'm planning to experiment with consciously shifting my focus from one thing to another, to see if my backbrain will process things in parallel.

* * *

Since I was in the office on Sunday, I took pictures, because I find people's work spaces interesting (also I never got around to posting the ones I took earlier and things have changed slightly since):

( eight pictures and more detail than reasonable )

Anyone else want to post pictures of their workspaces?

* * *

Finally, a few links:

• Nice Beaver! :: One more zoo picture from Chad.
• Why do writers pretend to be Indians? - By David Treuer - Slate Magazine :: "Sadly, until we break the habit of reading Indian lives as necessarily "Indian tragedies"—and see the shallow types and terrible prose and awkward, tragic poses for what they are—there will be more Indian fakes."
  (tags: fake.memoirs cultural.appropriation writing)
• NPR: It Isn't Rocket Science: How Best to Board a Plane
  (tags: math travel)
• "Hollywood's About-Face On Blackface: Is the Broken Taboo a Step Forward or Back?" By Neely Tucker
  (tags: race movies tv)
• Match It For Pratchett :: Help match Terry Pratchett's $1 million ( £500,000 ) donation to Alzheimer's Research.
  (tags: health charities sff)
• Decision of the Day » Blog Archive » Best Case Name Ever :: "U.S. v. Approximately 64,695 Pounds of Shark Fins, 05-56294 (9th Cir., March 17, 2008) // Even better: the Approximately 64,695 Pounds of Shark Fins win."
  (tags: law humor)
• Is it possible that a Hummer's better for the environment than a Prius is? - By Brendan I. Koerner - Slate Magazine :: Answer: no.
  (tags: environment cars debunking)

Oh, okay, really finally: we got forty minutes into Samurai X: Trust and Betrayal on Saturday night before turning it off. Even if we'd realized that it was an OVA edited into a movie, rather than a series, it was violent and choppy and just not what we were in the mood for after a nice dinner to celebrate the good news about FutureBaby.

Another sucky week here at Chateau Steelypips, so let's talk about writing instead.

Apparently "ten things I know about writing" is going around as a meme. I'm not doing ten, because this is a specific list: ways that writing a legal brief is like writing a work of fiction, as noticed by me in the last couple of weeks.

1. Reader expectations.

   You must know what your readers expect from you, at pretty much every level of the work—from the way a sentence will proceed, to the way that sections fit together, to the way the work will end. In fiction, you can violate those expectations, but you must know what you're doing so you can make it worth it. In legal writing, violating reader expectations is not recommended, because the consequences of annoying your readers are rather different.

   This struck my attention when, on the same day, alg had a "demystifying publishing" post on genre, and I asked for feedback on how suitable a draft brief was for a new-to-me audience.

2. "Said" words.

   In fiction, "said" is invisible as a dialogue tag.

   When I got back a draft that replaced every "the court stated" with "the court said," I realized that the same rule applies to non-fiction.

3. "I've suffered for my research, and now you must too."

   Yes, you did several boatloads of research before starting to write. Yes, you're proud of all the nuances and variations you now comprehend fully. Yes, it was important to have as complete a map as possible of the landscape before starting, because you can't know what path you're going to take without a map.

   But once you've picked your path, most of that information becomes entirely superfluous. And you don't get points for including superfluous information, no matter how hard-won it was.

4. Other sets of eyes.

   People who will keep you from inflicting violated expectations, said-isms, and too much research on your readers? Priceless.