Wasn't there a similar Pros story to this?
May. 5th, 2012 01:43 pm![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
lada-hitam.livejournal.com posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
prosfinderThere's a new M/M book by Chris Quinton, Paradox. The summary is like this:
"A diversionary kiss from his work partner, Ryan, shakes Phil's world, but when an accident sends him into a dream that soon invades his waking life, he must separate past from present before he loses the best relationship he's ever had.
Phil thrives on the danger and excitement of his job, and he trusts his partner with his life. Until Ryan kisses him. It's a diversionary tactic, but the kiss shakes Phil to his foundations. He doesn't need or want a long-term lover, but now it seems his heart does.
A short time later, Phil finds himself trapped in his wrecked car, drifting in and out of a dream-haunted coma where he's living a parallel life. Centuries in the past, someone's trying to kill Caius Marcellus Valens, and nothing is the way it seems. When the dream invades Phil's waking life, he must separate past from present before it tears apart his world--and the best relationship he's ever had."
It reminds me of a Pros story with similar story line, but I can't remember the title or the author. Can you help me finding out if my memory's faulty or not? If there's indeed a Pros story like that, I want to read it again and compare it with the M/M book. I want to know whether this is another case of fanfic published as original fic or not.
Any help is appreciated, thank you!
It reminds me of a Pros story with similar story line, but I can't remember the title or the author. Can you help me finding out if my memory's faulty or not? If there's indeed a Pros story like that, I want to read it again and compare it with the M/M book. I want to know whether this is another case of fanfic published as original fic or not.
Any help is appreciated, thank you!
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Date: 2012-05-05 08:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-05 09:06 am (UTC)Thank you for finding it :)
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Date: 2012-05-05 08:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-05 09:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-05 09:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-05 09:59 am (UTC)I understand this group is minimised against google searches? So theoretically I could post here and the thing that I post will be unlikely to turn up. That might make me think that it's OK... just us Pros fans. BUT I also know that a selection of my fellow fans are (in my opinion) much less discrete with fannish information, and might repost to non-minimised sites. So I can't rely on everyone applying my personal standard of discretion, and I tend to assume that what I post here will (if it's interesting enough) find its way onto Google.
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Date: 2012-05-05 10:29 am (UTC)The people you're worried about have access to those things anyway, and using the link up above won't help them get there any faster.
What I am concerned about those people doing, however, is claiming "The editor also indicated that she did not want the letterzine to be posted online." and then posting huge chunks of said letterzine online, including artwork. I'd say "less discrete" is a rather kind interpretation of that...
The internet is a dangerous thing, and just because it wasn't understood as such originally doesn't make it less so and doesn't mean that we can go back (like splitting the atom, to use a completely disproportionate simile *g*). I'm also aware that people have different reasons for wanting to go back - some authors now want to make money from what was previously written as not-for-profit fanfic, and what they want to hide is the convergence between the two types of story. I've less concern over that, for instance, than I have over respecting the wishes of people who originally requested their words never be put online at all - and whose wishes are now apparently being knowingly ignored...
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Date: 2012-05-05 10:16 pm (UTC)OK, what I was thinking of and wanted to be discrete about was the information from my New Year's Day post this year on Pros Lit, which would have been easy to do but might have had 'consequences' (couldn't help it, sorry) if spread around by people-not-thinking. Because, quite right, none of us have complete control of our words on the Internet, and things are being hoovered up and reposted , in different contexts, sometimes erroneously (don't get me started on the subject of actions to preserve history actually changing it topic) etc. And...
"The editor also indicated that she did not want the letterzine to be posted online." and then posting huge chunks of said letterzine online, including artwork.
Oh, yes - that is totally mind-boggling. Apart from absence of names and fic, I think I commented somewhere that the quoting was at the point where they might as well publish the entire contents on-line. But letterzines all have hundreds of subscribers, and are advertised, so where's the problem? /sarcasm.
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Date: 2012-05-06 09:08 am (UTC)But then there's a difference I think, between the worry that a single idiot will put something on a website somewhere - and fans seem to have been able to rally around and get that sort of thing taken down - and the huge-scale, non-caring, going directly-against-the-wishes-of-an-individual-in-fandom behaviour in the second point. And these people doing that - and they have access to Pros-Lit, it's just a question of when they decide to start doing it. Unfortunately their way in is already there, and I don't think a link here or there is going to change it.
Years ago, when I first started Palelyloitering, I talked to the ProsLit mod about including links to reviews of stories people had posted to the Yahoo group, and eventually came to the (sad) decision not to, because of the way it was set up etc (though I could have emailed them individually for permission). Two people in a fandom were able to talk to each other, and action was taken based on the knowledge exchanged between them.
The situation in our comments above is a group of people who are deciding what's "best" for fandom as a whole - and bashing their way through individual fandoms, and past individual people as a whole. It's just as much corporatising fandom as those two blokes trying to charge people to archive their stories ever did. As an en-masse body they're behaving just as badly as Laura Hale ever did, only they're doing it "in the name of fandom" because they're "on our side" - except they're not... History has shown that people who try to govern huge sprawling and diverse entities rarely do a good job - and that the smaller groups/countries/people who don't agree to be colonised fare particularly badly...
And I note that even though the author from the original post changed her original name in fandom to someone more pseudonomised, Fanlore has chosen to post that original name anyway, alongside the pseud - but it's not on the list of names-its-okay-to-post, so I'm not sure how that works either...
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Date: 2012-05-06 12:48 pm (UTC)Oh, it was my post originally, so if I'd wanted to quote the information in it I could have. I just didn't think this was a good place to do it.
I note that even though the author from the original post changed her original name in fandom to someone more pseudonomised, Fanlore has chosen to post that original name anyway, alongside the pseud - but it's not on the list of names-its-okay-to-post, so I'm not sure how that works either...
Inconsistently - it appears to depend on who you are. In one case (broad fandom) a person is well known to be a fan writer and a published author, and so everyone respects the "don't put names together where people can google them" request of that person. For everyone else it seems that the rule is they must opt-out, usually AFTER the info has been posted. There have been 3 cases I know about in Pros: in one I changed a pseud to a preferred one and left a page note and that seems to have stayed put; and in 2 more the authors or editors were MOST put out the information had been published (from print to internet) and requested privacy protection, which was done after the fact. A 4th case is a bit dicey... Anyway, no-one actually seems to use the pre-1995 list of names as a reference! And for some fandoms like Pros that were strongly print-only for years after the Internet, 1995 is NOT an ideal cut-off. But we must be stretched or trimmed to fit the template, obviously.
It is NOT that many years ago that stories were put on the Circuit Archive and Hatstand and we were told that Tarot was the author's preferred name for the internet. 'Consequences' still has the footnote: ""Tarot" is the name this author chose to use on the online versions of her Professionals stories, and is the name they're archived under. Please don't correct it to an earlier, print version." If there has been some process by which permission to link the two has been obtained, there is no record of it.
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Date: 2012-07-06 08:59 am (UTC)"I understand this group is minimised against google searches? So theoretically I could post here and the thing that I post will be unlikely to turn up."
Not to worry you... but this page just turned up in the top page of Google hits when I was searching for a different author's name: the name in your later comment on the 6th at 0905 UTC.
So, well. "Minimised", maybe, but it still shows up.
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Date: 2012-07-06 09:20 am (UTC)Do you mean Tavaran? (It's the only name I can see there) I've tried googling just now, and it's not come up in 6 pages of results... (there are more, but I don't have time to go through them all.
Tavaran +Professionals gets me 4 gibberish-results...
Take out the "+" (why's google messing like that? /rhetorical) and she comes up on Fanlore, a result comes up for the Scarsdale tavern, and there are other "tavern" hits
Tavaran Bodie Doyle brings up a whole page of correct links, but none to this page... at the bottom of the second page is a link to a 2007 discussion at this lj...
I'm actually not sure this group is minimised against search engines - you'd have to check that with the mod. Interesting how we can both get such different search results though, presuming I was looking for the correct author name.
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Date: 2012-07-06 09:31 am (UTC)Take out the "+" (why's google messing like that? /rhetorical)
I've noticed this and it's d*mn annoying! Something that worked perfectly logically for ages has recently become all about what they think I want to see rather that what I decide I want to find at any given time - and it annoys me immensely!
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Date: 2012-07-06 09:34 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-07-06 09:33 am (UTC)Google currently knows who I am, because I am using Gmail from the same IP address at the moment. It is almost certainly skewing my hits based on what it knows of my previous searches (and I would imagine my gmail.com emails) from this address.
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Date: 2012-07-06 09:43 am (UTC)Google customises far too much, which is annoying... probably my results are all mixed up with Arctic searches and so on at the moment - and probably medical articles on this computer!
Not sure what you mean about "first name-last name-etc" in your edited comment? I mean, ultimately we can all search hard enough that things will come up on google, there's very little in unlocked posts that's actually private - the whole definition of the internet is public after all, but I'm not sure why, in this case, it's worrying? And as I said above somewhere (?!) I'm not sure this comm does have search engines minimised...
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Date: 2012-07-06 09:59 am (UTC)And that would be my fault for the presumption - originally I recall thinking we were discussing on one of your comms, not this one which
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Date: 2012-07-06 10:05 am (UTC)The comms I run are minimised for search engines, but it's true that results do still show up now and then, if you google the right thing (and presumably if google thinks it knows what you're looking for, cos heaven forbid anyone should try anything new...) It is minimised rather than excluded, after all...
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Date: 2012-07-06 09:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-05 06:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-05 08:35 pm (UTC)I'm just rather fascinated by the reasoning behind it - the idea that you can give something away freely for many years, and then turn around and say "No, actually you can't have it, give it back, I've decided I can use it to make money - and I can convince other people that it was never fannish to begin with..."
If it was something non-fannish to start with, for instance, how would we react... someone writes a story for the Kindle, and in ten years times decides they want to change it and charge twice as much money for it, so they have it retracted from everyone's machines, just delete it, and say "Now pay me more for this different version of it."
I know fans have done this before - there are other examples in Pros - but I've never quite thought it was the decent thing to do, just for the sake of earning money... maybe once to get a start, but when they've already written other stories, to go back and re-claim a story they've already given away freely...? Or maybe, like Jane, all CQ's "original" stories so far were fannish first, just in fandoms I don't know...
I dunno - it's interesting, and makes me slightly uncomfortable... more so than my providing a link to information about the original fic above, anyway!
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Date: 2012-05-05 08:58 pm (UTC)It's unusual in that it belongs to the post-internet age, which most 'numbers filed off' fic doesn't. And e-publishing is certainly changing the way fiction is published and sold (I know of at least one author who is revising her very famous series of novels for e-publication - effectively asking readers to pay twice for what is essentially the same material.)
It's not something that I like - but I suppose there are re-makes of films and TV shows, and no one is forcing people who liked the original to buy the new version.
Writing stuff for fun and free to your limited circle of friends when you're young and employed is very different from the perspective of someone now trying to scrape together a living on a pension and publishing something that will be new to the majority of buyers (many of whom won't have been born when the original was written).
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Date: 2012-05-05 10:09 pm (UTC)no one is forcing people who liked the original to buy the new version...
No, but whether or not they're adding anything to the original fiction market, I do think they're taking away from fandom, particularly when they strip that fandom of their stories, and I think that's a shame - there's so much that's being fragmented in the world right now...
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Date: 2012-05-07 04:47 pm (UTC)So I understand some of your sentiments entirely, and I am fascinated by the discussion. However... the talk about fragmenting fandom...taking away from fandom... stripping fandom. Do you feel the author owes you their stories? That doesn't make any sense to me. All of fanfic is voluntary, the only payment enjoyment and, if one is lucky, feedback. After time passes, the liklihood of new feedback diminishes radically. The liklihood of ending up on the bad end of a public critique or snide comments (AU especially- think of the elf stories), definitely increases.
Unless fandom owes authors safety from this and continued feedback from new readers, I don't think writers owe fandom to keep their stories up, for any reason. It should be personal choice. I admit I don't give feedback for older works as often as I should. But when I do, I always say thank you for sharing your story. (I believe it takes courage and that getting to read it is not my right.)
Replying from my kindle- excuse any erros please...
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Date: 2012-05-07 05:25 pm (UTC)What I'm talking about has nothing do with "owing" anyone anything - quite the opposite, in fact. When an author puts a story into the public domain in fandom or elsewhere, nothing is "owed", anywhere - not feedback, not good feedback, not thanks, not anything, unless it's part of an acknowledged exchange (such as buying an original book/story/etc from BookDepository or Amazon or the like). It's nice to do those things, of course, but it's not owed.
Fanfiction authors write stories for a thousand reasons - but the one thing they have in common is that they have chosen to write a story using someone else's creation and characters instead of starting from scratch on their own. It is generally accepted, across fandom, that because we are building on someone else's work, we should not then charge money for that work.
What I saw, when I found fandom for the first time, was hundreds of (mostly) women, writing for the sheer pleasure of it - because they loved those other characters, because they wanted to share that with each other. Money didn't come into it. Often other people come and help us, all for free, betaing, or commenting, or illustrating, or providing archive space or places to post and discuss stories and so on. I know very few people - if anyone - who writes their fanfic stories in a vacuum and doesn't get something back from fandom that helps them to write more stories. And I thought that was fabulous - finally, a place in the "western world" where women were working and playing together, and pretty much ignoring the big corporate, commercial world where people just try and exploit each other so as to earn more money.
So I'm sad when I see people taking away stories that have been shared and enjoyed as part of that community, so that they can join that other group of people - the people who want to make money out of their fanfiction. And I'm sad that future fans aren't going to be able to discover and read those stories with the same joy as I did.
Clearly it depends what people are in fandom for in the first place, and everyone has their own personal reasons - those are mine above, that's what I love about it. And I get the impression that's where the roots of fandom, and of Pros fandom, lie - sharing with each other, with no thought of "owing".
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Date: 2012-05-07 05:25 pm (UTC)If we took another part of the world as analogy - someone presents you with a piece of art, or a piece of furniture, and you absolutely adore it. Ten years later, when it's a comfortable part of your household, much loved, often used and with happy memories, they come and take it away again, overnight without warning, because they've discovered that actually if they change it a bit, they can make money from it instead. And there's a gap in your house now, where it used to be. You can fill it with something else of course, but instead of the fond, affectionate memories you had of the piece, and of your friend, what you will remember most now is that someone gave to you generously - and then took away again with no thought for you. Would that be okay? Would you feel as comfortable and trusting around that person as you always have? Around other people who also make art/furniture? It's not just a question of who's-got-the-beautiful-thing, or who deserves to have it - it goes much deeper than that, right down to the big questions about what humans are to each other...
It just seems so unnecessary to me - if the author has changed their story enough for publication that it's no longer fanfiction, then they shouldn't need to take it down - it's no longer the same story. If it is the same story though, all bar names, then surely they're now trying to profit from the original creator's work, and that's never been considered acceptable. And if it is considered acceptable now, then you can bet that more people will do it than not - and that generous world of fandom will vanish from existence. Which makes me sad.
Of course it's an authors personal choice to do anything - but just because we can make a particular choice, it doesn't mean it's a good thing to do...
(And for the record, I do generally comment to thank fanfic writers when I read their stories - not because I "owe" then that, but because it's a nice thing to do, as I know from the other side. *g*).
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Date: 2012-05-07 06:28 pm (UTC)But the chair analogy doesn't work for me. Unless the author wrote the story as a gift for someone. Then it's a very personal thing and should never be taken back. But I don't think all posting is the same as a very generous, personal gift. More like... a loan, or sharing. Like they made the chair for their house but let you sit on it or borrow it. If they sell it you might be sad... or you might be happy for them.
But again we come back to what fanfic is. I don't think it's right to sell it as original after posting it... but I don't feel confident to say it's always wrong either. I'm pro fanfic... pro publishing... and don't want to come down on anyone for either. I just don't know... for certain... that it is either right or wrong, just that I could never do that.
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Date: 2012-05-07 06:08 pm (UTC)I enjoyed reading about your experience and discovery of fandom. I too like the feeling of chucking off the outside world and just playing... not having to worry about what publishers would think, just you and any readers you want to please. I do find that gets muddied the longer I'm in fandom, and I have to try to retain that purity and not care too much what anyone, even readers, think.
But I think your assessment of the publishing industry is a bit harsh. Certainly exploitation CAN come into it, but not always. Publishers try to reach an audience and readers to find what they like. It's no worse (or better) than many other industries. And the people who write are generally doing it for love since many authors earn the equivalent of less than minimum wage, so I don't see how *they* could be exploiting anyone. Of course it's possible you didn't mean the industry or writers in general when you referred to exploitation, though it did sound like it.
I do find the many aspects of fanfic and original fiction writing and publishing/sharing fascinating. Thanks for the discussion.
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Date: 2012-05-08 05:22 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-08 10:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-05-05 09:42 pm (UTC)Various opinions on the matter being expressed there, well worth a look if you're interested in the 'fanfic vs original fic' debate.
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Date: 2012-05-05 10:05 pm (UTC)I've got to say that comment 23 is the one that strikes home for me, especially this: They’re taking something that was about love and turning it into something about money– a commodity. The exact opposite of all that I loved about fandom when I found it...
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Date: 2012-05-06 09:05 am (UTC)To me the key issue is that there were a pair of fan fiction stories that were conveniently accessible online and now are not - but in this case it isn't that the stories have been competely removed from Pros archives. Unlike 'Camera Shy', or Tavaran's work, they are still available on the CD. I presume they will stay there, unless too much public attention to the connection with 'Paradox' makes the author reconsider. I also think that this is a case where a little more information about the fan stories themselves on Fanlore (separate from this publication question) wouldn't go astray, so that we don't lose the knowledge that they exist.