flourish: A white woman with multicolored hair and glasses, looking at the camera. (Default)
(Crossposted from Tumblr)

Now that Yuletide has been revealed, I can actually announce the fic I wrote: The Hellhound of the Rockefellers, a gift for KateandBarrel!

Words: 30364
Fandom: Elementary (TV), Sleepy Hollow (TV)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes & Joan Watson, Ichabod Crane & Joan Watson, Ichabod Crane/Katrina Crane, Ichabod Crane/Abbie Mills
Characters: Joan Watson, Sherlock Holmes, Ichabod Crane (TV), Abbie Mills, Katrina Crane, Frank Irving, Original Female Character(s), Original Male Character(s)
Additional Tags: Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Mystery, Bonding, Murder Mystery, Original Character(s), Slow Build, POV Third Person, POV Female Character, POV Male Character, POV Alternating, POV Character of Color, POV Third Person Limited, Relationship(s), Developing Relationship, Developing Friendships, Team Bonding, Banter, Trust Issues, Supernatural Elements, Canon-Typical Violence
Summary: Ichabod Crane and Abbie Mills are enjoying the fact that for a few weeks, the Headless Horseman has been dormant: their biggest problem is an escaped convict. Then Sherlock Holmes and Joan Watson are called in on what seems like an unrelated (and unimportant) issue. When the two cases intertwine, the four must work together to solve a murder and save an innocent life.

Some notes:

  • This fic was the greatest pleasure to write. It really grabbed me and wouldn’t let go.
  • It’s my first ever casefic! Despite being in the X-files fandom for years, I never wrote a mystery before.
  • It’s seriously fanfic with footnotes. Literal footnotes.
  • I wanted to write true pure Ichabbie, but Katrina kept getting in the way. So it’s pre-Ichabbie, a slow burn with lots of little shippery moments.
  • The good news is, I’m working on a sequel, because dammit, I am going to get them together someday!
  • Finally, I am enjoying a complete squee about the reaction of my lovely recipient, because I was super nervous she wouldn’t like it. Hooray! I love you kateandbarrel!

...so I'll have another post when that happens, but for now, I wanted to make sure that I linked my amazing Yuletide gift, which apparently I hadn't done on Dreamwidth yet!

Grimoire (1652 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Sleepy Hollow (TV)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Ichabod Crane & Abbie Mills
Characters: Ichabod Crane (TV), Abbie Mills
Additional Tags: Friendship
Summary: “There’s a note that says equine saliva can be substituted for the goat blood,” Crane says helpfully.

 absolutely loved my gift this year. I loved seeing Ichabod and Abbie interact, I laughed out loud, and I want to know what's going to happen next with Irving! In general it was an A+++ Yuletide for me...!

flourish: Henry Mallet, from Spirited. (Spirited)
I'm only here for a few days on business, but it's been a good trip so far. (It has been about 10 hours since I touched down.)

The really crucial thing I've done is gone to the Museo Nacional de Prado, where I saw La Virgen y el Niño, the paining by Luis de Morales. I'd never heard of Morales before, but the picture stopped me cold. It's Mannerist, but the realism of the figures' faces is incredibly beautiful. Sure, they're idealized, but not like any other Madonna I've seen—it is more like you're looking at someone you love and they are made beautiful in your eyes, than like you are looking at some holy ideal person, do you know what I mean?

The other thing I saw in the Prado was El Greco's great altarpiece work from the Church of the College of María de Aragon. I had never really liked El Greco before, but I think that was because I had only seen small reproductions of his great works. Seeing the altarpieces in the flesh, figures life-size or larger, was revelatory. It made me view his smaller works in an entirely new light. I can't wait to go back to the MFA in Boston and see some of the pictures that I had previously dismissed as dreary, as too pronouncedly impressionistic.

Now to meet colleagues and try to wake up at the right time in the morning. After only a couple hours' sleep on the flight, I did take a siesta; hopefully I haven't screwed up my body's adaptation to the time change...
The show I've been working on, East Los High, has been released!

I'm still in the middle of Hell Week trying to organize everything, but we've been incredibly thrilled with the response so far. I hadn't even dreamed it would go this well. (Knock on wood!) 
I've been thinking more and more about the Kindle Worlds situation, and I've come to realize that the most insightful thing that's been said about the terms offered so far is—they essentially invite unsolicited manuscripts for tie-in novels. ([personal profile] khellekson said this in the comments to my last post, and others have pointed it out too.) This impression is underscored by what Barbra Annino, one of the initial Kindle Worlds authors, has said about her perspective on the project.

I'm less interested in what these terms mean for individual fan fiction authors, and more interested in what they mean for the way fan fiction is perceived. One of the most erroneous, but far-reaching attitudes I've found in the entertainment industry is the attitude that all fans want to be part of the "in group," that they want to be paid to work on the properties they like. It's easy to see why people who are already working in the entertainment industry might have this idea about fans.
  • People who work in the creative side entertainment industry love stories, love movies/TV/books/video games/etc. It doesn't always seem this way from an external perspective, but the fact is that the industry is too tough for people to persevere in it without a real attachment to the work they're doing.
  • However, in order to get ahead in the industry, most people use a strategy of refuting that they're "fans" of anything. They cultivate ironic detachment so that they can be viewed as professionals and not just wannabes, because being too enthusiastic is suspicious, especially when you're working around celebrities of any kind. Those who don't refute that they're fans, on the other hand, very reasonably believe other fans to have the same interests and values that they do: they believe other fans to also want to take part in the industry.
  • This industry-centric attitude is reinforced by the reactions of the average person when one tells them that you work in TV (or movies, or video games, or what have you). "That's so cool!" they say, 90% of the time. Many people think that the entertainment industry is glamorous, and in fact, it can be. Pretty quickly, it begins to feel like everybody wants to work in the entertainment industry.
Not all of this is fantasy. Many people do want to work in the entertainment industry, and many fans do want to "break in" to writing novels or TV shows or movies. The way the AAA video game industry works at all is based on the fact that kids just out of college are willing to take enormous amounts of shit and work under terrible amounts of pressure in order to get to say they worked on the latest big console release.

OK. Now add to this the fact that there are plenty of people employed in the entertainment industry who are not part of the creative side at all, or who get involved based on a business interest, not an artistic one. From their perspective, the industry is entirely about making money. They may or may not be sympathetic to creative desires, but ultimately, their joy comes from business and business is business.

(There's also other types of people entirely—people who only do passion projects but get away with it because they're so good; people who are truly rapacious executives; people who have had the life stamped out of them; people who start off thinking they're just making a paycheck but eventually realize they could do so much more—but bear with me.)

There's nothing wrong with being a businessperson, nor is there anything wrong with wanting to make money from creative work that you love doing.

But now let's think about fan fiction. Who are fan fiction authors?
  1. People who are writing with a goal of someday having their own original stories published.
  2. People who are writing with a goal of someday breaking into the entertainment industry.
  3. People who are writing in their favorite worlds to "scratch an itch," out of pure desire for more stories about their favorite characters.
  4. People who are writing in order to tell stories they can't tell any other way, or to make points about the properties they're writing about.
  5. People who are writing in order to be part of a community.
  6. People who have totally different motivations than these, or (more commonly) a mix of these motivations.
You can see immediately that from the general entertainment industry perspective, types 1-3 are most comprehensible. And these are the types of fans that Kindle Worlds might appeal to.

One attitude towards Kindle Worlds—the one that Karen took in her comment that started me down this line of thinking—is that the whole "fan fiction" phrasing is just a clever way of marketing what is essentially inviting people to do work-for-hire writing. It isn't sexy to just invite people to write tie-in novels, so let's say "fan fiction" and then the internet will freak out!

I don't think that this quite puts the finger on it, though. There's no real evidence one way or the other, but I greatly fear that to many people in the industry, wanting to write for free and outside industrial strictures is simply incomprehensible.*

When you view it in this light, some of the statements made in the press release about Kindle Worlds seem quite different. Some people have interpreted the statement that "writers benefit from Kindle Worlds because Amazon Publishing has already secured the necessary licenses to write about any Kindle World" as implying that one needs licenses to write about shows like The Vampire Diaries and Pretty Little Liars at all—that is, that fan fiction is all illegal. I don't read it that way. I read it as coming from a perspective that the only writing really worth talking about, the only writing really worth doing, is the kind of writing that can make you money. I read it as coming from the perspective that of course fan fiction writers want to have their writing licensed—because then you can sell it!

This is where we get back to my point: at least Kindle Worlds recognizes that authors of derivative and transformative works have some rights to their stories. This is far different than the rhetoric of just ten years ago, when the cease and desist letters were flying. It really does represent a shift in the relationship between the entertainment industry and fandom.

Neither "the entertainment industry" nor "fandom" are monolithic entities, of course, and we know almost nothing about Kindle Worlds so far—nothing about the kinds of works it will accept (apparently they do not define 50 Shades of Grey as pornography?) and nothing about the way the contracts with authors will actually turn out, and nothing about the way the books will be marketed as it goes on. But to me Kindle Worlds is an interesting move in this negotiation between fandom and industry because it so quickly encapsulates where we've gotten since 2003 (the year of the first Harry Potter fan conference, by the way). 
  • Fans are recognized to own their own fan fiction and few groups are actively trying to shut fan fiction down.
  • Fans are explicitly recognized as a potential talent pool.
  • Fans are a powerful enough group that calling something "fan fiction" makes it actually sexier.
That's a long way to have come in just ten years, even if there are yet many miles to go.

*Of course, to some other people the idea of writing for money is just as incomprehensible. I hang out with a lot of conceptual poets and to them it is way more acceptable to say that you write fan fiction than to say that you write almost anything else—other than conceptual poetry, of course.
flourish: Laura Roslin wrapped in a blanket, looking slyly to the side. (BSGverse really?)
I wish I was at WisCon today, but since my lymph nodes are actually actively attempting to secede from my body, it is probably just as well that I am not.
A lot of people have asked me for my thoughts on Kindle Worlds, since I (and my company!) have a stated interest in this kind of thing.

For those of you coming in midway through this story, Amazon has just announced that they'll be publishing fanfiction for Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, and The Vampire Diaries, allowing the fic to be sold for money. The author will receive 35% of net revenue (for works of 10,000+ words) and royalties (unspecified) will be payed to the rightsholder of the fictional universe.

I think a lot of people have a kneejerk reaction to this which is strongly negative—"Jesus Christ, it's FanLib all over again!" People also have the expectation that it will fail, that fans are not interested in selling their works. I don't think that all that negativity is entirely justified. Here's why:
  • The success of Wattpad shows that younger writers especially are interested in self-publishing and that many of them view fanfic as a road to a self-publishing career. For writers who view fanfiction in this way, Kindle Worlds would seem like a godsend.
  • Unlike FanLib, Kindle Worlds is not framed politically—as "freeing" fans in any shape or form. A lot of people were turned off by FanLib's rhetoric who won't be turned off by Kindle Worlds.
People who take part in Kindle Worlds will be signing away a lot of the rights to their stories. Most importantly, the rights you give up prevent you from ever "filing the serial numbers off" of your story (á la 50 Shades of Grey) and selling it as original work. The rights also give the original world licensor the right to use your story ideas in the central series. I think that there are many people who will not mind giving up these rights, but there are many people who will—and there are also many people who will sign up for Kindle Worlds without fully understanding the rights they're giving away.

Still, I suspect that there is a large enough base of writers who would like to sell their fanfic for any amount of money that Kindle Worlds will not have a hard time finding authors. I'd bet that it will serve as a point of entry for people who were otherwise uninterested in writing fanfic, too. This is another way that they're being smarter than FanLib: instead of trying to appeal to fans who are already uninterested in their deal, they are introducing the idea of fanfic to people who might not otherwise have been interested, expanding their base, so to speak.

A larger obstacle are the content guidelines. Kindle Worlds does not accept pornography, "offensive content," "excessive use of brand names" or crossover stories.* Contrary to what many people say, there is plenty of fanfic that falls within these guidelines and that I believe people would be happy to pay for. Take a look at the fandoms for One Direction or, yes, Twilight if you don't believe me. Yes, these content guidelines mean that a large amount of fanfiction is excluded from Kindle Worlds. So what? Maybe there becomes a bifurcated fandom structure—people willing to write stories within Kindle's content guidelines, and people who aren't. Who cares? If anything, I suspect that the stories "too hot for Kindle Worlds" will be more in demand, not less. 

Generally speaking, I believe that fans are not too dumb to read a ToS. I believe that fans will choose to use Kindle Worlds if it works well for them, and they will choose not to if they are uninterested in its strictures. After all, nobody has to submit their stories.

Or do they?

I worry that some people in the entertainment industry are viewing Kindle Worlds as a way to "control" fans. This is a tale as old as time, or at least as old as when rightsholders really, really wanted the Harry Potter fandom to stop writing about Harry Potter being gay. (Yes, this was An Issue, long before Dumbledore came out of the closet. I swear to you, it was.) Can I blame them for wanting to control the stories they've told? Not entirely, no. I can't blame that impulse, any more than I can blame the impulse of a novelist to yell at fanfiction writers for "messing up their world." The novelist invested their heart and soul, Warner Brothers invested millions of dollars, in either case there are these weird outsiders coming in and making the stories about something else, something they never envisioned. What will happen? What if Harry Potter gets associated with gay porn? Then maybe audiences won't want to see it anymore! And then what? 

But the thing about this view is that it's unrealistic. It does not reflect the realities of the internet, and it does not reflect the realities we've seen in the past ten years of fans interacting with corporations. Even though Harry Potter did get associated with gay porn (well, slash fanfic, but it's the same thing in the eyes of the uninitiated), it didn't stop it from being profitable. Hell, fans of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic turned it into a megahit among the most unlikely audience—and among the audience that people most want to woo, 18-30 year old males! Nobody would be excited to find out that their show was getting associated with 4Chan, yet 4Chan made it a runaway success.

There's nothing wrong with Kindle Worlds as one possibility among many. It actually represents one good thing: the recognition that fans are doing work for franchises, work which can and maybe should be compensated. That's a step that nobody has taken (outside of rare contests), to my knowledge. I know a lot of fans see this as cheapening their art by tainting it with commerce, but the fact is that the entertainment industry is all about making money, and unless fans are able and willing to talk in monetary terms, they will never be taken seriously. (Actually, it represents two good things. In its terms, it admits that fans have rights over their own fanfic, rights that can be signed away when you take part in Kindle Worlds. This seems basic, but it is not always recognized.)

Where Kindle Worlds may go wrong is if it is viewed by the entertainment industry as the be-all and end-all of interacting with fan creativity. That would create a no-win situation for everybody. Many waters cannot quench fandom, neither can the floods drown it—a fact that companies are likely to learn if they believe that they can condemn works that are not published within Kindle Worlds, or if they believe that fans will stop writing their porn and run happily into Amazon's corporate arms.

In the meantime, the answer to Kindle Worlds must come from within fandoms. It must come from places like Organization for Transformative Works, providing alternative spaces in which to share stories that are not within corporate boundaries. Everyone must educate themselves about what rights they hold to their fanfic, what rights they can choose to sign away, and what rights they have no matter what. This is not the end of a conversation. It's not the beginning of a conversation, either. We're in the middle of it, and we will be for a long time to come.

*This is especially funny given that one of the fandoms they're allowing as a "Kindle World" is The Vampire Diaries. How can you possibly write a Vampire Diaries fanfic without depicting racism, and probably using the N-word? A significant chunk of the story occurs in the antebellum South! I suppose that the TV show does it, but one of the things fanfiction is best at is engaging with issue that network TV can't or won't. Sigh.

Edited to add: Another great response to this, from a different perspective.
flourish: "I've met several of his girlfriends, in fact. The most appalling bunch of bloodthirsty Amazons you ever saw." (Vorkosigan amazons)
So, in celebration of the end of the school year, last night NM & I hosted some people at our house to watch Hackers and Antitrust. The former is an old favorite of mine; I had never seen the latter, but Noah insisted that it was the best-worst hacking movie ever, so there we were.

After Antitrust I had to go and drink a shot of tequila to steel my nerves. It was that bad.

The thing that was so terrible about it was that the script had a fundamental misunderstanding not of how open source software works, but of how business relationships work. See, the characters do use the term "open source" as a kind of a shibboleth, but at least there's some stab at describing what that might mean (although I think the term they were really searching for is "free/libre"). But that's not as weird as the way that the Bill Gates-ish character is a terrible, terrible manager, or the way that the premise of the plot is completely unbelievable.

Pro tip: When you are working on an enormous project like Word, Excel or a satellite cell phone network that can handle video, you cannot save the project and hit your date by bringing in a kid just out of college, no matter how smart he is, two months before the deadline. You also cannot save the project by spying on other programmers and stealing their code, because code is not Unobtainium, and it is context-specific, not usually something you can just yoink and paste into your own project. 

Also, everybody in the movie looked like they were acting through a thick veil of "I really need to make my boat payment. Please, God, let this movie be over so I get paid and can make my boat payment." Since everybody involved has done other projects that aren't stinkers, I don't think there's any other explanation for it.


Apr. 27th, 2013 10:08 pm
flourish: A cup of coffee with a smiley face made of foam. (cheers)
Well, it's been awhile.

I got married!

And I also worked on a TV show (now cancelled).

And I'll have some other TV-adjacent things to announce soon.

And I got really into Tumblr and then I got really out of Tumblr.

But, you know, hello! Hello Dreamwidth. I'm still alive.
flourish: The side of a yellow school bus reads UNSCHOOL BUS (unschool)

Tasks accomplished have been crossed out. Things to read, listen to, or view are in blue. I will take notes on these readings. They are in no particular order; initially they appear alphabetized, but this is not so as one continues. Things to write or make are in teal.

Syllabus )


LotR question: Is there any actual evidence that Aragorn's ruling seat was in Arnor?

I always assumed that he ruled from Gondor, despite traveling frequently, since he was crowned there (and eventually died there). But I came across the assertion that he ruled from somewhere in Arnor in one of the LotR wikis, and although I can't substantiate it, it seems possible. It must be in the unfinished works, though.

(I ask because Eldarion would, presumably, have ruled from his father's seat, and it screws up the fanfic I'm writing if that meant traveling to Arnor from where his father died in Gondor!)

WARNING. This is an image heavy post! Sorry about that. Kind of. Almost all the images are from the official HPEF photo stream (taken by Jenn Racek). Other images are all linked to their source (which will also be mentioned).

Read more for the full scoop... )

Of course, Nick is learning quickly that con crash is a real thing with real consequences. But I've got so many other projects that I'm barreling right into the next thing. And who knows—I might see if I can scrape together an award flight and make it to LeakyCon...

flourish: Snape making a silly face. Caption: "Well, I say we get drunk, cause I'm all out of ideas." (HP get drunk)
I am going to have SO MUCH TO SAY about running a con when Ascendio is over.


Hey, people who have writing contacts—is there any chance some platform like The Mary Sue or some other geeky site would be interested in my yammerings? Because I am, like, ready for a magnum opus of do's and don'ts.
flourish: A list: "Bewitch the mind, ensnare the senses, bottle fame, brew glory..." (HP to do)
We'll have daypasses available onsite, but the only way to get a Full registration is to register online before midnight (EDT) tomorrow!

Yesterday, we posted an amazing announcement about Night of a Thousand Wizards!

Now, each NoaTW 2 ticketholder will be able to enter Universal's Islands of Adventure® starting at 2 PM on Thursday, July 12, and will get a $20 voucher for dinner that can be used that evening. The price of a NoaTW ticket remains the same.

After 10, NoaTW2 ticketholders will have exclusive access to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, where we'll be featuring an extensive menu of dessert and beverages on the streets of Hogsmeade - and they're included with your NoaTW 2 ticket!

During Night of a Thousand Wizards, we'll have a a DJ spinning music, lashings of Butterbeer, a chance to hang out with Chris Rankin (Percy Weasley) and Afshan Azad (Padma Patil) and so many other awesome moments!

Remember - online registration closes on June 25, and we won't be selling Feast tickets or Full registrations on-site. Click here to register now, or add a Night of a Thousand Wizards ticket to your registration. 

Who else is coming to Night of a Thousand Wizards? The HP Alliance's Andrew Slack, Mark of MarkReads, members of Team StarKid, authors like Lev Grossman, and Ascendio's Special Guests Chris Rankin and Afshan Azad! 

You should join us too! Each ticket includes admission to Islands of Adventure starting at 2 PM, a $20 gift card to use towards food in the Park, dessert and free-flowing Butterbeer and Pumpkin Juice after 10 PM in The Wizarding World of Harry Potter, and our exclusive Night of a Thousand Wizards event on the streets of Hogsmeade! Tickets start at $140 for registrants.


May. 13th, 2012 10:38 am
20188 / 55000

I haven't done my writing for today yet. Fingers crossed I'll do better than what I need to today, and keep plugging along. I've had a really bad ten days—barely got anything done (5,000 words? Honestly?) and that's frustrating.


May. 3rd, 2012 11:48 am
flourish: Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli and Gandalf riding across the plains of Rohan. (LOTR)
14972 / 50000

I am going to try and push through to get to the rest of the current chapter today, maybe, before I turn it in to be workshopped. I already did 1,000 words this morning—not good words, but that's what editing's for. This week, unfortunately, is super wild and I'm booked solid for most of it. Sigh.

11400 / 50000

So, um, at first I thought this was going to be a 25,000 word story. Ha ha ha. I think I'm going to be lucky to get done at 50,000 words. It may be getting way longer than that. At this point, we haven't even made it to Minas Tirith yet. Heck, we haven't even made it to Henneth Annûn yet. We're still wandering around in the forests of Ithilien getting to know each other. Unless I can have more days like today—today I edited 5,000 words and wrote an additional 2,000 or so—I am going to be really screwing up my writing schedule. I need to get done with this fanfic so I can write some original stuff!

That said, it's really breaking my brain to write something that's intended to be primarily entertaining. I can feel the synapses popping.

I was serious when I asked, before, whether anybody knew where to post LotR fic. I also wonder whether anybody is actually going to read this thing. I mean, I'm going to probably post it on the Ao3, FF.N and maybe Henneth Annûn. Many LotR sites don't accept slash (there's a Legolas/Gimli subplot here) or only accept slash (the Legolas/Gimli is only a subplot) or don't accept 'modern person in Middle Earth' stories (which always makes me wonder whether they've read the Lost Tales, but anyway).
workin' it to make Hillary Clinton more likeable.

(It's probably also that the difference between her positions and Obama's seems smaller now that he's actually in office. And that she can kick back a little without a Presidential run—no worries about appealing to everybody, she can just go dance in a bar if she feels like it. But while before 'OMG she's basically my Mom, my Mom can't be President!'—now it's 'OMG she's basically my Mom, that's awesome!' IDEK.)

Seriously though, she's gotten so much downright gushy "she's so cooooool" press lately that part of me wonders whether she fired her whole PR team, got new ones, and is gearing up for another run in 4-5 years. But then I think "no—because if she was doing that, she wouldn't be pandering to Jezebel, the Hairpin and Buzzfeed." Which is true.
  1. I just got a connection request on LinkedIn from my old pastor (at the church where I was baptized). I liked lots of things about that church and even some things about this pastor, but the response was LOL NO for so many reasons I can't even list them.
  2. I'm really trying to finish this goddamned Lord of the Rings fanfic, and I'm beginning to realize that I'm so out of touch with LOTR fandom that I have no idea where to post it when it's done anymore. Help!
  3. I finally read Fifty Shades of Grey (and: honesty! Fifty Shades of Darker, and part of Fifty Shades Freed before I got bored) and dude, I have so many feelings. To wit: DUDE, THESE NOVELS ARE ALL ABOUT CONSENT. They are totally fix-it fic wherein Edward understands that even if he has Boundary Issues, those issues are a problem and those issues are his problem and he should probably work on fixing those issues. Also, the scene where Jacob kisses Bella in a totally rapey way? Here, Edward stomps in and is like THE LADY SAID NO, and it is made totally clear to us that while Bella Ana forgives Jacob José, non-consensual kissing is not cool. Oh, they aren't textbooks on How To Be In A BDSM Relationship by any means, but seriously, the damn thing reads like a paean to safewords and enthusiastic consent. Also, the writing is not nearly as bad as people are making it out to be—it's about on the level of a Harlequin Presents (and actually, if the pr0n were taken out, it practically would be a Harlequin Presents. So there's that). Sure, it gets really, really boring circa the end of book 2 (there's only so much helicopter-and-yacht porn I can take) but dude, whatever. Different strokes for different folks, etc.
  4. Oh, and one more thing! Reading the damn thing all the way through, I have no idea why people are freaking out about these books' similarity to Twilight. Yes, if you know that it was based on Twilight, you can see that "Ana Steele" is Bella Swan, that Esmé has become "Grace," that Alice has become "Mia." And Edward Christian gives Bella Ana an Audi. But that's about as far as the similarity goes. Plots—totally different. Family relationships changed (Rosalie is now Bella's roommate, for instance.) Only the most minor of love triangles between Ana and José. Etc., etc. Seriously, there is no way that someone would have read the damn thing and thought "oh—it's a Twilight fic!" if nobody had told them, especially given any familiarity with romance novel clichés. WHATEVER. I mean, it is a Twilight fic, and that's fine. But saying that it isn't transformed enough is silly. Things don't have to be transformed out of all relation to their original inspiration to count, IMNSHO.
flourish: A fashion plate from the 1800s: a young girl wearing an Empire waist, pale yellow dress. (AoS Heyer)
Let's see, where to start?
  • Super, super busy.
  • In the Company of Elves got workshopped at my writer's group last week, and got lots of really useful comments. I'm rewriting the four chapters I had drafted, and they're coming out quite a bit longer thus far. So, my little word meter doesn't really make sense any more. I'll repost it once I've gotten everything edited back up to the point where I'm working.
  • I have Ascendio business coming out my ears. Guys, it is going to be super awesome, and I am going to drive myself mad planning it. So OMG come to Ascendio and validate my choice to overwork myself!!
  • I also have a lot of papers to grade that I haven't graded in over a week and I don't want to talk about it.
  • I also have things to do for my other job which I actually get paid for. (Well, I get paid for the grading too, but nobody tells me when to do that as long as I am capable of turning in grades at the end of the semester.) 
Also, I've been back on the cooking wagon, which has produced some really delicious things, but has also gulped up a bunch of time with kitchening when I should have been working. Whoops.
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