Oh, look, meta
Two items for your consideration today:
+ cupidsbow: How Fanfiction Makes Us Poor, thoughts on reading Joanna Russ's How to Suppress Women's Writing
+ matociquala: a little commentary about the previous essay
The essay is a typical reaction to reading Russ and realizing that it's all true and all still happening and all completely infuriating. And then the writer goes on to think about fandom, this ghetto of unpaid women writers. It's invisible, just as women's writing has been all along.
ETA a bunch of stuff:
agilebrit rants that if people want to be taken seriously, they should be writing fanfiction they can make money from, that is, fanfiction based on material that has fallen out of copyright. (Twain characters. Sherlock Holmes, etc.)
inalasahl comments on the vast extension of copyright we've seen in the last century. (So that Disney can continue to own Mickey.)
Put these two together and what do you have? In a world with a sane copyright law, Trek fanfic would be Trek pastiches. Men would be writing them. (Oh, look, back when you could write Trek tie-in novels with some freedom, and earn royalties for your work, writers like John M Ford and Greg Bear and so on did write Trek fanfic.)
... And women would be creating some other community for doing something uninteresting to the economic and artistic mainstream. Because the underlying cultural issues would not have changed. Huh.
I'm more likely to agree with swan-tower in this discussion than I am with the women offering me arguments about why things have to stay exactly as they are and why they're happy with their low status. But since I have discovered that I am happier doing than talking about doing, I will go make myself happier with a cup of coffee and a problematic plot outline and leave the meta to the experts. I am in the plotting stages for... er, four stories right now. I hate plotting.
+ cupidsbow: How Fanfiction Makes Us Poor, thoughts on reading Joanna Russ's How to Suppress Women's Writing
+ matociquala: a little commentary about the previous essay
The essay is a typical reaction to reading Russ and realizing that it's all true and all still happening and all completely infuriating. And then the writer goes on to think about fandom, this ghetto of unpaid women writers. It's invisible, just as women's writing has been all along.
ETA a bunch of stuff:
agilebrit rants that if people want to be taken seriously, they should be writing fanfiction they can make money from, that is, fanfiction based on material that has fallen out of copyright. (Twain characters. Sherlock Holmes, etc.)
inalasahl comments on the vast extension of copyright we've seen in the last century. (So that Disney can continue to own Mickey.)
Put these two together and what do you have? In a world with a sane copyright law, Trek fanfic would be Trek pastiches. Men would be writing them. (Oh, look, back when you could write Trek tie-in novels with some freedom, and earn royalties for your work, writers like John M Ford and Greg Bear and so on did write Trek fanfic.)
... And women would be creating some other community for doing something uninteresting to the economic and artistic mainstream. Because the underlying cultural issues would not have changed. Huh.
I'm more likely to agree with swan-tower in this discussion than I am with the women offering me arguments about why things have to stay exactly as they are and why they're happy with their low status. But since I have discovered that I am happier doing than talking about doing, I will go make myself happier with a cup of coffee and a problematic plot outline and leave the meta to the experts. I am in the plotting stages for... er, four stories right now. I hate plotting.