• The Hindu featured an article on writer Shreya Prabhu Jindal who discussed her start in fanfic. "Most of the audience members were eager to know how Shreya, in her early twenties, managed to write a book at such a young age. Shreya, an English teacher at Vasant Valley School, began writing when she was 13. As a young girl and a budding writer, she discovered fan fiction, and ever since, has written in that genre, relatively unknown in India. 'A lot of my writing is inspired by fan fiction. I visualise stories as scenes and there are cliff hangers in my stories.'"
• The National of the United Arab Emirates wrote about Kindle Worlds. "[P]ushed to its logical conclusions, it has potentially major implications for the way the creative industries work, and, indeed, for what we mean by 'fiction'. As fan fiction comes into the mainstream, it’s possible to envision a future in which popular novels become only the first instalment in an ecosystem of further stories. And over time, will the great distinction we maintain now between the original work and the fan fiction simply fade away? Currently, our idea of the creative process, and of 'art', is tightly wound up with the idea of a single author – this is the idea of the creative genius, given to us by the 19th-century romantics – but in this networked age, perhaps that conception of art is finally losing relevance. Instead, we may come to see art as the aggregated efforts of a number of networked people: a creation of the global brain, not a solitary author."
• Malaysia's The Star Online had two features on fanworks. One focused on online RPGs. "Nurhanani Fazlur Rahman, 19, prefers the unique collaborative effort involved in 'role-play fanfic'. And she doesn’t do her writing on forum boards like most of the others in the genre – she does it on Tumblr, as part of a community of about 30 authors from around the world. In fact, Nurhanani – or Nani, as her friends call her – has five separate Tumblr blogs, each dedicated to a character from the A Song Of Fire And Ice series."
• The other feature focused on fanfiction's evolution. "Known simply as fanfic, this genre of storytelling has actually been around for quite some time. Some even say Charlotte Brontë and her siblings pioneered it when they started writing fantasy adventures based on Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington – an actual person. In today’s world, that’s known as real-person fanfic – very popular among One Direction and Kpop fans. And in the 70s, of course, we had the Star Trek-based Spockanalia fanzine, which was basically filled with fanfic. But thanks to the Internet, e-books and tablet devices, fanfic has really started to grow like crazy in recent years, including in Malaysia."

What stories have you seen about fanworks in your country? Write about them in Fanlore! Contributions are welcome from all fans.

We want your suggestions! If you know of an essay, video, article, podcast, or link you think we should know about, comment on the most recent OTW Fannews post. Links are welcome in all languages! Submitting a link doesn't guarantee that it will be included in a roundup post, and inclusion of a link doesn't mean that it is endorsed by the OTW.

Here's a roundup of stories on fan relations with entertainment industries that might be of interest to fans:

• The Social Media Examiner did a video interview with Carri Bugbee about fan fiction and social media as a brand issue for creators. She was unfamiliar with fan fiction when she began tweeting as the Mad Men character Peggy Olson, so she seemed unaware there was a particular term for what she and the other characters do, RPG. She agreed that some people believed that the RPG was a campaign by AMC, Mad Men's network, especially as Twitter was not well known at the time. She explained though that she was more a fan of Twitter than Mad Men so that her participation was more of a social experiment. However, AMC's response was to suspend the Twitter accounts of the RPG participants only a week after they began tweeting together. She described angry fan reaction, and how the accounts were restored in 24 hours with the request that participants should contact AMC's digital marketing department. Her takeaway for companies is that if they don't manage their characters across the web, that others would and the results might not be what the brands would want. The way she approached her participation was to avoid doing anything she wouldn't do if she were getting paid for the job. The interviewer suggested that fan activities were a boon for brands as they were free advertising, but Bugbee warned that fans could not necessarily be co-opted and might be doing things brands didn't like, so they should be bribed with attention and goodies from the brand owners. She concluded that given the usual marketing costs, these expenses would "be nothing."
• In a guest post at AllThingsD titled Music for Nothing and the Fans for Free a venture capitalist concluded that "When the dust finally settles between the artists, labels, and distribution companies, everyone will finally realize fans are more valuable than recorded music. As traditional monetization models for recorded music sales slowly fade away, new monetization methods centered on the fan will emerge."

If you're part of Mad Men or a music fandom, why not contribute to Fanlore? Additions are welcome from all fans.

We want your suggestions! If you know of an essay, video, article, event, or link you think we should know about, comment on the most recent Links Roundup — on transformativeworks.org, LJ, or DW — or give @OTW_News a shoutout on Twitter. Links are welcome in all languages!

Submitting a link doesn't guarantee that it will be included in a roundup post, and inclusion of a link doesn't mean that it is endorsed by the OTW.

The second issue of Transformative Works and Cultures (TWC) has just been released! The March 15, 2009, special issue, entitled "Games as Transformative Works," is edited by Rebecca Carlson and combines TWC's general interest in fan works and fan cultures with a focus on games. Anthropology is the issue's dominant disciplinary approach, but literary and cultural studies also frame the discussion. Although several essays address the role of production, the voices of the fans and the gamers themselves remain ever important.

The Praxis articles address many of the issues that surround computer games: editor Rebecca Carlson, for example, studies the complex position of gaming journalists, who are simultaneously fans and advertisers; Casey O'Donnell looks at the ambiguous role of game producers; and Robertson Allen's study of the use of games in Army recruiting similarly complicates the social role of games and their real life effects. Three other Praxis essays focus on particular games and the communities surrounding them: World of Warcraft (Mark Chen), Kingly Quest (Anastasia Marie Salter), and tabletop role-playing game Exalted (Michael Robert Underwood). Kevin Driscoll and Joshua Diaz focus on fan creativity in their introduction to and explanation of chiptunes.

The Symposium section looks back and forward: pieces include Will Brooker's recollection of early computer games of the 1980s and what specific effects these games had on a particular generation; Thien-bao Thuc Phi's powerful analysis and personal response to the depiction of Asians in computer games; and Braxton Soderman's meditation on fan labor and fan activities in various online computer games. Several essays focus directly on fan responses and productions, such as Rebecca Bryant's account of the way players have rejected and circumvented recent Dungeons & Dragons updates; Amanda Odom's look at the sensory experiences of live-action role playing; Joe Bisz's description of player productivity in card collecting; and Julia Beck and Frauke Herrling's provocative suggestion that reads role-playing game characters through the lens of fan fiction criticism.

The issue also features interviews with Paul Marino, cofounder and executive producer of Academy of Machinima Arts and Sciences (AMAS); Doris Rusch, gaming scholar and video game designer; business professor Tony Driscoll; and Diane E. Levin, professor of early childhood education.

Check out the entire Table of Contents here.

The third issue of TWC will feature more general submissions and is scheduled for release on September 15, 2009. No. 4 is slated to be a special issue on the WB television show Supernatural, "Saving People, Hunting Things," guest edited by Catherine Tosenberger, and will appear on March 15, 2010 (call for papers available here). TWC has also just issued a call for papers for a special historical issue, "Fan Works and Fan Communities in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," slated for spring 2011, guest edited by Nancy Reagin and Anne Rubenstein (call for papers available here).