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OTW Fannews: What fanfic does for writers
Tags: Business Models, News of Note, Commercialization of Fans, Commercial Works Authors, Fanfiction , News Media
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Two articles examined the value of Amazon's Kindle Worlds. Slate featured author Hugh Howey. "I had read Slaughterhouse-Five in high school and didn’t really get it. And then a few years ago, I studied the work again, and the story had not just meaning but special meaning...Vonnegut’s didactic work helped me through a similar trauma. With my first work of fan fiction, I chose to use his example of writing about the bombing of Dresden in order to confront my 9/11 experiences—an event I’ve long avoided discussing directly. And what I discovered surprised me. Fan fiction is difficult. More difficult than the dozen or so novels I’d previously written."
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OTW Board Addresses Personnel Concerns
Tags: OTW Board, Spotlight
Welcome to a new year! The OTW has certainly seen a lot of changes in the past year. In the case of the Board, we recently have said goodbye to veteran Directors Ira Gladkova and Kristen Murphy, and hello to new Director Anna Genoese.
In our first post of the year, we’d like to focus on the criticism the OTW has received about the abrasive nature of interpersonal relations within the org. Personnel difficulties have accounted for what we consider to be a high rate of volunteer attrition. Due to this, many of Board's Directors have publicly indicated their interest in working to fix this problem.
We'd like to give a status update.
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Strategic Planning releases reports on Wiki/Fanlore, Systems, and Grants
Tags: Report, Grants Committee, Strategic Planning, Systems Committee, Wiki CommitteeThe Strategic Planning Committee is pleased to announce that we are releasing our reports on the Wiki Committee/Fanlore team, the Systems Committee, and the Grants Committee.
You can download the reports as PDFs:
Wiki Committee/Fanlore report
Systems Committee report
Grants Committee report- Log in to post comments
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OTW Fannews: How much is too much?
Tags: News of Note, Commercial Works Authors, Fanfiction , Television, Theater
Death and Taxes complained about What happens when fan fiction takes over the original? "It’s not unusual to do a concept production of a play or musical." But "Playbill has just announced a national tour of the long-running musical The Fantasticks that is 're-envisioned as a steampunk-inspired production.'" Writer Madeline Raynor complained "not only are you foisting a misguided concept onto the show, but you’re not actually integrating it in?" and concludes "[W]hen the creative team behind the source material uses fan fiction-like elements to change the original? That gets weird."
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OTW Fannews: Fandom challenges
Tags: News of Note, Comics, Race, Ethnicity, and Nationality, Cosplay, Gaming
NPR's Code Switch asked Who Gets To Be A Superhero?. "But an artist named Orion Martin noted that the X-Men comics have on the receiving end of much real-life discrimination: the main lineup in the X-Men team has been mostly straight, white dudes...So Martin decided to reimagine them, recoloring some famous panels so that the main characters are brown — a gimmick that changes the subtext and stakes for the X-people."
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OTW Fannews: Fanfiction's benefits
Tags: News of Note, Education and Curriculum, Commercial Works Authors, Fanfiction
Writer Jim Hines discussed what his experience writing fan fiction taught him about writing. This included "Writing good fanfic is just as challenging as writing good anything else", "Instant feedback is dangerously addictive", "Fanfic can be freeing", "I can do 'realtime' writing", and "A writer is someone who writes. I’ve never understood why some people jealously protect the coveted title of 'Author' or 'Writer.'...Having done both profic and fanfic, I don’t get it. Calling someone who does fanfic a writer or an author doesn’t in any way diminish or dilute me and my work. Why is this even an argument?"
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January 2014 Newsletter, Volume 76
Tags: Newsletter, OTW Sections
For more information about the purview of our committees, please see the committee listing on our website.
I. FOCUSING ON COPYRIGHT
While some of our committees and staff were able to take a bit of a holiday break over the past month, others have been pretty busy with OTW work. This was particularly obvious with our Legal Committee.
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Events Calendar for February 2014
Tags: Conferences, Books, Fan Conventions, Event, Movies, Fanfiction , Television
Welcome to our Events Calendar roundup for the month of February! The Events Calendar can be found on the OTW website
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OTW Fannews: Passing judgments
Tags: Anime and Manga, Gender and Sexuality, News of Note, Movies, Music, Sports, Fannish Practices, Technology
The visibility of fandom fights is a definite downside of social media. Stylecaster wrote about attacks on singer Lorde and dubbed it "extreme Internet fandom". "'The music and fashion industries nurture teens’ obsessions with one icon after another,' said Epstein—a professor of psychology at the University of the South Pacific...'No matter how competent teens are, we trap them with their peers 24/7 and don’t let them enter the adult world in any meaningful way. Many get frustrated or depressed or angry as a result, and they exercise power in any way they can. In recent years, social media has become a major power outlet for teens, even though it actually gets them nothing except a little attention. So when Lorde or anyone else for that matter trips up, or at least appears to trip up, they pounce in large numbers. It’s a pathetic way to demonstrate power.'"
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OTW Files Amicus Brief in DISH v. ABC
Tags: Announcement, Intellectual Property, Legal Advocacy, Legal Committee
On January 24, 2014, the OTW filed an amicus brief on behalf of DISH Network in the case of DISH v. ABC. This case, currently before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, concerns DISH's "Hopper" DVR, which allows DISH subscribers to temporarily record primetime TV shows and then watch them, commercial free, for eight days. Although the U.S. Supreme Court declared more than 30 years ago that recording television for the purpose of "time-shifting" constitutes copyright fair use, ABC is attempting to shut down the Hopper by accusing both DISH and its users of copyright infringement.
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Two articles examined the value of Amazon's Kindle Worlds. Slate featured author Hugh Howey. "I had read Slaughterhouse-Five in high school and didn’t really get it. And then a few years ago, I studied the work again, and the story had not just meaning but special meaning...Vonnegut’s didactic work helped me through a similar trauma. With my first work of fan fiction, I chose to use his example of writing about the bombing of Dresden in order to confront my 9/11 experiences—an event I’ve long avoided discussing directly. And what I discovered surprised me. Fan fiction is difficult. More difficult than the dozen or so novels I’d previously written."
