The domain has been registered for something over a year now, but I have finally gotten the furniture sufficiently arranged to declare it Open For Business.

My old SFF Net Web page has not yet gone anywhere, and will likely hang on for a little while yet (I need to transplant more of the filk lyrics before I turn out the lights), but I have now set up housekeeping as (at?) The Lone Penman, with a new WordPress-driven site.  My last couple of LJ/DW posts are mirrored over there, and -- more importantly -- I've made a tiny beginning at the long-term project of archiving my entire book review file onto the Web. 

Again, this does NOT mean that this/these journals are going away; the great majority of my new posts will likely go up in all three places.  But there will likely be odds and ends that show up here and not there, or there and not here, and I will very probably keep better track of the ongoing review and lyric archiving at Lone Penman than I will on DW/LJ.

In any case, everyone's invited to wander Over There, gawk at the shiny parts, kick the tires, and point out the inevitable bugs.  There may even be a virtual housewarming if I can find the SFX generator (or the pocket dimension it was left in three or four cyberspaces back....)

As at least some of my readership is aware, I have been a theater junkie -- if a somewhat undernourished one -- ever since junior high school (which is to say, for a scarily long time now).  I have, of course, also been an avid reader of fantasy for even longer than that.  And it's been my experience that there just isn't much modern genre fiction that makes effective use of theatrical settings.  There are a very few exceptions, and mystery has done somewhat better than fantasy in this regard, but even good theatrical mysteries are a trifle thin on the ground.

You may therefore imagine my cautiously optimistic delight some weeks back, when I ran across a new(ish) book at my local library promising just this: a fantasy yarn set against the backdrop of a small musical theatre company in rural Vermont.  The ingredients seemed perfect -- but would they be well blended and skillfully served up?

( They would indeedCollapse )

Crossposted from my mirror-journal on Dreamwidth (at http://djonn.dreamwidth.org/36482.html); feel free to comment here or there.

I've seen a good deal of reaction over the last couple of days to Amazon's announcement of its "Kindle Worlds" program in which it aims to solicit and publish licensed (!) fanfiction set in a handful of franchise universes.  Both the fanfic world and certain corners of the professional writing community are rising up in mutual astonishment, mostly to point out the holes in Amazon's logic.

At the same time, both the fans and the pros seem cautiously convinced that the program is actually going to work -- that is, that people are actually going to make money on the deal.

I'm not.  I think the odds are against anyone -- writer, licensor, Amazon -- turning a significant profit on the venture.  ( Let me explain....Collapse )

Crossposted from my mirror-journal on Dreamwidth (at http://djonn.dreamwidth.org/36194.html); feel free to comment here or there.

To the extent that there's a common thread running through these events, it seems to be that their instigators were looking for attention.  And in almost every such instance -- the media has given them that attention in industrial-size quantities.  Which sends a message to those viewers who are potential instigators: if you do something like this, you will get all the attention you could ever want.  (It generally doesn't matter that you may not be alive to revel in said attention, at least not to this specific subset of the population.)

If you're a veteran of Internet or pre-Internet online communities, you're doubtless familiar with an earlier formulation of this premise: "Do Not Feed the Energy Creature".  The fastest way to defuse a flamewar or rout a troll/bully is simply not to respond.  The same applies in the present context -- if we simply stop giving these events more attention than they deserve, we supply less motive to the next generation of real-world "energy creatures".

The major media outlets need to learn and assimilate this lesson -- and to stop perpetuating the life-cycle of such events as the Aurora shootings, those in Clackamas Town Center, and those today in Connecticut.  Saturation coverage, especially when it consists of reporters saying "information is still developing" every five minutes for hours on end, is expensive.  If we as viewers stop watching it, we can help teach that lesson; if we tell our media outlets why we've stopped, it may teach that lesson more quickly.

Let me be clear: I don't mean to suggest that there should be no news coverage of such events, especially in communities where they may occur.  But the style of coverage needs to be thoughtful and careful and investigative, and the level and focus of coverage should be appropriate to the needs of those directly affected by the specific event being covered.