Categories
cycling

The kindness of strangers

Just a short little story to share because I have had way too much to drink tonight and we’re not even going to discuss the number of cupcakes I’ve ingested, other than it’s a sum that rhymes with “regret.”

Earlier today, I did another forty mile loop on my bike. I did one yesterday as well, since I’m trying to hammer out as much mileage as I can each weekend in preparation for cycling my first full century – that’s 100 miles in a single day. (By the way, I’m dedicating my first century to UNICEF UK and raising funds for them. You should totally go donate. Even a single dollar, which is just one penny per mile I’m going to cycle on July 21st, can make a huge difference in the life of a child.)

Anyway, since these were miles 98-138 for my week and  quads were feeling a bit whiney, I’d dropped from my peloton and was riding the last twenty miles effectively solo. About five miles from my end point, I ran out of water. This does not sound like a big deal, but when it’s going to be another 20 minutes and it’s 97 degrees in Houston, that becomes a problem. (Think about it this way. I rode 40 miles today and drank approximately 3.5 liters of water while doing so.)

The stretch of road I was on was fairly lonely. I recalled having seen a gas station, so I turned around to go there, and… it was boarded up and extremely creepy up close. But I did see people around, a bunch of [motorcycle] bikers gathered outside what was apparently a biker bar. Before lunchtime. A bar surrounded by several groups of gangly, feral kittens. I approached, since I know bars do tend to contain water to go with the alcohol.

“You here for church?” one of them asked me.

I was a bit flummoxed, to be honest. And they did, indeed, all have Bibles. I said no, but thank you, I was just hoping to trouble them for water. And a nice older gentleman in a leather vest filled up my Camelbak with cold water from behind the bar.

After I thanked them, one lady told me to be safe out there. The drivers are crazy, and, “it’s important you ride safe. It’s safer for all of us.”

I’d never really heard it put like that, but she put it down there simply, that cyclists and motorcyclists should view each other as natural allies. I liked that, and I hadn’t expected it at all.

The drivers in Texas sure are crazy, but it’s also true that generally, the strangers are very kind. And I wanted to share that as well.

Categories
movie

In which I try and fail yet again to give a crap about Superman

Saw Man of Steel. For the record, I wanted to see This Is the End. I was outvoted by a combination of spouse and housemate interest, and the fact that I have an early morning ride tomorrow and the time was more convenient.

Gotta say, I wish I’d just stuck with it for This Is the End.

Light spoilers follow, I suppose, if you consider the revelation of how much real estate gets blown up and where a significant spoiler.

In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll admit that I’ve never been a fan of Superman as a character. In the droves of comic book movies and their respective main characters, I think the only one I ever cared even less about was the Hulk, and for very similar reasons. They’re both a bit too stupidly powerful for me to really find them interesting. But then Joss Whedon and Mark Ruffalo used their amazing wondertwin powers to get me to admit yeah, okay, maybe I could give a crap about the Hulk now.

So I was kind of hoping that Zack Snyder and Chris Nolan and generic strong-jawed white guy Henry Cavill could work the same magic. I’m sorry to say that was not the case, and all I feel I really got out of my evening was an excellent pizza at the Alamo Drafthouse and a new movie soundtrack I want to buy. Because all the bitching I’m about to do about this movie aside, the score for Man of Steel is excellent.

My biggest general complaint about Man of Steel is that it feels like it was trying to be about too many things and go too many places at once. We get to see bits of Clark’s past peeking through during the entire movie, but a lot of time without the full significance ever actually being explained. The movie never feels quite coherent, the major scenes never quite connected.

And the exposition. There is a lot more exposition in this movie than I’m normally prepared to take, I think because there is such a lack of development in the plotlines. It has to be verbally explained away, which is never a good thing. There is one character, I will call him General McDimpleChin, who seemed to only exist for the purpose of providing exposition or asking kind of dumb questions to enable other characters to do exposition.

The disconnection between the narrative threads also turned into a disconnection between characters. The only characters I ever felt any real chemistry or emotional connection between were basically young Clark and his parents and… Faora and Colonel Hardy, who had the most giant battle hateboners for each other that it kind of took my breath away. Lois and Clark didn’t have much going on, probably because any relationship development time was abandoned in favor of destroying a few more blocks of New York City Metropolis. (By the way, I’m pretty sure Superman personally destroyed more acreage than Loki did in Avengers, which I find quite hilarious.) The only other time a movie has ever made me wish for less destruction and fewer explosions was in Transformers 2. Well, I guess this movie at least didn’t involve a lot of slow motion shots of people running away, but it’s probably not a good thing when Man of Steel gets compared in my mind to a Michael Bay film. But for goodness sake, I would have rather a few more buildings got to stand and we had more character development. Plus Superman’s apparent lack of concern for flattening an entire town while he had his fight felt very, very weird from what I know of the character.

(For another point on this and the reason I didn’t care for the ending, please see the review in Locus. It’s more coherent and thoughtful than I could manage, and also lets me keep this basically spoiler free.)

And since I’ve mentioned the Marvel franchise, I’ll note yet another problem I had with Man of Steel: this movie wasn’t having any fun, and therefore it was difficult to sit in the audience and have fun with it. The Marvel movies have always been incredibly playful; I think DC could have done with stealing a bit of that. They’ve already got one hideously serious superhero franchise (Batman). They didn’t need another. And come on. Superman wars red underpants over his tights. How serious can he be? There’s about two minutes of Clark having a good time when he figures out how to fly, and the only real verbal playfulness in the movie ended up in the trailer, when Lois asks him about the S.

Now, it was a visually beautiful movie. Though in the field of pretty, it honestly had nothing on Oblivion. However, unlike Oblivion, Man of Steel did not actively piss me off. It just annoyed me and occasionally made me slap my palm to my forehead. And while it’s not saying much, a couple of the women in this movie got some actual agency, unlike in Oblivion. Lois Lane sure does some stuff in between screaming uselessly and needing to be rescued, even if we never have any idea why. And then there’s Faora. She had agency, and decided to use that agency to be a giant BAMF and punch missiles in the face (no, really). Which was a very nice change from the sighing over Superman’s chiseled jawline and needing to be caught up in his manly arms.

Though I will note one thing I found interesting. Even if the female characters were what I’ve come to expect from a comic book movie for the most part, they generally weren’t visually objectified. Take Faora, over there on the right.

I mean holy shit. They dressed her in armor that actually looks like, you know, armor. There’s not even a boob window! And there was at least one other female Kryptonian, who had the same sort of armor. Also, in the scenes that involved the US military, there were actually visibly women in uniform, combat ready. That impressed me a lot.

I’d guess it’s fun if you like that sort of movie. If you’re really in to Superman. I have it on good authority from my housemate that this one is immeasurably better than the previous Superman movie, though that apparently also isn’t hard to do. And it is, of course, Zack Snyder pretty. But if you’re like me and have never been that excited about the concept or the character, you might want to just to see something else or risk spending close to two hours of your life picking at nagging plot threads that never seem to quite connect. Now, I can’t say if This Is the End is any better yet, but I intend to find out soon.

Categories
steampunk writing

A Murder and a Tiny Dog

curiouscaseofmissclementinenimowitz-500Marta spied a curved white shape under one of the little tables, thanks to the new angle of perspective. Curious, she bent to retrieve what turned out to be a china teacup, mate to the one Simms had found on the end table, a brown stain dried on its bottom and side. Marta took a curious sniff, only to detect something bitter, hinting of almonds. “Oh my.”

“I’m still not going to let you shoot the dog,” Simms grumbled.

Marta crouched down, looking from table to corpse. It was too far for the cup to have rolled there on its own unless Miss Nimowitz had flung it in some final seizure, and that seemed unlikely since a few drops of tea had remained within. But perhaps it had been prodded by an unwary foot and sent skittering aside. More importantly, she somehow doubted that Miss Nimowitz would have prepared tea with two cups if it was just a final drink for herself.

Interesting, that.

“I’m less inclined to shoot it now,” Marta said, rising back to her feet. “The dog is a witness to murder.”

Simms gave her one of those looks at which he seemed to excel, his expression caught somewhere between disbelief and resignation. “Did you really just say that with a straight face?”

“I’ve rarely been more serious in my life.” Marta waggled the teacup at him. “Miss Nimowitz was poisoned.”

“And shot.”

“Tough old bird.” Marta smiled. She checked the teapot on the end table, but could detect no hint of poison in the liquid still within. “Unless our little friend there has developed opposable thumbs, she had outside help with at least one of those activities.”

“Murdered twice and then robbed. Not a good week for her,” Simms commented, but his expression had become markedly less grudging. While the man wasn’t averse to firefights and throwing the occasional security guard off a train, his feelings about murder were generally in line with Marta’s—it was the sort of thing that gave honest criminals a bad name.

I loved writing this novella. I loved it. I do so hope you love it too.

Categories
geology science

Still life with trilobite section

I’m back I’m thin section heaven at work, slaving over a hot petrographic microscope and continuing my second listen to the Vorkosigan saga audiobooks. (Excellent, by the way.) And I saw something a bit like this today:

BioclastsBiosparite

Out rather, a bit like the portion marked with a T. A trilobite! Or rather a cross sectional cut through the carapace of one. I wish I could show you a picture of my actual thin section because it was way prettier and had the more characteristic hooked W shape. But I like that whole having a job thing so, no. Sorry.

But this is why it’s cool and why I love geology. Something like 340 MILLION years ago, a time so distant in the past that my brain can’t really comprehend it as anything other than wow a long fucking time ago, a little trilobite was hanging out on a shallow marine shelf. Because there were trilobites back then (and realize that no human being had ever seen a live one, we missed them by hundreds of millions of years). And this little trilobite presumably had an awesome trilobite life and hung out with his or her little trilobite friends and then one day died. Waves swept the little guy further out to sea, where he was given a proper burial in carbonate mud and…

Over three hundred million years later, met me.

I’m looking at a piece of rock that was the bottom of a tropical sea in the distant past long before biology every got around to even thinking of primates, key alone drinks involving little paper umbrellas. And I get to touch that. Every day I get a tiny window into an Earth alien to the one we live on now.

And that is why geology is cool.

Plus volcanic lightning because fuck yeah.
Eyjafjallajökull by Terje Sørgjerd

Categories
feminism rants sfwa women in science writing

Lady [Insert Job Title Here]

This may come as a shock, but I am not a “Lady Geologist.” I do not examine women visually and use lab tests in order to understand their physical properties, provenance, and environment of deposition. I have never gone up to a female stranger, hammered a chunk off of her, and sent it to the lab so I could determine the abundance of her constituent minerals. That kind of thing would, I assume, land me in jail.

I’m a Sedimentary Geologist. I commit those sorts of friendly acts on sedimentary rocks, which are mineralogically more interesting and also don’t mind if you take a hammer to them. (Okay maybe they do mind, but they have no legal standing under current US law.)

I would likewise think that “Lady Lawyers” don’t limit themselves to female clients. And “Lady Engineers” don’t spend their time designing more durable women in AutoCAD. And “Lady Writers” (this I can speak to personally) don’t just write women or about women. And “Lady Editors” don’t leave trails of women in their wake, panting and covered with marks made in track changes.

Oh, right. The “Lady” is supposed to indicate that we’re a professional of some sort that happens to be a lady. And what’s wrong with that?

It’s simple. By feeling the need to point out that holy shit, that engineer is a woman, you are paying lip service to the idea that it’s only normal for men to be engineers. That women are the exception instead of just a normal part of the professional landscape. When you append or job titles with the unnecessary flag of gender, it effectively removes us from the work ecosystem and marks us as an invasive species, abnormal and not belonging.

Maybe I could have understood that more back when women were just starting to claw our way as a group out of the role of housewife, but our presence in the workforce hasn’t been a surprise in decades or far longer. (At my ripe old age of 32, I literally do not remember a time when women were not doctors, lawyers, and engineers, though admittedly not without struggle.) It isn’t shocking–SHOCKING!–that women write scifi. You have heard about this little book called Frankenstein, right?

And using the word Lady instead of Woman? Just makes it sound more cutesy and condescending because it’s a callback to all that chivalry bullshit. I’m not a lady, guys. I’m a woman. I’ve yet to hear someone referred to as a Lady Anything when her accomplishments or her gender weren’t then subsequently (if subtly) belittled. Wow, look what she did, and she’s a lady! Look what that lady did, unlike all those other women! Pretending to be amazed over and over again that we are here and working and doing just fine effectively erases our presence in the past.

Do you get what I’m saying? Do you get why I (and many of my fellow women, though please don’t think I am in any way claiming to speak for all women) are getting a little tired of that shit? Do you get why, even if it wasn’t meant to be patronizing or paternalistic, it might sound that way?

Good. Now kindly knock it off.

When I’m at work, I’m a goddamn Sedimentary Geologist. I’m a Writer. The presence or absence of tits does not change either of these facts.

Categories
rants sfwa

Dear Barry Malzberg and Mike Resnick: Fuck you. Signed, Rachael Acks

I still haven’t gotten my SFWA Bulletin 201 and 202, I’m guessing because I moved recently. However, thanks to lovely people who have scanned the newest mailbox-delivered turd shat from the pale, sagging rumps of Malzberg and Resnick, I know about that at least, and have read it.

Gentlemen (and I use that in the same condescending asshole way with which you have again and again applied the word “lady”): fuck you.

The fact that you cheerfully used a right wing radio host epithet (“liberal fascists”) to describe those who disagreed with you on the simple fact that women deserve to be spoken of with the same respect shown to men speaks volumes about your character. We didn’t have to equate you with Rush Limbaugh. You just did it yourselves.

And a word about anonymous criticism. When we bitched about your condescending old white guy bullshit on the SFWA forums, that was not anonymous because each and every one of us was logged in. When we bitched about your condescending old white guy bullshit elsewhere on the internet, it was likewise not anonymous. It was on our blogs and our websites, each of which comes with a name or at least an internet handle attached, which you can figure out easily using a single click of your mouse. You know, if you can stir yourself from your fetid kettle of nostalgia (for the days when women weren’t so uppity, I guess) to put out such a Herculean effort.

We are not censoring you, you poor precious babies who have had your fee-fees hurt by the nasty feminists. We are calling you assholes. There is a subtle but important difference between the two, and one you really ought to figure out if you don’t want to come across sounding like grown men who should know better having a temper tantrum.

Whoops, too late.

No, I’m not going to threaten to resign my SFWA membership; I know the organization carries a hell of a lot of water for writers in my chosen genre. But it’s sure making me wonder at the wisdom of whoever the hell thought giving these two moldering assclowns a platform with the organization’s name on it was a good idea. If I hadn’t already had a lot of positive experiences with the older male membership of the organization, I would honestly be really wondering about that as well, since the attitude Malzberg and Resnick display with such pride belongs in an era that thankfully ended before I was born.

But for fuck’s sake, we’ve gone from fool me once to fool me three times territory in the Bulletin. Enough is enough.

Signed,

Rachael Acks <— which is not pronounced “anonymous”

PS: For the record, my original, non-anonymous complaint about Bulletin 200. Jim Hines has an excellent list of likewise non-anonymous complaints. Ball is in your court, gentlemen. Are you going to Rush Limbaugh it again, or are you going to put on your grown-up pants and stop embarrassing yourselves in public?

Categories
Uncategorized

Forward Momentum

Over my three day weekend, I rode 111 miles on my bike, spread over three days. The second day was 47 miles of pure hell and head winds; by the time I got to day three, I just wanted to sleep late and say fuck it. But I got up and did another 39 miles anyway.

I was told, “I admire your dedication.”

I don’t know. Maybe it’s dedication to a certain extent. I am trying to train up to ride a full century (100 miles) this year – more on that at a later date. But I don’t feel like it was dedication then, or when I drag my tired ass out of my house and to the gym.

It’s fear. I’m afraid of losing my forward momentum.

I do like what I do, most of the time. Otherwise I wouldn’t do it at all. But there are days when I just desperately wish to sit on the couch and watch Hulu. But then fear drives me out of the house. I keep thinking about how easy it is, to skip a day, and then another day, and then suddenly I can’t go up a flight of stairs without getting out of breath again. That’s what I’m afraid of. I’ve struggled so much to get myself rolling at this speed, and I know precisely how easy it is to lose that.

I guess it comes down to Newton’s first law, like will is a physical instead of mental thing. A body at rest tends to stay at rest. A body at motion tends to stay at motion. I’m terrified of becoming a body at rest again.

Maybe I should start just planning out recovery days.

Categories
movie

Five movies in brief.

So I usually take long flights to catch up on movies I didn’t have time to see in the theater. There was actually a bit less of that this time around since I had a lot of editing work to do both ways (I completely killed my laptop battery on the flight home) and then I actually managed to sleep some on the flight out (shock!). But, here are my thoughts on the few movies I saw. If a bit late.

I imagine there are technically spoilers for these. They’re also generally older movies so I’m a little less concerned, but there you go.

Rise of the Guardians

I kind of already expressed my opinion on this one, which was a resounding: meh. It’s a pretty movie, yes, but these days a movie needs a damn good excuse to not be pretty. The plot just wasn’t there for me. After I got over my delight at Hugh Jackman and Alec Baldwin being over the top as the Easter Bunny and Santa respectively, there just didn’t end up being a lot of there there. It was very much a kid’s movie, without enough added oomph to it to make it interesting to me as an adult. Now I’m sure, in the grand scheme of movies that adults are forced to watch by their children, it’s probably a superior offering. But since I don’t have kids making me watch bad, treacly movies, I can be picky.

The Tempest (2010)

I wanted to love this movie. I really, really, really wanted to love it. It’s The Tempest genderbent so that Prospero is a woman – Prospera. And there were certain parts I did really love. Every scene involving Helen Mirren as Prospera just had me breathless. That woman is a treasure, and the depth she gave to that character was beyond anything I’ve ever imagined. I also really liked Ben Whishaw as Ariel, and some of the visual effects trickery they did with him. But other than those two? Much of the cast left me unconvinced, I’m afraid, and the play was very liberally cut down to fit in a standard movie length. The cutting they did still spent too much time on the more comedic scenes with Caliban, and the way that was all played just didn’t grab me at all. (Particularly since I’d just seen Hamlet and perhaps my expectations were even higher than normal.) I also can’t say a lot of the visual effects in the movie felt like they added to it.

Oz the Great and Powerful

I expected to not give a single shit about this movie, and was shocked by giving a small fraction of one by the end. Mostly because James Franco. My dislike of this movie is woven into its very fabric, however. The entire plot hinges on there being a prophecy about how a powerful man will come save Oz. I’m not keen on prophecy as plot fuel to begin with, and considering this basically meant three very strong and interesting female characters spent the whole movie going on and on about how a man needed to save Oz, it’s a wonder I didn’t just implode on the plane. I really liked the three witches. I thought their interplay was fascinating. And then every time one of them brought up the stupid prophecy, I wanted to grind my teeth, because any one of them was shown over and over again to be far more competent than the Wizard. Save yourselves, ladies. For fuck’s sake.

Seven Psychopaths

This move was weird, and twisted, and darkly humorous. And Christopher Walken. If you like movies like Boondock Saints, you will like Seven Psychopaths. It hits those same places of dark, macabre hilarity, over and over again. It’s about dognapping and psychopaths and assassins and, oddly enough, the struggle of what you want to write not being the same as what you actually write or what people want. I loved it. I also can’t really say much more about it without seeing it again because it’s a very difficult movie to explain.

Taken 2

Seriously, why do people keep messing with Liam Neeson’s family? I just watched this to pass the time before landing, and I ended up really enjoying it, for much the same reason I really liked all of the Bourne movies (other than my shaky cam objections). While there is a lot of fighting and killing, there are also lovely scenes where it’s just Bryan using his brain. The ending kind of annoyed me, however, with Bryan’s wife being randomly dead but not really and apparently she forgets to breathe unless he touches her or something. I didn’t get it, it made no sense, and it was just kind of stupid.

Categories
movie

Oblivion

The longer I think about it, the more utterly furious this movie makes me.

(SPOILERS, duh.)

Though I will say, Oblivion is an incredibly pretty movie. (Though is it me, or does all the tech look like it could have come straight out of Aperture Science?) It’s just gorgeous. The landscapes Tom Cruise flies over as Jack Harper left me absolutely breathless as a geologist (even while, as a geologist, my brain was screaming THAT MAKES NO FUCKING SENSE). It’s beautiful. It’s stylish.

It makes no fucking sense.

I could go on and on about the ridiculous science (the moon blows up so there are earthquakes and tsunamis what) but frankly at this point, expecting a movie to have even a passing handshake relationship with science is really an invitation to just never enjoy another scifi film again. So fine, Oblivion, I will give you your ridiculous MacGuffins, and well may you enjoy them.

It’s the plot that does it. The plot is one where, if you can thread your suspension of disbelief along, it almost scans. And then something happens and WHAM you’re left wondering what kind of incoherent dartboard of ideas was used to produce this story. To be honest, I cannot even describe to you in detail what major plot holes really tripped me up. The plot has completely slipped from my mind, not because I wasn’t paying attention, but because the lack of internal logic honestly made it hard for me to parse the events when considering them later, while at the time it all superficially made sense. This is a movie that desperately wants to be a mind screw, and it almost succeeds as long as you clap your hands hard enough and believe in fairies. The reveals were shocking, until five minutes later my brain caught up and thought Now wait one damn minute…

But no. The thing that has me breathing fire right now is the fact that of the three main characters in the movie, two were women, and there was not even a sliver of agency between the two of them. The only “female” character that got to be anything but a passive vehicle for Tom Cruise’s soulful or nutty looks was Sally, and I put female in quotation marks because she was, in fact, and evil alien computer thing that just happened to sound like a Southern belle.

And then he blew her up so. Oh well. He destroyed the only female that wasn’t a passive receptacle. Parse that how you will.

So much about this just chaps my ass. If nothing else, a giant point is made in the movie that Jack Harper was an astronaut, and thus one of the best the Earth had to offer. Well, both Victoria and Julia were astronauts on the same goddamn mission, and they were both utterly useless. Victoria existed only to mindlessly adhere to rules and regulations and then, in what I’m sure is complete adherence to the intelligence, determination, and curiosity inherent to being an astronaut, betrays Jack because she’s upset he likes another woman better than her. She doesn’t stop to ask why shit that makes no sense keeps happening. And then she gets blown up by a drone like a sad little foot note, having acted as the agent of her own death.

And Julia? A million times worse. She seems to exist only for Jack to save her repeatedly (four times, by my count) and then help him regain his memories by pointing out that she’s his wife. Oh, and get knocked up. The one meaningful decision she makes in the entire goddamn movie, which is to sacrifice herself with Jack to save humanity, is disregarded by him in one of the more obvious plot holes (where did they get another sleep chamber? how did they transfer her? why bother to put her in the sleep chamber at all except as deus ex machina?) in a way that I’m sure is supposed to be about twue wuv but really just highlights the fact that nothing a female character in this movie does has any goddamn meaning.

Argh. ARGH. I don’t know what makes me angrier, that I sat through two hours of beautiful wasted potential where the plot shit on me at every turn, or that this movie made me actually hope it would be good scifi.

Categories
writing

Kindle Worlds – fanfic for pay

If you know any writers, you’ve probably seen this spewed all over social media today. Well, it’s my turn to spew. Amazon is starting a new scheme, this one to sell fanfiction. For profit.

That’s right. Fanfiction. Making money off of it. This is a thing now. Well, it had the feeling of inevitability as soon as everyone realized 50 Shades of Gray was tarted-up Twilight fanfiction.

I have some very complicated feelings about this, both as an author and as a fan. The author gets to go first:

I had one moment of pants-shitting terror until I actually read over the terms. The fact that this for-profit fanfic will be limited to only properties Amazon has a deal with, and that royalties will be paid to the owners of that property soothes a lot of potential worries that I might have had, and goes a long way to explaining how this venture would even be possible. They’re not going to go selling fanfic at random. And there’s actually a lot of control by the owners of the original properties (from the Kindle Worlds authors page):

World Licensors have provided Content Guidelines for each World, and your work must follow these Content Guidelines. We strongly encourage you to read the Content Guidelines before you commit the time and effort to write.

So that’s certainly offering more control over content than regular fanfiction does. This means if the original property owner wants no slash, there will be no slash. (More on this later in the fan section.) Honestly, this doesn’t sound like fanfiction so much as a new model for writing tie-ins. So yeah, from the viewpoint of writing, it sounds like it could be beneficial – original property owners could make some money, starting writers could make some money for something they’d otherwise give away for free, win-win, right?

Hm, maybe. One of the major issues that’s making me feel uncomfortable with this scheme is right in the terms as well:

When you submit your story in a World, you are granting Amazon Publishing an exclusive license to the story and all the original elements you include in that story. This means that your story and all the new elements must stay within the applicable World. We will allow Kindle Worlds authors to build on each other’s ideas and elements. We will also give the World Licensor a license to use your new elements and incorporate them into other works without further compensation to you.

And.

Amazon Publishing will acquire all rights to your new stories, including global publication rights, for the term of copyright.

Emphasis in both passages added by me. First off, all rights for the term of copyright is something that had writers across the internet shitting their pants over the originally proposed contract terms for Hydra and its sister imprints. These are bad terms. The term of copyright at this point, with the ludicrous nature of copyright law, means “as long as we can squeeze even a dime out of your work’s rotting corpse.” Copyright effectively does not end as long as someone cares enough to renew it.

Add to that the other part. Basically, any original work you add in this for-profit fanfiction, be it plotline or world element or character effectively ceases to belong to you in any useful sense. If I’m reading this right, you can no longer use these original elements of your own outside of this fanfiction. And even better, the original owner of the work can use your story elements without so much as giving you credit. This may sound fair at first blush (this is fanfiction, after all, right? You’re getting paid, right?) but I’ve known a ton of people who write fanfic (including myself) who have gone on to use elements they first developed in fanfiction to fuel their own original endeavors. Come up with a cool side character that you can transfer into your own original universe and then write awesome novels about? Tough titties.

So that’s something I find incredibly worrying.

In a more abstract sense, I’d also like to throw in a little “won’t someone think of the children?” Part of what had people up in arms about the Hydra debacle was that it blatantly targeted struggling writers, because they were the most likely group to go for shitty contract terms and not know better. This has all of the same hallmarks, but potentially worse since the series in question could have a very teen-heavy fan (and writer) base. Get ’em while they’re young, eh, and then they’ll think term of copyright is a-okay?

It’s not entirely downbeat. I think this might be a shot for new writers to start building their own fan base, which could be useful when they branch off and start writing their own work. Hell, it could be a way for talent to get noticed by the people who run these properties. Who knows.

Though that does circle us back around to the question of quality control. Obviously there will be some, thanks to the “Content Guidelines.” But I’m curious to know how much editing will be done. How much will this be an opportunity for writers to actually improve their craft? I’ve already seen epublishing treated often as a “well fuck the editors they don’t see my obvious talent I’ll just self pub online” escape hatch by writers that honestly need more work. (Please note, I am not saying all self published work is like this. Some of it is phenomenal.) Will the Kindle Worlds get swollen with badly written works by writers who are not getting the necessary guidance to improve? Look at the internet, man. There is a lot of fanfic out there. And a lot of it is really, really bad.

Which brings us around to my much less mixed and generally less positive feelings as a fan.

Let me just put it out there that I find the idea of for-profit fanfiction thoroughly repugnant, as someone who has been writing fanfiction nearly her entire life. This is a little less so on the grounds that it’s done in concert with the creators, but still. In the depths of my fannish soul, I do not like it. Maybe I’m one of a dying breed.

Beyond that, there are two main concerns that I have as a fan:

1) If this becomes a useful revenue stream for the property owners, will this give them incentive to try to crack down on free fanfiction on the internet? While we know that fanfic has a way of surviving even when the holder of copyright doesn’t like the fact of its existence, this could make life very unpleasant for people. Obviously, this is a moot point unless the “licensed” fanfiction starts making a lot of money. But one does have to wonder, why bother paying even a pittance for fanfic on the Kindle when you can get it for free at AO3 or Fanfic.net?

Other than for the shiny badge of sanction, I suppose. Which brings me to point the second:

2) The “Content Guidelines” were mentioned before, but we don’t know why kind of things might be in them, other than no porn. How strict a control will there be on what is depicted in these stories?

While much of fanfiction is pure, joyful (and often badly written) brain crack, the one thing it can do, at times unwittingly, is give voice to viewpoints and characters that are marginalized in the original properties. For example, while a lot of slash can be porn for the sake of porn, it’s also there as a vehicle for depicting relationships between male characters where there wasn’t one in the series. While homosexual characters are becoming more common in the actual shows themselves, if you believed fanfiction you couldn’t throw a rock in a given episode without hitting a gay character. And while this may sound flippant or trivial to you, I believe it can have a profound impact. Frankly, yaoi and slash fanfiction were what started me as a teenager on my journey to realizing that gay people are (holy shit) people, and that I’m bisexual. Fanfiction can let side characters, often people of color, shine when they are given no opportunities in their original show. How will this work with content guidelines, and so on?

There’s a lot of fanfic out there. And there’s a certain magic to having to sort through it all to find stories you like. In the process, you’ll often find out that what you like isn’t necessarily what you thought you’d like.

A lot of this is just me spinning my wheels. Kindle Worlds is a thing that’s going to happen, and there’s no stopping it. There’s also no knowing how profitable will be. It could be a massive hit. It could be dead and forgotten in a year. We’ll find out. But while we wait to see how it develops, I can’t shake my feeling of profound unease.

While I’ve seen several blog posts that include, “If property X were in Kindle Worlds, I’d sure be tempted to write for it…” I’m not going to join that club. I have no interest in this scheme, not under those terms, no way, no how. Not even if it were Avengers. Because I do it for the love. And because some day I’m going to write the adventures of the little waffle iron that could.

Further reading: