Obscure vineyards

[hedda62]

Hey.

Haven't been updating or commenting much, mostly because I'm working flat out to get the book done; have set a goal of Monday to get the last chapter to betas, and I think I might make it. Then comes the rewrite, whee.

In a few spare moments I have read some of the posts commenting on cupidsbow's entry about women's writing (suppressed) and fanfic,

Comments

[legionseagle]

thanks for linking to the debate; there's a longer version of this comment to follow by email (since for copyright reasons specific references to your work, my work and the works of others probably shouldn't appear here). I followed the original posters - cupidsbow - quite a long way, since the topic of How To Suppress Women's Writing with specific reference to fanfic is a subject dear to my heart; I think it's behind a lot of the fear and loathing of the Mary-Sue and the consequent pressure not to create original characters which that exerts. And that spills over into self-censorship in original fiction - when writing F. I contintually have an inner-Sue moniotr switched on, not always to the benefit of the ensuing production. And of course it also spills over into how women's writing is professionally regarded - look at how many times we're told DLS was "in love" with Lord Peter (actually, if anything the better view was that she wanted to be Lord Peter - I certainly did) whereas no-one suggests that Doyle was in love with Holmes (or even Irene Adler). But I lost her at the "fanfiction impoverishes women" part. The fact is that over the years women have produced a lot of items "for free" (that is, without being remunerated directly for the value of their labour) ranging from bottled fruit to sexual favours which other commentators have felt they ought to have charged for (Dr Hendrix, in a followup to the rant that spawned International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day actually did use the phrase "Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?") . And undoubtedly the economic importance of their work was undervalued as a result. But I think what's happening on the internet is in part not a continuation of that process but symptomatic of a more widespread view of concepts of value, personal worth and the social contract; take the (predominantly male) generation of freeware, shareware etc. Russ spends ages on the CSS boards co-operatively developing cascading style sheets with a large community of like-minded others. Now if you take a narrowly reward-based view of IP ownership and exploitation that "giving away" is just as impoverishing as fanfic (and raises many of the same legal issues, incidentally) but no-one seems to see it that way.

[swan_tower]

Hmmmm. I had the impression that creating original characters was the exception rather than the pattern, but I didn't ever link that to Mary Sues in my mind. Interesting. (I just posted a lengthy thing on my own journal about my personal history writing fanfic; it was almost exclusively about my own characters in somebody else's setting. I never had much interest in borrowoing canon characters.)