OTW Fannews: Ripped from fandom

[otw_staff]

• Communities of fanfic writers took their writing group practices online decades ago. On the Media reported on a commercial copy of these spaces, dubbing it "virtual workshopping. A website from Penguin Publishing, Book Country, enables thousands of writers to exchange manuscripts and notes and self-publish their work. A few have even gotten traditional publishing deals through the site." Other than the book deals, the mechanisms sound familiar. "[I]f a writer has written something that is just awful, not very many people will comment on it or they will comment briefly and respectfully but not say very much; there's a sort of graceful fade away. And the second thing that can happen is a manuscript that might seem terrible to one reader seems fantastic to another, because they are the right audience for it. You can find sub-categories and niche audiences that you wouldn't otherwise access."


• While not commercial, Caroline Siede wrote in A.V. Club about a fandom practice that has been automated, making gifs. "Gifs have long been the bread and butter of Tumblr—the perfect way to capture every moment of Dean/Castiel sexual tension, every David Tennant eyebrow raise, and, apparently, every moment of Omar Little badassery...Either to mock these fans or to help them celebrate their beloved Wire by capturing even more moments from the show, programmer Darius Kazemi has created a robot that posts a random gif and an accompanying line of dialogue from The Wire every hour."


• At SB Nation an "experiment" in writing fanfiction to accompany a photo turned into dueling fics when "my effort at fulfilling this assignment struck my esteemed girlfriend as so gross that she would not let it stand but composed her own rival fan fiction Friday to bring the touch of urbanity to the proceedings."


• Hero Complex interviewed Eric Moro, Wikia’s director of entertainment programming and asked "Why a collaborative effort between professionals and an online fan community?" to which he replied "[O]ur various anime and manga communities draw incredibly large audiences from all over the world. So hosting a project in this space allowed us to play at a global level. Second...it’s more about the creator that’s involved than it is about the character(s). Third, comic book, movie and TV characters are all tied up in complicated rights issues/licenses. And while we’re just starting to see networks work in this space (“The Vampire Diaries” fan fiction through Amazon’s Kindle Worlds, for example), it’s still not an idea the industry has fully embraced."

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