Who Owns the World? A reaction to Kindle Worlds

As you probably know by now, Amazon has announced that they will be launching a new Kindle Direct program called Kindle Worlds.  Fan-fic authors can submit their work in one of the official licensed worlds and if accepted will find their work for sale on Amazon.com.  Along the way, Amazon gets all kinds of benefits and perks and young fledgling authors who have been writing fan-fic for fun or for practice can now add "for profit" to their reasons for doing so.

John Scalzi, who himself is brilliant in all things writer-advocacy, has a great post up where he dissects the actual agreement.  I'm going to spring board off of that myself here.

Spring boarding off of this there is one fundamental underlying question:  Who owns a world?

Writing "Real" Fiction

So a while back I waxed poetic on the merits of writing fan fic as a means to practice your art and to establish some kind of reputation as someone who can tell a story, craft dialogue and engage characters.  I stand by that advice, but I would like to deal with some of the negative stigmas that Fan Fic gets and how some of them are legitimate.

One thing that I see in a lot of fan fic, but rarely in quality published writing, is the use of specifics.  The main character does not get into a hot rod to drive to school, she climbs into a 2012 Pontiac Solstice with turbo charged V8, leather seats and the eight speaker stereo.

This makes me want to ask the author:  So?

On being a cover band/writer

There's been a bit of a curfluffle as there often is over on Good Reads, this time about 50 Shades of Grey. For those of you who don't follow literary circles (using the term loosely), the 50 Shades series is a trilogy of novels that follow a dominant man as he seduces an innocent, loving, young woman. The works are getting a great deal of attention in part due to the history of the work (it began as Twilight fan fiction) and because it's become the new guilty pleasure: A saucy kinky steamy romance complete with handcuffs and blindfolds.

And while a great deal can be said about the transitory nature of the book and how they've brought a good number of people out of their shells, or rather lead them to think thoughts that they thought only "those people" would think, I'd like to focus on the first of those two, the origin story of the novels.

But first, let's talk about Cover Bands and Harry Potter.