A "Book" Revisited

Back in March I posted a little something about reading works that were once fan-fiction but have been self-published. The topic of one of the works I discussed has come up over and over again in the last couple of months. 

The Fifty Shades of Grey Series is not something I would consider literary genius.  I can't even consider it decent literature.  There are so many errors and repetitive use of words and phrases that it becomes difficult for me to read.  It's annoying because I know that I've read something similar just a few paragraphs back.

What prompted today's post started out so simply. 

A very dear friend of mine texted me this morning with a link to this article on Crushable.com.  She thought I would get a kick out of it because she knew how I felt about the subject matter.  The author of the article, Natalie Zutter, let the cat out of the proverbial bag about E.L. James' true feelings about those that helped her to get where she is today.  She's making millions of dollars thanks to those that loved her "original" story.

If you read the article, you find out that Fifty Shades of Grey was originally written as fan-fiction.  The name of it was Master of the Universe (affectionately known as MotU) and yes, it was Twilight fan-fiction. What does that mean?  Well, Christian and Ana were originally Edward and Bella.  James built a huge fan base through the Twilight fandom, and if you believe the quotes from a former confidant, she doesn't much appreciate those people.  

The article did spark a question in my mind.  How did Zutter find out about James' dislike of the fandom?  Did she speak directly with the source or pull from a blog?  A bit of a search took me to the spot I was looking for--which brought a great amount of respect for Zutter because she obviously believes in doing her research well.  I found the original source known as "gentleblaze"--well her journal.  Actually her final journal entry.  

I try not to judge people that are so negative--it takes me down a road I don't want to go down--because I'd hate for anyone to judge me so harshly.  I'm sure gentleblaze aka AngstGoddess003 had her reasons for doing what she did.  To be honest, if James had told me how she felt, I don't know that I could have kept that to myself either.  I'd want the fandom that adored her so much and gave her such high praise to know the truth. 

Psst...she doesn't really like you. 

What is sadder still is that James contends that Fifty Shades of Grey is an original work.  She even has Vintage Publishing backing her claim.  Those that read MotU before it was pulled know that this is false. James did pull the story down from Fanfiction.net and Twilighted.  She even went as far as to shut down her site 50shades.com.  If you were to try to go to that site now, it shoots you over to James' current site.  

I understand the drive to get published, believe me, I do.  When you get where you eventually hope to be, you should praise those that helped you get there.  Why would you try to ignore them as if they were a kid throwing their fourth tantrum of the day because you don't want anyone to know they're yours? Oh...wait...is that what it is?

I decided to go ahead and watch Erika James on The View.  One of the things that truly bothered me was that she couldn't look any of the hosts in the eye when speaking to them. She kept playing with her mug of water or looking at the table, finding the grain rather interesting.

"I had no idea so many people had been reading the story." 

Really?  Have she really forgotten about all those people in the world of fan-fiction that helped her with her research and kept telling her how great she was?  Is her memory that short?  Apparently so.

She also said she had an idea and put the "idea" out there. Well, let's see, she put more than the idea out.  She wrote the full story and put it out there on her website.  People have pdf copies of the entire thing.  If you google it, MotU can be found available for download. 

To this day, I don't think MotU should have been published. It was a mess then and it remains a mess.  The editing is bad, there is constant repetitiveness, and let me just say, inaccurate on certain subject matter.  I cannot believe the bull rubbish that she is spilling in these interviews. 

I was laughing my fool ass arse off about the BS-storm from James' camp regarding 50 Shades. I did find some very interesting articles.

For example: Vintage, James' publisher and an extension of Random House, says that MotU and FSoG are two distinct fiction pieces.

 **choking cough**  

There was an actual analysis done.  The gist of it, 89% the same. The 11% difference includes name changes and punctuation additions. Yeah...not at all impressed, but it was interesting to see the few changes she did make.  89% the same does not make two distinct works of fiction.  So sorry.

In the Summer of 2010 a woman by the name of Anne taught a unit in Twilight fanfiction for her Theories of Popular Culture course.  Her blog has the information on the coursework and I found it interesting. I think I may have liked that class and probably would have ripped James' story apart. Oops! Did I say that?   

I found another blogger that brought some interesting points. Fan-fiction cannot be copyrighted.  Not truly.  It's a bit of a GREY area, but the gist of it is that if it's on the net, sadly it falls under "fair use".

I did the research.  A person would have to pay a copyright fee for every piece of work written.  You can't do a general copyright based on your name.  For that you'd need a trademark and the requirements for that get even hairier.  Now James is published and her story copyrighted as Fifty Shades, so under those laws MotU is still fair use.

DISCLAIMER: I have nothing to do with legal.

That being said, I am sure a lawyer could figure out a way to say that MotU was copyrighted.

When Old Projects Are New Again

I recently began to reacquaint myself with an old writing project of mine.  At first, I was scared to see how things were going to work out.  I didn't know if I'd be able to hear my characters in my head anymore.  I didn't know if I would be able to feel what they felt or see what they saw.

I worried that I wouldn't hear their voices talking to me anymore.  It's essential that I hear them.  I need this to be able to continue to work.

<If you didn't read my last post about this, go here. >

Then, my main character reminded me of just how funny he could be.  Truth is, he's a pain in the arse, but he is funny for the most part.  He's my way of getting my frustrations and aggression out of my system without outwardly hurting anyone in my real life.  He's my evil twin, so to speak.  I have a lot of love for this character and the further into the story I get, the more I realize how very much I have missed him.

I am thoroughly enjoying getting reacquainted with him and the others in his story.

He isn't the only one I think about, but he is my focus at the moment.

Alas, I have five or six other projects that are knocking on my window.  They all want attention, but I know I lack enough focus right now to work on them all.  I desperately want to finish this one work, so that I can say that I actually completed something.  I crave that sense of accomplishment.

Back to what I was saying...

I've missed him.  I find myself reading through his pages and laughing--or thwap him on the back of the head if the need presents itself.  It's as if I wasn't the one that wrote the story.  I know I did, because it's my print, but I'm experiencing it all over again as if it were the first time.  I know it's not the first time, because I can hear him saying how funny that moment was, or regretting a decision that was made.  I can hear the character telling me how different he'd wished certain events had transpired, and I find myself aching for him.

I know, I know...You're back to thinking , "Whoa!  She's looney!"  I wouldn't blame you.  I actual think I am sometimes, but like I said in my previous post, you kind of have to be.  If you think that I am completely off my rocker, let me leave you with this.  Are you familiar with Anne Rice?  The creator of Lestat from "Interview with a Vampire"?  She has said in interviews that Lestat would often converse with her while she was writing.  She a NY Times Best Selling Author.

Not so crazy anymore, am I?

Sorry to keep this so short, but I have to get back to my little guy.

He just told me not to call him that..."little," I mean.  He's so touchy!

The Hardest Part in Reading

The more I read books lately, the more disappointed I become in parts of the publishing world.

I know that just about everyone talks of the Twilight Saga books, and some people consider them a work of art.  I saw many errors in those books.  The timeline was a bit off, there were multiple grammar errors, and can you say "Thesaurus?"  Goodness gracious!  The vocabulary in those books alone was egregious!  (See what I did there? I know how to use one too!)  Who knew teenagers knew what those words meant, let alone knew how to use them?

Most people began with the movies and know nothing of the books, but they really should read them.  The story in the books is much better.  You lose a lot in the movies which, looking back, could be a good thing for some chapters.  The movies did not do the books justice. The timeline in the movies was worse than that in print form.  Catherine Hardwicke's Twilight started the movie in the wrong month to begin with, and she added a warped situation that was never even mentioned in any of the books or Meyers' Midnight Sun.

And now...

There are writers out there doing the Self-publishing trip, but they really should have an excellent editor looking over their work.  They make me want to red-pen every mistake I find. There are missing words, grammar mistakes, word usage errors, point-of-view issues...I could go on, but won't. I don't like to point authors/writers out, that's not what this is about, but it's becoming increasingly difficult to find any book without errors in editing.

This is a story about sacrifice...
death... love... freedom.
This is a story about forever.

A part of me is wanting to take the current book I have, Sempre, and do a little red-penning.  It isn't nearly as bad as some of the others I've read, but there are a few errors here and there.  Sadly, I read this book in another form (fanfiction) before it was published, and I believe I liked it more then than I do now.  It was changed from a first person perspective--I understand why that was done--but you can see the writer's struggle with the transition.

The story itself is a good one; original in concept, good plot and good character development. The flow of the story is done well considering the amount of perspectives the author has to include, but the errors in the edit are unmistakeable.  I am hanging in there though, because I really do like this storyline.

Errors in editing bother me, probably more than they should, but I can't help but get frustrated when I come upon one.  It's not something I want to see in a published work--commercially or self-published.

If the errors in edits were just one or two here and there, okay, maybe I could let it go, but when we're talking roughly about three errors per chapter, things get a bit crazy.  It takes everything in me, not to pull my hair out.  I hate reading the same thing multiple times to try to figure out what the line is supposed to mean.  This is why it takes me so long to finish some of these books.

If I can really get into a book and enjoy myself, I can get through it in one to three days.  I have, at times, found myself taking over one week to get through a book.  Most say you should trade the book if it's taking you that long to read, but when you really want to see where the characters are going, you can't help but read on.

One such book, that I desperately tried to get through...Fifty Shades of Grey.  I cannot help but mention the trilogy because it drives me insane that it is getting so much hype.  Even HOLLYWOOD HYPE!  The wonderful thing is, I don't have to say much about it, because someone else out there felt about it the same way I do.  So, instead of giving my review or spoiling it for anyone on my blog, I shall just give you the link here.  Yes, there are spoilers in that blogger's review.  I don't particularly like her comments about James Cameron, but she is right about the book itself.

I can tell you that the sequels for Fifty Shades of Grey, don't improve upon the mistakes of the first.  They too were self-published and a former fan-fiction, but the storyline here lacks...feeling.  Much of the interaction between characters seemed robotic to me.  The book really didn't change much from its original form. I tolerated it as a fanfic because I had a few friends wanting to discuss it.  I didn't care for it then, and I don't particularly care for it now either.

Scarier still is that Vintage Books, a division of Random House Publishing, has picked up the trilogy and will continue to publish the pack.  One can only hope that they get an editor to fix the gross amount of errors, considering this statement comes from their website:

Vintage Books is the website for Vintage Publishing, a division of Random House which focuses on publishing quality literary fiction and non-fiction.

I'll keep my fingers crossed for all those future readers out there.

I have works of my own, but I would hope that I would be smart enough to be sure that all the edits were complete before I published.  I would also hope that if a publisher agreed to take on my little stories, that they'd take the time to be sure that it was edited properly.  Who knows, maybe there is no more room for that type of a profession.  If not, Lord help the art of language for it is dying just as quickly as it is being used.

My next book to read is Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins.  I want to read it before I see the movie.  The movie looks VERY interesting.

UPDATE: Because I wasn't very clear...you should read Sempre and blow off the Fifty Shades Trilogy.

Confessions of a Reader in Secret

Intrigued? Don't be.  It's nothing that is truly all that bad.

I am a fan-fiction reader. Yes.  I read fan-fiction. My little sister got me hooked on it, and at first, I will admit I did not see the draw. Then, I began to read some really good stories which had some pretty original ideas, and I began seeing some things that made me think, "Hey, I would actually buy this book if it were published."



There's been quite a bit of an uproar over the years because some authors were pulling their stories, changing the names of the characters (which were originally based off another author's work), and publishing under different titles.

At first, I was livid--especially when I was reading one and hadn't quite finished it when it was pulled--but, then I asked myself, was I into it for the story or because it was based on these characters that I knew from the original work by the original author. If the answer was the latter, then there was nothing to really get upset over. If it was the preceding, I did everything I could to find if it had been published. In all cases, it had not been published by a publishing house, but had been taken by other "writers" and represented as their own work.  Basically, it was stolen, misrepresented, and was taken down for "protection".

Recently, a book series--rumored to have been shopped by Hollywood--is taking quite a bit of flack because it had begun as a work of fan-fiction.  The author had pulled the stories, changed character names and played with the title.  The story was good and far apart from the original work's storyline, however fan-fiction readers are in hate mode.

Why?

Granted the story, originally, was written as a Twilight fan-fic (yes, I said Twilight. Get over it.), but there wasn't much if anything that resembled Twilight. Yes, it began in Washington, but not in the small town of Forks. The characters were adults and there was no "other-worldliness" to any of them.

I think the truer issue is that at one time the reading was free and now, if they want to read the story and some of the additional pieces that were added, they have to pay for it.

I said the story was good...it wasn't great, and I wouldn't pay for it, but other readers of actual published works have.  There were a few things that bothered me about the fan-fiction story (to the point where I stopped reading), but some people really loved it.  So, I guess I do feel a bit sorry for them, but in my own personal opinion....

...it should be the author's right to choose what they do with their story.  She had a good following for the series and if she chose to take it another route, then she had to know it could either ruin her or do something really great.  If she gets the Hollywood deal...I don't think she'll be too worried about what "the little people" think.

Even if they are the ones that gave her the stones enough to go after her dream.

"You got a dream, you gotta protect it. People can't do something themselves, they wanna tell you you can't do it.  If you want something, go get it. Period." - Pursuit of Happyness (Movie)