Saturday, November 30, 2013

Apologies

I fear I have been neglecting you, my friends


I've had so much going on this year that I have failed to make posts since May.


Where to start?


Well, I guess the most important update is the Anthology my short story, Beyond the Grave, is featured in was published back in Aug. Dawn of the Living Dead is a collection of paranormal stories by some of the most talented young writers I'm honored to share a book with.

http://www.amazon.com/Dawn-Living-Dead-Melissa-Somoza-ebook/dp/B00EUM9ANM/ref=sr_1_1_title_0_main?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1385869666&sr=1-1&keywords=dawn+of+the+living+dead

http://www.amazon.com/Dawn-Living-Dead-Melissa-Somoza/dp/1492120928/ref=sr_1_1_title_1_pap?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1385869666&sr=1-1&keywords=dawn+of+the+living+dead


I just finished my second NaNoWriMo (Yay!) Met some awesome new friends :)


I'll be working on my fantasy series The Asagai of Mitera next and hopefully I'll keep yall more informed.

Until next time, my friends

Sunday, May 19, 2013

Fan Fiction

Today I want to talk about fan fiction.

For those of you who don't know what that is, fan fiction, also known as fanfic or just fic, is where writers take established works like the Twilight Saga, the Star Trek franchise and the Dragon Age franchise and create their own works using the world of the work they are fans of. Many times the writer will create their own character from that universe, called an Original Character or OC, and take events from either a film, book, or video game and stick that character in it. The Copyright laws generally overlook fan fiction as long as you put a disclaimer that you do not own the original work.

For example:

Jethro Gibbs, Ziva David, Tony DiNozzo and NCIS in general belongs to CBS.
Agent Jessica Jackson belongs to me.

The first have lets people know that the Chacters of Gibbs, Ziva and Tony and the TV show they appear on, NCIS, are copyrighted to CBS Television and do not belong to you in anyway. The second line tells the reader that Agent Jackson is your OC.

Now this doesn't mean you can go and publish your NCIS fanfic and make royalties off of it. Then you will end up in court being sued by CBS and NCIS' creators for copyright infringement.


Personally, as a writer, I think writing a fan fiction is great practice and a great way to pass the time when you either have writer's block or you're just stuck on what comes next in your original story. I have a whole series of stories based on Bioware's Dragon Age franchise: One very long novel length one with its sequel in the works and several shorter ones.

And for those of you who don't know, Dragon Age is a role play game video game where you take a character that the creators give you and personalize him or her. The player has the choice of choosing the gender, race, class and origin of the protagonist (referred to as Personal Character or PC here). The surnames are given but you have the choice of either going with the first name the game offers or create your own.

Now in the case of Dragon Age fanfic, many fans will write tales about their PC and their adventures in the games. I have seen a few that will create their own characters and stick them in there.

Now, yall know I am one of those fanfic writers. When I first started writing, I broke in with fanfics. My first being based of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen film. As the film had been open ended, I wrote a "sequel". Looking back on it now, it was horrible. I also did one for Hellboy (which was never finished) and, don't laugh, a Twilight fic (It was never published and only one person other person read it)

Wait. You said you couldn't publish fanfic...

You can't publish it where you'll get paid for it. There are plenty of sites out there where fanfiction can be read by others. fanfiction.net is the most popular, but other sites like deviantART and Archive of our Own (AO3) host fanfic, the former has art to go along with it.

Now, not all authors like fanfiction are there are some who do not want their works to be made into fanfiction and will take steps to prevent it. Anne Rice (The Vampire Chronicles) Anne McCaffrey (Dragonriders of Pern) and Raymond Feist (The Riftwar Cycle) do not allow fanfic to be written with any of their characters. George R. R. Martin (A Song of Ice and Fire) is strongly opposed to fanfic and believes it's copyright infringment and not something aspiring authors should do

But there are some authors who love the fanfic based off their works. J.K Rawling (The Harry Potter Series) has been noted as saying she is "flattered" by people writing harry Potter fics. Stephenie Meyer (The Twilight Saga, The Host) even posts links on her website to her favorite fics.

In fact, the popular Fifty Shades trilogy was born as a Twilight fanfiction originally titled Master of the Universe. E.L James renamed the characters and obviously did some heavy edits before publishing them.

But don't get me started on that series...


But the whole point of this week's ramble was to talk about the little known "genre" of fan fiction. What do you think?

Until next time, Friends

Happy Writing


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_fiction
deviantart.com
http://archiveofourown.org/
http://stepheniemeyer.com/ts_fansites.html

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Sunday, February 24, 2013

Plagiarism

You spends countless hours, days, weeks, months even years fleshing out your story. You share it with folks. You get feedback and rave reviews. And then someone takes that which you have shed ink, sweat and tears over and passes it off as their own.

Plagiarism isn't new. It's been around as long as the written word. It's a fight that we writers, artists etc. deal with.

What inspired this topic today?

About 2-3 years ago now, I started playing the first game in the Dragon Age franchise. I loved the story so much I recommended it to one of my sisters. I made the offhand comment that my character's story would make a great book. She then asked if I would write one for her. Of course I agreed, since I didn't have any active writing projects at the time. A year later I gave her the finished project. Since then, I've written several short stories based on the Dragon Age universe and connected with the fan fiction community. After playing the second game of the franchise, I was inspired to write a short story from one of the character's point of view. The character, Fenris, is a romance option for the player character and let me tell you, it's one complected romance. The story, Broken, also inspired by a song of the same name, turned out to be one of my best ones and told Fenris' version of his relationship with Alexandria, what I named my character, from their first meeting to the final battle and beyond.

I finally had the courage to post it on deviantART in January. On Friday, a wonderful young woman on the site informed me that Broken was on Bioware Social being passed off as being written by a girl calling herself Emma Shepard. It had been posted 10 days after I published it. Of course, I was livid and immediately asked her to remove it before I reported the plagiarism to the administrator. Within 24 hours the post, along with every other story she'd stolen, was taken down

Of course I was mad. I had spent the good part of the previous month fleshing it out. Only to have Emma Shepard take less than 5 minutes to copy and paste it to another site and claim that she wrote it.


Photo by MLauba


I think what pissed me off the most was the fact that she didn't credit me as the author. Yes, I was mad that she didn't ask first. I may have even allowed it then as long as she credited me. But to pass it off as her own. That is intolerable.

I hope and pray that any of you writers out there that read this never have to deal with the stress of being plagiarized. Trust me, it's no fun

Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Holy Mother of Pearl!

I have disappoint you guys, I'm afraid. My weekly blog seemed to have died for 5 months... I'm a horrible blogger apparently

Well to give you some up dates:

October: I prepared for National Novel Writing Month and did a lot of drawing.

November: I participated in my first NaNoWriMo and not only made the "50,000 words in 30 days" goal, I did an extra 18,000 words. I also made a ton of friends locally who are writers as well.

December: Christmas. 'nuff said. And I had to recover from the writing binge lol

January: I focused a lot on a fan fiction and wrote a lot of fan fiction stories :/ Although I did gather some ideas on how to add more drama into a love triangle in The Rangers of Aleera.

Febuary: More edits on both the Fanfiction and The Rangers of Aleera


And here we are again. I will do my best to update once a week.

Until next time, friends

Happy Writing


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