Ginger Strand @ MacDowell

When Ginger Strand told me she was going away to the Macdowell Colony for the month of August to work on the followup to her excellent debut novel, Flight, I begged her to send me some sort of dispatch I could run here, like my friend N.M. Kelby’s letter from Sewanee. So I was pretty excited to see Ginger’s email turn up in my inbox last night.

Artists! Woods! Shooting stars! That is the fabulous concurrence to which I was recently exposed here at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, where I am happily spending August.

Somehow word spread about the meteor showers. Rumor flitted from table to table at dinner, hot on the heels of the news that a certain novelist had been given extra sausages. Stories of stellar resplendence rolled with the 3-ball down the pool table. No one could quite explain it, but the attempts were creative: earth had rolled into a projectile meteor belt; the planet was tilting on its axis toward cosmic chaos, one of the gods had ashed a cigarette. In any case, there were shooting stars up there, and several of us decided to go to the golf course across the street to watch them. By 10 p.m., the appointed congregation time, word had spread further and the outing had grown–in the way colony outings often do–to the size of a Roman legion. We waited for last minute bathroom runs, then phalanxed onto the darkened road.

Immediate controversy arose over the use of flashlights. One of our number–a fabulously gung-ho sculptor–had vowed not to use her flashlight unless absolutely necessary. MacDowell has been impressively resistant to lighting, and as everyone knows, the woods are lovely, dark and deep. Going lightless can be challenging. However, one can usually follow either the hump of the rounded gravel roads, or the thin, jagged line of sky that parallels it, finding guidance, as humans will, either above or below.

In the absence of light, however, a Greek chorus of doom began summoning the specters of werewolves, ax-murderers and passing Volvos, and a few flashlights were duly, if grudgingly, engaged.

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12 August 2005 | guest authors |

Now We’ll Never See That Butterfly Effect Sequel

Lee Goldberg passes along the news about a fanfiction writer who wants private subsidization to complete her Buffy the Vampire Slayer novel, and the scornful reaction that ensued among other fanfic fans. He calls it “the funniest thing I’ve read in ages,” while Nick Mamatas calls her, in one of the few parts I can quote, an “incorrigible, self-involved parasite.”

I found out about all this from John Scalzi, who observes:

“Don’t kid yourself: Goldberg and Mamatas are the sideshow to the fanfic community pile-on. Which, incidentally, worked, since the fanfic writer in question abandoned her idea to take money and also, in the wake of 500 messages, the majority of which were (heh) disapproving, decided to take a little break from the online world. But the sheer ferocity of the response is just boggling, and should answer any doubt on the part of non-fans as to whether most fanficers have a grip on reality. Clearly they do, because they understand what the penalties are for trying to cross the line, both to themselves and to their community.”

You know, even as somebody who’s rattled the donation cup online myself, I’ve got zero sympathy for this woman–not because, as one fan put it, she wanted “monetary compensation for a goddamned fucking hobby,” but because of the difference between our “hobbies.” I mean, I’m doing whatever it is I’m doing here with the reportage and the commentary and the spotlights on other writers, and she’s basically the online equivalent of those guys you see hawking $5 bootleg DVDs on the sidewalk.

12 August 2005 | uncategorized |