Home again, home again.

[alex_beecroft]

Jiggety jig.

We are safely returned from Cornwall, bringing home with us patchy tans, several pounds of extra weight due to ice-creams and cream-teas, soaked and salty wetsuits, and a sheaf of photos that need sorting through before I post any on here.

(Not one of our photos of the Minack Theatre. Ours include the stage hands setting up backdrops for The Book of Mirrors, a steampunk musical. But as I say, they’re still in the camera.)

I just about managed to keep up with my more urgent emails while I was there, but it’s hard typing a cogent message on a mobile phone, so I’m catching up with my blog posts now I’m home.

Speaking of which, here I am guesting on Elin Gregory’s blog, being put through the ordeal of the Comfy Chair:

http://elingregory.wordpress.com/2012/08/11/today-in-the-comfy-chair-alex-beecroft/

where I’m talking about the problem I have with villains. (They will keep blocking the chimney when they try to break into the place. Why can’t they just come to the front door like the salesmen?)

Mrs Giggles reviews Bomber’s Moon and gives it a mark of 83 (out of 100.) I don’t think I really do it for her, but many thanks to her for reviewing it

Clare London sent me an interesting link to a Guardian article on fan fiction

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/aug/13/fan-fiction-fifty-shades-grey

in which, apparently, the mainstreaming of fanfiction spells the end of literature as we know it. IMO, this doesn’t sound like a bad thing. My only real interest in 50 Shades of Grey comes from noting that it at least proves definitively that there’s nothing illegal about filing the serial numbers off your fanfic and publishing it. If this isn’t a legal precedent, I don’t know what is.

Mirrored from Alex Beecroft - Author of Gay Historical and Fantasy Fiction.

Comments

[alex_beecroft]

I think you probably had to be in the know - someone who had known the original fanfic version - to know that the Temeraire series was O'Brian fanfic. They could very easily have been simply original fiction set during the Napoleonic wars, so they flew under the radar more. (I've read quite a few of them and honestly see no resemblance to PoB's books at all.)

With 50 shades, it's such common knowledge that it's in all the newspapers. You could definitely argue that the issue hadn't been forced up to now. But now, everybody knows, there's no plausible deniability, millions of dollars are at stake, the world is watching, and still there's been no lawsuit. Lots of gnashing of teeth, but no legal action, and you'd have thought that if there was going to be legal action it should have happened by now.