[American Magic] Lost Twins (short-chapter version)

[Muphrid]

This is a different notebook; the scene would be happening about the same time Simon was getting home. I made the notebooks are different colours, but that's really too much of an unnoticeable detail. Hmm. I wonder if there's some way to make it clearer....

Maybe a distinctly different surface.  I remember Simon's notebook has a tortoiseshell surfacing?  Alternatively, show that the old man has several notebooks that are all distinct.  I mean, if he has two, is it much of a leap for him to have many more?

The whole autonomous Bolg government thing is also weird to have, in a place as controlling as the United States. But it is something the human government tolerates, because the alternative would involve either having the Bolg try to challenge the humans for territory, or allowing the Bolg to vote in human elections. Both of these were reckoned as horrendously bad ideas. The way it's set up instead is that the governments have this weird mutual recognition agreement, even though the Bolg side of things barely is a government by human standards; a 'division' of Bolg is merely the fattest troll of the bunch, who cobbles together a coalition of maunar and then uses them to push everyone around on a small slice of territory into obeying what she says. Or, as Guard puts it, a "family establishment".

Strikes me as somewhat similar to Indian reservations:  occupying a strange legal limbo between total control and jurisdiction and a total lack of control and jurisdiction, often in counter-intuitive combinations.

I am still debating between a number of books for her to be reading, so the space is only temporarily empty. Probably The English in the West Indies: Or, The Bow of Ulysses or something similarly jarring (if the reader bothers to look it up).

Reading on the television because conventional books are not Bolg sized?

[Arakawa]

Strikes me as somewhat similar to Indian reservations:  occupying a strange legal limbo between total control and jurisdiction and a total lack of control and jurisdiction, often in counter-intuitive combinations.

That's pretty close to it.

Spoiler: ShowHide

I just realized that another comparison that might be drawn is to the strange sovereign jurisdiction that Reverend Bacon was depicted as having in Bonfire of the Vanities, where he also had a mansion in the Bronx and lieutenants who ran things for him, and a whole arrangement whereby to extort money from the official government in exchange for keeping a lid on black civil unrest in the city.

It's not so much a conscious riff on Vanities, as it is that this kind of arrangement really does seem like something that plausibly arises where there's two very differentiated groups in the same city, and the political priority is to keep them separate to avoid a massive mess of tensions, rather than pursuing any dreams of equality or equivalence. As you said, native reservations are another good comparison. From what little I know, it seems to be very easy for the central government to just pay a few influential people off and turn a blind eye to any social problems on a reservation, and the rhetoric that this is a group that should be independent and self-governing can actually be misused to justify this.

And since unlike Reverend Bacon the Bolg have official recognition as an authority, they get money from official funding schemes rather than under-the-table extortion, so it really is closer to a reservation.

It's potentially a very heavy topic, so I'm glad it doesn't really come into focus during this point in the story, because Simon doesn't really have the context or the perception to think about this aspect of things.

Reading on the television because conventional books are not Bolg sized?

Indeed -- books are really not troll sized. (Although trolls are a minority of Bolg. They come in a variety of sizes from tiny imps through human-sized goblins - as we saw on the train - through the larger trolls who form sort of a governing class. It's very straightforward. Bigger and meaner means authority. How they make a principle this asinine work as a governing arrangement is far more complicated.)

[Arakawa]

Just a quick update: currently I'm trying to solidify some aspects of the world building for this universe; that's just where the muse is dragging me, I guess. If anyone is interested in helping me out with feedback on this, please PM me. I won't post my notes on this thread since they're potentially a lot more spoilery than I'd like them to be at this stage, but I'm more than willing to share them with anyone who doesn't mind that.

[Arakawa]

Just a quick update: currently I'm trying to solidify some aspects of the world building for this universe; that's just where the muse is dragging me, I guess. If anyone is interested in helping me out with feedback on this, please PM me. I won't post my notes on this thread since they're potentially a lot more spoilery than I'd like them to be at this stage, but I'm more than willing to share them with anyone who doesn't mind that.

Changed my mind; worldbuilding thread is going to be here. I figure I should be writing something, as long as I write regularly.

[Arakawa]

Due to unrelated stuff happening, my writing on this project has been slow. In the interim, here is a Drake Powell:

Spoiler: ShowHide

I should also note that I'm pondering https://leanpub.com/ as the publishing thingamajig for the eventual fic. While the natural thing to do there is charge some symbolic amount of money for an ebook, I'm dithering whether it's ethical for me to have that as a plan, while still posting in-progress chapters here for C&C. This is quite a ways away, but any thoughts?

_{(I honestly care for Leanpub's ebook-generator tools far more than their monetization thing, so the more important question would be to look into what tools they're using and how that can be duplicated offline, I guess.)}

[Jason_Miao]

Due to unrelated stuff happening, my writing on this project has been slow. In the interim, here is a Drake Powell:

Spoiler: ShowHide

I should also note that I'm pondering https://leanpub.com/ as the publishing thingamajig for the eventual fic. While the natural thing to do there is charge some symbolic amount of money for an ebook, I'm dithering whether it's ethical for me to have that as a plan, while still posting in-progress chapters here for C&C. This is quite a ways away, but any thoughts?

_{(I honestly care for Leanpub's ebook-generator tools far more than their monetization thing, so the more important question would be to look into what tools they're using and how that can be duplicated offline, I guess.)}

Don't know much about leanpub, but traditional publishers in general tend to care quite a bit about monetization.  And if someone does a basic search and finds your work on the internet, that may negatively impact the publication process.  OTOH, if this is one of those places where anyone can "publish" but you're feeling bad about charging even the minimum, some ideas:

(1) Make the sale version look slick and professional: if you personally know a top-notch computer illustrator (because one that you don't know personally won't draw for cheap), high-res portraits, NY map akin to those in fantasy novels...basically, make the buyer feel like he or she just bought the equivalent of a hardcover novel.
(2) Throw in a link to this thread in the book description and tell people up front that there is a free version.  If they liked the story enough, they can donate by purchasing the ebook version.
(3) Learn to live with the horrifying thought that some people may end up giving you money because they believed your story might be worth that amount in the absence of knowledge of a free version on the internet.
(4) Donate the proceeds to a worthy cause.  Ideally, something that has some relation to your story, but in a pinch, feeding the homeless or curing cancer works.  Whether you tell people you'll do that or not upfront is up to you.
(5) If Drac is willing, request deletion of this thread once you've obtained sufficient C&C. 

[Muphrid]

My understanding of copyright law here is that this forum qualifies as a private forum; attachments can only be downloaded by members, so in principle, the story is not open to the public.

How much that actually applies when anyone can sign up...is another question, though.

[Arakawa]

I think my main ethical qualm isn't in slighting the readers by charging for something that there's a free version lying around of, but in slighting anyone who contributes C&C, thereby helping materially improve the book, then turning around and selling it myself for a bunch of money.

Said qualm is probably ridiculous, because if the fic is not popular it will make only symbolic amounts of money that will not be worth the bother of giving C&Cers a cut, and if the fic is popular enough to make more than symbolic amounts of money, then Soulriders would no longer be a feasible place to post random drafts and spoilers for further instalments anyways :-P

As you can see my kind-of-plan (publishing in the medium-to-long term) is also to include illustrations, and generally go for a full-glossy novel experience. (Drawing is easier to fit into my current schedule than writing, actually, because I can scribble things a bit at a time and then assemble some kind of more polished work based on those, whereas writing requires long chunks of time.) So yeah, map of goblin trade colonies across New York, pretentious preface, and all that stuff. So, on that note, I suppose I can justify it as a "premium" thing even if a free version is lying around.

(Attachment is the kind of thing leanpub spits out as a PDF / ebook / whatever.)

The issue of people going to SR to look at drafts for free is totally moot when anyone can also put up the Leanpub-generated PDF as a torrent, which I have better things to do than police.

How much that actually applies when anyone can sign up...is another question, though.

In some ways I'm wasting my time pondering further the hypothetical of "what if this makes a bunch of money and popularity". Probably I'll put up the book and about 3 people will be interested (I'll still have discharged the debt to my muse), in which case they're more than welcome to track me down to Soulriders if they so care. If a bazillion people unexpectedly start to buy it then there may be an issue of making sure they don't all have a stupid reason to flood into SR, but I suppose that kind of thing would be easy to handle as it comes up.

So, my main question was resolving the ethical moment of whether the C&Cers I've had thus far object to something eventually becoming a commercial work, and the response at the moment seems to be "Enh." So it doesn't seem like a problem.

On an unrelated note, I'm curious how far off Powell is from your mental image :-P

[Jason_Miao]

I think my main ethical qualm isn't in slighting the readers by charging for something that there's a free version lying around of, but in slighting anyone who contributes C&C, thereby helping materially improve the book, then turning around and selling it myself for a bunch of money.

Hmm...well, haven't really contributed C&C for quite awhile (I think I did for chapters of an earlier version, but life doesn't permit me the time to really dig into a story to give C&C like I used to), but for what it's worth, I would be pretty happy if anything I helped to edit became wildly popular.  In the end, it's your words, your effort, and your story.  It's usually authors, not editors, that are on the cover of a book.  Now, if people are co-authoring, then yes, you might have a bit of a problem, but I don't think that has happened here.

But my opinion aside, per the thread history, it looks like Murphid has been really the one carrying the C&C ball here, so maybe his answer is more relevant than mine. :)

[Muphrid]

Frankly I expected that this novel would be published in some capacity (though self-publishing in particular took me by surprise).  I have no problem providing feedback with that in mind; again, I expected that's how it would ultimately be used.

And, perhaps, if I get done with the fanfic bug, I have some original novel ideas of my own that I might consider writing (or in some cases, rewriting), and I can only hope that the favor would be returned in kind.  I think as long as everyone's clear that that is your intention, they can choose whether to go for it or not with respect to offering c&c.

As far as my image of Powell, I had imagined big, almost childlike eyes that would clash with the usual expressions those eyes would hold.  Also, flat, straight hair (though not much longer than drawn).  All these being really trivial details, though, I'm not sure how important they really are to drawing her.

[Arakawa]

Frankly I expected that this novel would be published in some capacity (though self-publishing in particular took me by surprise).  I have no problem providing feedback with that in mind; again, I expected that's how it would ultimately be used.

Interestingly, I hadn't considered anything besides self-publishing. The only question would be where, and how. (The lowest cost option would be to throw it out on FictionPress - ergh - but that feels far too lazy and dismissive of the work that would go into writing it.)

Correction: I might consider options other than self-publishing if the book was short and to the point, but it actually just presumes a series that goes on and on and on... and I couldn't guarantee actually finishing that to any person who was considering it for publication. Nor is it clear that they would want a series even if I did guarantee it. I'll revisit this with you on IRC when I have more writing progress, I guess; as someone who is also pondering original-fiction, you've probably thought about the tradeoffs here as well.

I know maybe one person who might have some kind of familiarity with conventional publishing, what gets published and what doesn't, so maybe I'll ask her when I have a cohesive draft.

And, perhaps, if I get done with the fanfic bug, I have some original novel ideas of my own that I might consider writing (or in some cases, rewriting), and I can only hope that the favor would be returned in kind.  I think as long as everyone's clear that that is your intention, they can choose whether to go for it or not with respect to offering c&c.

That, I think, is what I wanted to clear up: before I post any further stuff, I just wanted to make it clear what my eventual intent to do with the story was, so people can c&c or not keeping that in mind. I certainly wouldn't care if the eventual story was going to be for-pay/for-free when giving writing feedback on a forum.

As far as my image of Powell, I had imagined big, almost childlike eyes that would clash with the usual expressions those eyes would hold.

Maybe this scribble is also relevant:

Spoiler: ShowHide

I do wonder if I'll realistically be able to do the illustration thing, or not, during the next couple of years. The current course I'm taking definitely pushes towards teaching a detailed structure at the expense of being accurate to imagination, in terms of character design -- which is really not what I want (if forced to trade off, I'd rather have a badly structured drawing that looks like the characters) -- so, the early classes were massively helpful, but now it feels like I'm getting into diminishing returns.

[Arakawa]

The universe keeps throwing research material my way.

I just got into an online argument with the closest thing to a real life Old Jonah Frost. Some religious-flavoured 'neoreactionary' type armchair theorist. He opined that, if given dominion over, say, the city of Toronto as it is today, he wouldn't even bother trying to fix things (it's so far gone into evil in his opinion), he'd in fact actively work to hasten a collapse of the society.

It's really weird to anticipate a person's argument even before you're aware that it's a thing. Earlier I thought Old Frost was primarily a hammy product of my imagination, who'd do passably well to drive the initial encounters.