ravenna_c_tan | Entries tagged with fandom

I have been having problems for years here on DW where I had too many friends (from back in the day when the limit was higher, I guess?) and back when LiveJournal and DW were interoperable so there was a lot of duplication, and you could import your LJ f-list to here (literally, it's the LJ accounts of people I see on my list).

But because I was way over the 1000 limit, I couldn't subscribe to anyone new here, not even communities, and this made it hard to make new friends and participate in fests.

And then there was a bug that meant any time I used the edit function to try to remove more than one friend at a time, it wouldn't work. Nothing would change. The only way to delete was to click on each one individually and then revoke access/change subscription. One at a time.

I finally chipped away at it enough that it's below the 1000 threshold, and I can friend people back, finally! Woooo!

Any fic communities or newsletters I should know about? LMK

Current Mood: cheerful

The Fansplaining podcast is about to transition to written form for a while, and they have a call for pitches up on Google docs that I feel some of you who follow me here on Dreamwidth are the sort of folks who would be interested in...!

As the form says:

"Fansplaining, the podcast by, for, and about fandom, was born on a panel at San Diego Comic-Con in 2015. Since then, we (Elizabeth Minkel & Flourish Klink) have recorded more than 250 regular and special episodes, featuring interviews with scholars, actors, writers, marketers, journalists, technologists, and fans about the ever-evolving world of fan culture. We’ve also published nearly two dozen articles—some written by us, some written by guest contributors."

"In May, we’ll be recording Flourish’s final episode (before they give birth and get ordained as a priest!), and then Fansplaining will temporarily transition into a written publication only. While Elizabeth is hoping to revive the podcast in some form eventually, in the short-term, the focus will be on publishing smart, substantive reporting on and analysis of fan culture topics."

More detail on what they're looking for and how to pitch an article:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1TjKuL5mLiqYqy5TOHm2aw9PpxCVApB5qqEKPHIL3TdM/edit#heading=h.srmyexcokgqb

OK, I took the plunge, got my early bird registration through IndieGoGo and then booked my hotel for Leviosa in Las Vegas in 2016. Many of the folks on the concom are old H/D and Snaco pals like

femmequixotic,

noeon, and

nqdonne so it was likely I was going anyway, but by registering now I got $25 off registration.

The IndieGoGo campaign only has a week left, they're 70% of the way to the goal, and even if you're not going to the con you can pick up a lot of cool swag as rewards for supporting. I was really happy to see the Slash Pack added to the rewards as well as a Slash & Queer Lit track to the programming. All the early publicity was about YA literary guests so I kind of had the (mistaken) impression that this was going to be a much "younger"/"cleaner" con than I'm used to. I've been assured there'll be plenty for smutty ol' me. :D

Suppor the campaign on IndieGogo: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/leviosa-2016-a-harry-potter-con

**Deadline is passed! Thank you all for playing! I’ll plan to make this offer again in a few months!**

The fanfic roots of my Magic University series are pretty clear, I think: who in Harry Potter fandom didn’t wonder what college would be like for wizards and witches? Although I have all original characters and an original magical system, the MU books are by a fan (me), for fans (*waves to LJ flist*), and happen to be liked by lots of other readers, too.

One of the most exciting and important developments during my time in HP fandom has been the creation and growth of the OTW: Organization for Transformative Works. If you’re not familiar with the OTW, you should be. The OTW, plain and simple, fights for the rights of fans to create fanworks. They are a bastion against the mishandling and misconduct that corporations and literary estates are prone to as they overreach on what copyright entitles them to. (Did you see that the Doyle estate finally was forced to accept that Holmes and Watson are in the public domain?)

And fanworks are in the news a lot these days (you might have noticed that 50 SHADES OF GREY, which began life as a fanfic, turned the publishing industry completely inside out last year, while AFTER, a One Direction fic from Wattpad, sold to a NYC publisher for six figures…). I believe that as corporations realize there is money to be made and material to be exploited, the right of fans to create transformative works is one that will need to be defended even more zealously than it was when they were just calling us “pirates” and “molesters” for doing it.

The OTW also operates The Archive of Our Own, a fanworks and fanfic archive. Anyone who has ever had a fanwork TOS’d or DMCA’d off a site like YouTube or Livejournal knows the value in having an online repository that is owned by us, not by some tech company.

I’ve been a paying member of the OTW for years. This year I decided to go a step further, and with the blessing of the OTW’s membership and development folks, I cooked up the following plan.

**Deadline is passed! Thank you all for playing! I’ll plan to make this offer again in a few months!**

Join the OTW or renew your membership for $10 or more before 12 noon eastern time tomorrow and I will give you a free ebook copy of THE SIREN AND THE SWORD, the first of the books in the Magic University series. AND, the first five people who respond with a donation of $25 or more will get either a signed copy of the book in paperback OR a free audiobook download from Audible.com! Your choice!

To participate, go to the OTW website (http://transformativeworks.org/support-otw), go through the Paypal button there to process your donation via credit card or from a Paypal account. Then forward your Paypal receipt, which you should get in email, to me at ctan.writer @ gmail dot com. That’s it! I’ll reply with your reward!

Please feel free to spread this offer around to anyone you know who might enjoy a magical new adult erotic romance, or who might enjoy supporting the rights of fans to create fanworks, or ideally both. :-)

Remember! Deadline is tomorrow, Friday November 21st at 12 noon! (Eastern US time!)

Mirrored from blog.ceciliatan.com.

The theme of the episode is supposed to be “fandom scandals” but I don’t think we really got into that… The whole thing is about 14 minutes long and my bit is after Aja’s, at the end.

Archived at Ravenna's Quill.

Worldcon Day One! (Thursday)

We actually arrived here Wednesday, but fairly late at night, so didn’t do anything but go up to the room and not emerge until this morning.

Today, however was non-stop action! (As cons like this often are.) Included in this post: recommendations of GLBT-inclusive sf/f books & media. But it’s at the end.

First order of business was move into our party suite. We got up early so we could move over there and register before my 12 noon panel. Managed to accomplish both those things and then get to the panel only a mere five minutes late after trying to figure out the odd arrangement of towers, elevators, and escalators in this hotel.

First panel was one I suggested myself, so therefore I got to moderate it: “We’re here, we’re queer…. are we used to it?”

Read the rest of this entry »

Mirrored from blog.ceciliatan.com.

So, one of the great fun things about living in the Boston area is that cool stuff happens like J. K Rowling delivering the commencement address at Harvard. A friend who is a graduate student there arranged for us to have tickets to the "afternoon exercises" when JKR would speak (the "morning exercises" being the actual graduation ceremony that most parents and visitors are focused on).

Harvard would already be a great place to run a Hogwarts LARP (Sanders Theater would be perfect!) but never moreso than on a day when everyone is running around in their robes. Boston.com apparently ran an article today about 9 reasons why Harvard is like Hogwarts.

Harvard President Drew Faust remarked, in her "state of the university address," which preceded Rowling's speech, that "We have elms, but no Whomping Willow.... still, it falls to me as Muggle In Chief, before I turn the podium over to our esteemed guest, to mention that reading good books may be the closest we ever come to experiencing true magic."

She then went on a 45 minute long justification of the size of Harvard's endowment ($35 billion), which was preaching to the converted, but with Congress eyeing all that money as if it should be spent as wildly as the budget surplus that Bill Clinton left the US government with was when Bush took office... well, I can hardly blame her.

But then came Jo.

She first addressed the Harvard officers and alumni/ae who had invited her there to say "thank you," because in the many weeks of nausea and trepidation that led up to today's honor of delivering the address she had "lost a lot of weight." Much laughter. "A win-win situation." She said she was getting through by "squinting at all the red banners and convincing myself that I am at the world's largest Gryffindor reunion."
( Read more... )

Here's the essay...

Five Keys To Writing Post Deathly Hallows Harry/Draco
By Ravenna C. Tan

Written for the "Fandom Opinion" segment of Slashcast, which podcast can be heard here:
http://community.livejournal.com/slashcast/19659.html

Well, HD-shippers, there's good news and bad news. The bad news is that the epilogue exists, and we know Draco didn't end up with Harry after all. The good news is that given the ages of the children in the epilogue, there's a good 6 to 7 years right after Voldemort's fall when Harry and Draco could have been having a torrid post-war affair. This interregnum is just one of the many gifts JK Rowling gave to us HD-devotees in Deathly Hallows, including that lovely tandem boom ride rescue.

If you're going to write what I'll call H/D Interregnum Fic, though, here are the five questions I feel I need to answer for myself, either in the story or in the background of the characters I use when writing it, even if the answers don't make it to the page. (Though they usually do...)

( Number One... )

So I got invited to submit an essay to the latest Slashcast! I submitted a piece called "The Five Keyes to Writing Post DH H/D."

I'll post it here tomorrow... I'm too sleepy to proof read it now.

But you can listen to the podcast of it here:

http://community.livejournal.com/slashcast/19659.html

I used my "NPR Voice." Hee!

They billed it as the best Harry Potter party ever, and maybe it really was. Harvard Square's booksellers and other retailers, instead of merely competing with each other for the Potter-fan dollar, banded together to create a fine celebration including a 3 hour live outdoor concert with Harry and the Potters, Draco and Malfoys, and The Hungarian Horntails, Potter-themed food at many of the restaurants, Hogwarts-style clothing on store mannekins, and of course the usual bookstore stuff.

In preparation for playing the part of 17-year-old Draco Malfoy in a Trial of Severus Snape at

pandemonium_bks later in the evening, I left the house in full costume including blond wig. Thankfully the humidity had broken and it was turning into a nice summer evening.

veiled_severus and I met for a delicious dinner at Mr. Bartley's. We got in just after 5:30 and sat down right away. The lingering heat and humidity made me feel as though a burger, which is their specialty, wasn't going to sit well, so I ordered gazpacho (cold soup), fish cakes, and two drinks, a large raspberry lime rickey, and a cookies & cream frappe. (That's a milkshake to most of you.)

By the time we left, me bringing my frappe in a to-go cup, the line was long for Bartley's, obscuring the windows of the Harvard Bookstore, which had a large Potter-related merch table, including books like the Whimsic Alley Book of Spells and prefect badges, Moody-like Mad Eyes, and so forth. We walked around a bit, noting the growing percentage of wizarding types among the pedestrians, and had a look at the chalk murals that some enterprising folks were drawing in the plaza outside the Cambridge Trust/Au Bon Pain.

I overheard one woman say as we passed her, "What is it, some kind of Harry Potter convention going on?" Hello, have you been living under a rock?

Speaking of rock, we then went into Harvard Yard where the concert was to take place. There were various merch tables that we didn't really bother to look at. They were giving away samples of Nantucket nectars, things like that.

We picked a spot in the grass. I sat on my robes (machine washable!) and she sat on the cloak with silver lining I was lending her for the evening. The sky was nearly pure blue, only a contrail or two marring the cloudlessness. Given that it had been raining that morning, and the prediction was for 30% chance of rain showers, everyone who knew weather magic must have been applying it.
( and what all happened in our evening )
Of course the main event was getting the book itself, at midnight. After which we rushed straight home to start reading.

veiled_severus stayed over at my house, we read until about 4am, then conked out. She finished around 6pm the next day, while I was busy teaching a class and things. I finished a little before midnight.

Some future post will have my thoughts on the actual book!

( And the photo of me as Draco... )

Publishers Weekly is running a poll asking people what they think Rowling's next Potterverse book should be about, should she write one. I believe anyone can post (it's a blog that one can post feedback/comments to) and can be found here: http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6460916.html

Personally I think she could do a much better job than George Lucas of going back to the previous generation. The story of the Marauders and that era would be totally gripping and fascinating. And not just to "the fandom," hardcore people like us, but to the more mainstream readers, I think. It could still be YA, still in the Hogwarts milieu...

Riz at Pandemonium is organizing a 'trial of Snape in absentia,' and still needs witnesses. She writes:

RE: July 20th, the Potter Party/Hogwarts Class Reunion & Trial of Severus Snape.

There’s a lot of events going on that night—the Trial will start about 8:15-8:30 and will go for about ½ an hour to 45 minutes. Ruth Anne has already signed on to be Narcissa Black; Ravenna C. Tan is coming in for Draco. HOWEVER… I still need a couple more witnesses. This is NOT going to be scripted; HOWEVER, the witnesses need to know the Potter universe really well, particularly the last two books, as they will be questioned by both myself (the defense advocate) and Jim Wolf (Cornelius Fudge, prosecuting for the Ministry of Magic). And I REALLY need a Harry.

If you’re interested or know someone else who is, please steer ‘em my way. There’ll be a meeting at Pandemonium next Thursday, 7/12, around 7:00 just for folks to meet, greet, get an overview and ask any questions. The meeting will NOT be held at Pandemonium—I just want to meet up there and then head to a café or something, as major gaming will be taking place downstairs.

Steering folks her way: lrisley -at- lesley.edu

Okay? Okay!

So it turns out my lovely partner has to go to a martial arts seminar in Buffalo on the weekend of Prophecy. The main reason I can't go to Prophecy is a total lack of money to get there.

Now it turns out I could ride free as far as Buffalo on Friday evening, so all I would have to do is get myself from Buffalo to Toronto (and back again on Sunday). I'd really only be there for a short time, but it'd be better than nothing, no?

I'll need to probably hook up with someone's floor to crash on. And save my pennies for food. But... it's a possibility.

*crosses fingers*