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Initial observations
10 Feb 2013 04:54 pmWith so many social software sites, it's always fascinating to see who's on it and who's not, what's happening, and what's not. I was surprised to find so many fanfic groups here on Dreamwidth, and so little other writing, when I expected to have found them on FB and failed to do so. Fanfic seems to encourage pseudonyms both by its nature and because its a fun thing that people do as part of the community/convention atmosphere while FB asks users to use their real name, so that might be part of it.(I'm not a regular fanfic person, BTW, preferring to create my own fantasy and science fiction universes and characters, but I discovered them when a convention I expected to be a writer-focused SF con turned out to be a fanfic con, instead. A fun and impressively diverse group with some good writing classes, though mostly not my thing.
I've also found a YA group, very new, that I am hopeful will be a useful and interesting chat group. I had hopes for the writing groups on FB but they have had a tendency to become places for authors to tout their new books: e-books, self-published, a few small presses, some of questionable legitimacy (which is to say, I have the impression that the publishers didn't have an editor or other source of quality control to filter out even the beginner first drafts of enthusiastic but untrained high-schoolers from being turned into e-books) with little effort to offer suggestions or advice to those of us still hoping to find real publishers, discuss the writing and creative process, or otherwise discuss any aspect of the writing and publishing processes in general or specific to the genre's specified in the group titles (like fantasy and science fiction writers: how can a group professing to be SFF writers discussing their craft not get more than two comments on a discussion of world building? Where are the discussions about finding SFF readers as well as publishers (most of whom seem to have lost any concept of what fantasy and science fiction is supposed to be! They don't seem to know that horror, speculative fiction, and popfic contemporary adventure are not synonymous, and of course do't care if they think it will sell, alas.)
Don't have a plan for a regular schedule of posts, yet. We'll see how it goes.
I've also found a YA group, very new, that I am hopeful will be a useful and interesting chat group. I had hopes for the writing groups on FB but they have had a tendency to become places for authors to tout their new books: e-books, self-published, a few small presses, some of questionable legitimacy (which is to say, I have the impression that the publishers didn't have an editor or other source of quality control to filter out even the beginner first drafts of enthusiastic but untrained high-schoolers from being turned into e-books) with little effort to offer suggestions or advice to those of us still hoping to find real publishers, discuss the writing and creative process, or otherwise discuss any aspect of the writing and publishing processes in general or specific to the genre's specified in the group titles (like fantasy and science fiction writers: how can a group professing to be SFF writers discussing their craft not get more than two comments on a discussion of world building? Where are the discussions about finding SFF readers as well as publishers (most of whom seem to have lost any concept of what fantasy and science fiction is supposed to be! They don't seem to know that horror, speculative fiction, and popfic contemporary adventure are not synonymous, and of course do't care if they think it will sell, alas.)
Don't have a plan for a regular schedule of posts, yet. We'll see how it goes.
