Day off today…which really meant it was just a day to catch up on all the things that I hadn’t been able to do during the week 😛
So, I did laundry, bought some groceries, cleaned the house and the floors which included both vacuuming and wet-jet-ing. The hardwood floors feel sooooo nice after using the wet-jet. I love it.
Did writing first thing, and then some more writing in the evening, though not as much as I’d hoped I would because I ended up hanging out with a young chap by the name of Nico for most of the evening. But still…two pages away from nirvana. TWO PAGES. I’m at 67. 65 is the absolute limit for a pilot. Two. Pages.
Gotta find it. Somehow some way. Going to do a read-through of Act V tomorrow in the morning, and then hopefully the Ho can read it during the day and suggest some cuts. Then…maybe a polish on Monday…and I submit it that night for this contest? I don’t know…we’ll see. The hard deadline for this pilot contest is NOT Monday night. The price to enter goes up $10 after Monday night, but no, Monday is the last day of February and that was kinda the date I gave *myself* to finish by. So, I’m going to do my damndest to hit that, but if I feel like I haven’t been able to go through with a fine enough comb, I’ll pay that extra $10 and spend a couple extra days on it.
Guys…I cannot tell you how amazing it feels to be on the roll that I am right now, which is to say that I’m in a rhythm. I’ve only got to this point by forcing myself to sit down for several hours every day. Every. Day. I’m up to 90-minute sessions now, which is also nice. 90 minutes in the morning, 90 minutes in the evening. I look forward to the day, oh how I look forward to the day when that will be my actual work schedule. When the hours in between can be used for daily life things, like all the stuff I did today, or for leisure. That’s the dream I’m working so hard to make a reality. And I really DO believe it will be a reality. Not so much that I’ll have “leisure time”…LIFE gets in the way of that shit…no, I mean that the writing will actually be my JOB. If I keep busting my ass, I *will* get there.
The worldly subject tonight concerns fan films. There’s someone I follow on the twits who was involved in a Trek fan film that raised in excess of $1 million, and they’re currently being sued over that. He’s someone I enjoy reading tweets from, and someone I respect for his other work. Obviously, he’s upset and disappointed about the lawsuit…he was making a comparison with how Paramount/CBS, the owners of the Trek copyrights, have historically been so welcoming of fan fiction – going so far even to have established the “Strange New Worlds” writing contest to gather fan submissions and actually legitimize them through publication. His tweet was a lament that fan films haven’t been treated the same…and that comparison really underscored for me, actually, why they’re so very very different: money.
My viewpoint on “copyright” is that it quite literally exists because of money. It exists to protect someone who’s created some kind of intellectual property from others using that property and make sure the original creator gets PAID for what they created. That’s an incredibly poorly contruscted sentence back there, but I’m tired and I ain’t revising shit tonight. Basically, copyrights exist to protect commerce. Otherwise, they wouldn’t exist. Commerce is money, so copyrights are money. And the reason why a fan film like the one currently being sued is so VASTLY difference from a short story contest is the MONEY INVOLVED. This fan film raised over a *million* dollars. That is absolutely a threat to the original copyright. It’s just so much money.
I completely understand the argument about fan expression, and I agree with it; no matter how you cut it, shutting down fan films is restricting the creativity and involvement of your #1 customers. That’s absolutely true. BUT…at the same time…you cannot expect to raise a million fucking dollars and literally put the name STAR TREK on your project, and then be outraged when the people who own that name come to your doorstep to tell you it’s not okay. If I write a book “Cooper in Space” which becomes successful and is paying my bills, you’d better believe I’d be pissed if someone went and used my characters, my world, and my *name* to raise a million dollars to make a movie about it…without asking or being given permission. I mean, that really is the other side of this argument. That’s why copyright law exists…to protect the creative people out there.
“But, CBS didn’t create SHIT,” you might reasonably point out. True. But Gene Roddenberry did. And then he sold it to CBS/whomever for the money that bought his house and paid for his family to live after he died. That’s how copyrights protect creative minds.
So yeah…I sympathize with the fan films. I really REALLY do, and there SHOULD be a better solution, which I KNOW is what this person was trying to say. Film is becoming a populist medium in our time, and fan films are only going to become more and more prolific…which is a GOOD thing. But absolutely no way do I think fan fic short stories are even close to the type of fan film that is the subject here. Because the money matters. Big time. And *that’s* why they’re being sued. Period.
Night folks 😉