http://themidhavens.net/heretic_loremaster Skeptical Readings of Literature and History Tue, 21 Jun 2011 13:37:01 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I just read a post by sarajayechan on the JournalFen fandom_discuss community about the use and general fandom annoyance with the term muse. Her first paragraph sums it up pretty well: So in the fanfiction world, "muses" are apparently frowned upon. Authors who have convos with the characters in their ... http://themidhavens.net/heretic_loremaster/2011/06/on-muses/ Marta has a post up (The Problem with Eowyn) that is in reply to a post by Anna Wing (Eowyn, Female Agency, blah blah) about the possible gender issues in Tolkien's depiction of Eowyn. Not being an expert on the LotR canon, I don't feel that I can contribute to ... http://themidhavens.net/heretic_loremaster/2010/11/gender-equality-and-elves/ I am jumping through the last leg of hoops in terms of completing my teaching certification, one hoop of which requires me to take two basic linguistic courses. Admittedly, it is probably the most pleasurable hoop to jump through, since it is an area I have wanted to study for ... http://themidhavens.net/heretic_loremaster/2010/10/welcome-to-middle-earth-now-speak-english/ The following entry is a guest post by Dreamflower. Dreamflower has been a Lord of the Rings fan since 1967, when she was 15 years old. She has read the books countless times over the years, but did not begin writing fanfic until 2004. She's written many stories, nearly all of them hobbit-centric; in ... http://themidhavens.net/heretic_loremaster/2010/09/was-the-elvenking/ I am in the midst of reading The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, which I have never read in full. They are very illustrative and have spurred many ideas for future HL posts (and I am only one-third through!), but I encountered one statement the other day that refuses to rest ... http://themidhavens.net/heretic_loremaster/2010/07/luthien-a-mere-maiden/ Before I begin, I some housekeeping: Now that I am freelancing full-time and have more writing time available to me (in theory), I am hoping to get The Heretic Loremaster off of the ground again. When I first created this site, I wanted it to be a place for discussion ... http://themidhavens.net/heretic_loremaster/2010/06/here-in-the-corner-all-by-myself/ Recently, on a list where I lurk, the owner made a post banning "remix" stories where an author takes an existing fanwork and rewrites it. And when I say "banning," I don't just mean that such stories are not allowed but anyone found writing them, even on locked groups, will ... http://themidhavens.net/heretic_loremaster/2010/06/ownership-of-fanworks/ Another (published) author has come out against "fan fiction": Diana Gabaldon publicly declared her disgust, disdain, and delusion that fanfic is illegal in a series of posts on her blog. Those posts have since been deleted, but copies can be found on Fandom Wank here or in Google cache here. It ... http://themidhavens.net/heretic_loremaster/2010/05/fan-fiction-is-fiction/ When I first started posting my writing online, I kept an open door to anonymous comments when the sites where I posted allowed me to do so. In my mind, someone had just read my work and had some amazingly insightful thought about it and went to comment and ... ... http://themidhavens.net/heretic_loremaster/2010/04/the-troll-without-a-face-anonymous-online-discourse/ Just like an Elf, SWG has both a recognized begetting day and birthday and, just like an Elf, its parent (that would be me) tends to recognize the former rather than the latter. In fact, I am slightly embarrassed to admit that I don't know the SWG's exact birthday except ... http://themidhavens.net/heretic_loremaster/2010/03/happy-begetting-day-swg/