There’s a lot of talk on the web right now about fanfic and whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing. I thought I’d weigh in with my thoughts.

For those who aren’t familiar with the term, fanfic is, in short, fiction set in the worlds, and utilizing the characters of, existing TV shows, movies, books, etc. Some guy’s story about what Harry Potter is like as an adult? Fan fiction. The further adventures of Mulder and Scully? Fan fiction. You get the idea. (There is also sub-category of fan fiction called “slash,” which postulates what would happen if Character A had sex with Character B, sometimes while Character C watches.)

I personally don’t have any feelings toward fan fiction one way or the other. I don’t write it because I don’t read it. I’m sure there’s some good stuff out there, just as I’m sure there’s a lot of crap, but I’ve just never really had the interest. Having said that, I don’t see the harm in writing it. All fan fiction, regardless of its quality, comes from a love and respect for the source material. In Misery, Stephen King referred to this as “fan love” and called it the purest love of all. Of course he was speaking through a deranged nurse, but I like to think there’s some truth in the statement. Annie Wilkes, homicidal tendencies aside, certainly seemed the type of person who might have written some Misery-based fan fiction when she wasn’t tending her hogs.

I certainly don’t think fan fiction is something to get worked up about. My only problem with fanfic is when people try to make money from it. There are writers like Cory Doctorow who have strong opinions on copyright, and for the most part I agree with them. But even someone like Doctorow doesn’t want people making money off his own hard work. It’s one thing to allow derivative works to be produced of one’s intellectual property, and another to charge money for them.

I try not to rant too much on my website because I’m not really a ranty guy. I stay out of most of the online spats because, quite frankly, I don’t care enough to get involved. Everyone has opinions and, for the most part, nothing I say will change them. When I do weigh in on something like this, it’s usually because I’ve received a few e-mails asking for my thoughts on the matter. I try to put forth my opinion without sounding like an ass, and I think for the most part I succeed. I’ve always been a lone wolf, hanging around on the fringe of things, always in the know without getting directly involved, and that’s how I like it.

On the subject of fan fiction, I think people should treat it the way they would any other kind of story: if you don’t like it, don’t read it.

• Currently reading: Generation Loss, by Elizabeth Hand

As promised…

So I bought a new pair of Nikes, running pants and a couple of shirts made of some fancy schmancy material that’s supposed to breathe well. I went for my first run once Kat and I got home and, well, it wasn’t a pretty scene. “Run” is actually not a very accurate word; “walking fast” would be more like it. I stopped running after I moved to Toronto about five or six years ago and I’m very much out of shape. I don’t know how I’m going to fit into my black Spidey costume by Halloween. It’s still several months away, but I’ll have to step it up if I expect to be webslinging by October.

After my run (Kat came with and promptly left me in the dust), we went to her older sister’s farm. Jen has tasked me to come up with a website for the place, with information on her horse-breeding operation. I told her I’m a bit burned out on website design for the moment, but I still took some pictures so I’ll be ready once I’m back in full form.

We ended up sitting around drinking beer and having a barbecue. Many delicious animals were devoured and I got a lot of sun. Kat and I came home, finished catching up on House, and went to bed.

Kat’s in Brooklin until this afternoon, and I was going to go for a run, but the long-promised thunderstorm has finally struck and it’s pouring rain. My new plan is to drink some coffee, post this journal entry, and watch a couple of flicks. I’m thinking Blue Crush and Requiem for a Dream. There’s a double bill, eh? Then, later, some writing.

Also, I’ll be the guest blogger at The Horror Library on June 12. I wasn’t going to mention it until my essay was posted, but they’re actually promoting it as an upcoming event, which I thought was very nice. It’s not like I’m a big draw or anything, but I appreciate the ego-boost just the same. Seems like they’re generating quite the audience over there. Here’s hoping my essay doesn’t suck. It equates writing to Spider-man, so I can’t see how I can go wrong.

So I get a phone call last night while Kathryn is out at her parents’ band concert. It’s a girl doing a follow-up call for some survey Kathryn has apparently taken. News to me, since Kathryn usually has less patience for telemarketers and the like than I do. I tell the girl she’ll be back in a few hours and later on she calls back. Kathryn was home by then and I hear her side of the conversation, in which she gives this person our address and seems to be making arrangements for some kind of meeting.

ME: What in the sweet hell are you doing?
KATHRYN: Someone’s coming by to give us a demonstrate of an air purifier.
ME: Who, Charlie Manson?
KATHRYN: No, it’s some company that makes them. I told them we weren’t interested and they said that was okay. They said it wasn’t a sales pitch; they just want to give us a survey and we get a free gift afterwards.

All this on a Friday night, remember. I’m in my comfy pants, I’ve already had a couple of beers, and we’re in the middle of catching up on episodes of House I had downloaded earlier that week. In other words, my patience was at low ebb.

So within the hour there’s a knock at the door and this tall, ponytailed fellow named Andrew saunters in with a box about the size of a bar fridge. He goes into his spiel about how the environment is going to hell because of the poor air quality. In fact, he brings out statistics that say bad air is causing damn near everything, including cancer (of course), flipper babies, and the fighting in the Middle East. Bad air, he tells us, has alleged connections to Al-Qaeda and there is apparently evidence that bad air was present near the grassy knoll when JFK was assassinated. No fake.

Kathryn was right about one thing: it wasn’t a sales pitch. Nope. It was, in fact, five sales pitches, each one punctuated with a request to use our phone so he could call his boss and “help us out” with a better offer. The fact that we told him from the very beginning that we wouldn’t be buying a purifier seemed to have fallen on deaf ears, or at least salesman ears, which amounted to the same thing.

I’m not a contentious person, but I’m not a dummy either. So when Andrew mentioned how his buddy, who doesn’t own an air purifier, got cancer, I had to ask: “Oh, so if he had one, he wouldn’t have gotten cancer?” Well, Andrew says, no one can really predict that. Funny, I thought, since he certainly seemed to imply that it could. Why else would he bring it up?

Something particularly slimy about the way he told us the price. He mentions all of the figures very quickly, so fast you can’t really understand them, doing what I thought of as the verbal equivalent of Three Card Monte. Then he told us the price, in his own words: “Twenty-eight fifty.” Oh, I thought, only thirty bucks? Well of course not. It was actually $3000, but I guess Andrew’s bosses instructed him that if you phrased the figure like there was a decimal in there, you might actually be able to trick someone into buying one. He actually asked us before he made the offer how we’d be paying for our purifier, cheque or credit card? How about my foot in your ass, Andrew? You got change for that? (Funnily enough, Kat told me later on that she thought the exact same thing, that the purifier was only $30, so I didn’t feel too stupid.)

I have no doubt that our air sucks, and that the purifier is a good investment, but I’m not paying $3000 for one, especially not when Kat and I just started house hunting. Reminds me of that episode of The Simpsons when the sleazy sales rep tries to sell Homer a home security system for some extravagant price.

REP: But surely you can’t put a price on your family’s lives?
HOMER: I wouldn’t have thought so either, but here we are.

I think once these things become a real necessity, you’ll see a thousand companies producing them and that price will plummet the way the price of flat-screen televisions and CD players and computers have all dropped significantly once the shine wore off.

Until then I guess I’ll just take shallow breaths while I walking around my deathtrap of a home. Or maybe I’ll buy a surgical mask. No biggie. I was living in Toronto during the SARS outbreak.

Speaking of purifiers, I really have to post a picture of our freaky humidifier. Remember my coffeemaker? The one that looks like it came out of the Matrix? Well this humidifier is just as weird, except where the coffeemaker glows green, the humidifier glows a spooky, ethereal blue. Some exciting life I lead, eh? I’m heading out to the mall in a bit to pick up new shoes and running togs. I’ll post a picture of them as well since that’s pretty exciting, too.

In writing news (damn it feels good to be able to say that again), I chalked up 2,500 words the other day on a new novella. It’s a love story about furniture, and that’s all I can really say. I’m calling it “Interior Design” for now, but that will probably change. I’m also working on a horror tale about surfing called “Foam” and a literary story about a crazy religious family called “The Devil Hunters.”

• Currently reading: Four and Twenty Blackbirds, by Cherie Priest

Last year I got a number of e-mails from friends and family asking my thoughts on the Lost season finale. I posted a lengthy entry about the episode because it was easier to do that than to reply to everyone individually.

I’ve decided to do the same thing this year, especially since this particular finale seems to have given people a lot to talk about.

Here’s my breakdown:

Ben — Well, it turns out Ben is not just a big liar but a HUGE liar. He lies to the Losties about his identity when we first met him, he lies to Locke about having been born on the island, he lies to his own people, giving them orders he claims are on Jacob’s behalf, he keeps secret that their own broadcasts are being jammed by a station that he told them was flooded. An all-around weasel, in other words. It also looks like his leadership of the Others may be challenged in the next season. Richard Alpert (who has allegedly signed on to join the main cast next year) doesn’t seem to trust him anymore, and may be grooming Locke to take his place. Jack gave him the business at the end of last night’s episode, and I can’t wait to see what they do with him next season. Lord of the Flies, anyone?

Sayid — Very glad to see he didn’t die. There were some serious bets that he was going to be one of the five people killed. Also, his hands-free neck-snapping was very slick.

Sawyer — James seems to be going to a very dark place after killing his father in “The Brig.” His whole life had been leading toward that moment, and it seems he doesn’t know what to do now that his mission is accomplished. Executing Tom is just the beginning, me thinks. Good line, though. “That’s for taking the boy off the raft.”

Charlie — I was actually kind of surprised to see him die. Considering the nature of Lost, I thought the build-up to his death, Desmond’s predictions, etc., was a big misdirection. But they went through with it, and all things considered it was a pretty gallant way to go. Thanks to Charlie, the jamming signal was turned off, Penny knows Desmond is alive, and Desmond knows the boat off the coast of the island isn’t Penny’s (info he will presumably pass on to the others).

Locke — After getting gut-shot and left for dead, Locke sees Walt, or Walt’s ghost, a projection of Walt (a future Walt, maybe?), telling him to get up, that he still has work to do. He presumably tells Locke that Jack is going to make the call on Naomi’s satellite phone and that it will be a cataclysmic mistake. I wasn’t that surprised to see him killing Naomi in order to stay on the island, but I’m curious to see what Locke’s role in the next season will be. He killed Naomi in front of everyone, so I don’t see the other Losties taking him back into their fold any time soon. I’m guessing he’ll go back to Alpert and the Others, since Ben is still in Jack’s custody and doesn’t present a threat to him for the time being.

The Snake in the Mailbox — Every year the producers of the show come up with a code phrase to describe the twist at the end of the finale. The Others kidnapping Walt at the end of Season 1 was called “The Bagel.” The two Portuguese men in the arctic listening station at the end of Season 2 was called “The Challah.”

This year it was called “The Snake in the Mailbox” and referred to Jack’s final flashback which reveals it is actually a flash-forward, to a time after he and Kate (and presumably the other Losties) were rescued from the island.

Throughout last night’s finale, we saw glimpses of Jack’s future in which he is portrayed as a bearded alcoholic and prescription drug addict. He is working at the hospital again, with a new Chief of Surgery, presumably filling in for Jack’s deceased father (who held the position previously).

The first flashback shows him coming upon an obituary in the newspaper and then climbing onto a bridge to commit suicide. Whose death would prompt him to end his life? Jack regrets leaving the island and is obsessed with finding it again. His apartment is littered with maps and atlases, and he has been using the “Golden Ticket” given to him by Oceanic (presumably their way of saying “Sorry our plane crashed”) to fly back and forth across the Pacific, hoping for another crash.

The episode ended with Jack and Kate meeting at a location that seems to have some significance for them (”You know where,” he tells her on the phone). Kate can’t stay long because “he” will be wondering where she is. Jack says he is tired of lying and that they made a mistake. He says they need to go back to the island. Kate drives away.

The most obvious guess is that Jack’s mistake was making the call on Naomi’s satellite phone. The call that Locke said Jack wasn’t supposed to make. And how far into the future do Jack’s flash-forwards take place? Not too far obviously, since the characters don’t look very different (although I have to admit I didn’t recognize Kate at first). Each season of the show thus far has covered about 45 days worth of time. If that continues to hold true for the remaining three seasons, which will be shorter than the first three, then the time elapsed should amount to about three months, give or take.

The Lost timeline begins in September 2003, and the producers have said we will see the characters celebrating Christmas in Season 4, so it’s probably safe to say that the show ends, presumable with the characters getting off the island, around March or April 2004. Beyond that, who knows.

There has been talk about time travel and alternate realities since Desmond was revealed to have traveled through time after activating the fail-safe in the Swan hatch. The woman he met on his temporal jaunt told him that certain events are predestined and that although Desmond may change things, time/fate/whatever has a way of “course-correcting” so that these events end up taking place.

I mention this because during Jack’s flash-forwards he mentioned his father twice. He had a faked prescription allegedly signed by his father, and he told the new Chief of Surgery that he should “go upstairs and find my father, and if he’s drunker than I am, you can fire me.” Or something like that. The most logical assumption is that Jack was stoned/drunk and this was merely a plot device used to make us think these were flashbacks and not flash-forwards.

It’s worth noting that the producers mentioned in a podcast that Christian Shepherd is indeed dead, but that they may be using the word “dead” in a sense the audience doesn’t fully understand yet.

Season 4 — So what do we know about the next season? Here’s the collected info given by the show’s producers:

• Danielle will receive a flashback detailing her arrival on the island and how Montrand, a member of her erstwhile scientific team, lost his arm (this was mentioned in the Season 1 finale when Danielle took Jack & Co. to the Black Rock for dynamite).
• The Others are headed toward a site called The Temple. This may be connected to a report that a set is being constructed for Season 4 called “the ruins.” Both locations might be connected to the four-toed statue featured in the last year’s season finale.
• Michael and Walt are supposed to return.

I guess we’ll have plenty of time to think about the finale and what’s to come, seeing as how the show isn’t slated to come back until Feburary 2008. That’s the price we pay for getting all the episodes at once, sans reruns. It’ll be painful, but worth it in the end.

Until then, namaste. I’m out.

• Currently reading: Four and Twenty Blackbirds, by Cherie Priest

Kat and I just got back from our long weekend in Ottawa, and a good time was had by all. We’ve been up to Ottawa plenty of times, but regular weekends aren’t really long enough to truly enjoy one’s self. By the time we get up there on Friday night, we really only have Saturday to do stuff, and then we have to leave Sunday morning to beat traffic and get ready for the coming week.

So it was nice to have the extra time to spend with Carrie and Glenn. Not that we really did anything strenuous. We got in a lot of beer and bbq, and we even managed to visit a park in Quebec with a waterfall. Here are some pics:

There are other pics, but I don’t think you need to see me and Glenn pounding the beers on the couch or me wrestling with their cat Nala.

Traffic actually wasn’t too bad on the way home. Surprising, considering all of the cops we saw on the road, waiting to nab the wily speeding cottager heading back to the city.

Now I’m off to enjoy the remainder of this glorious holiday weekend. A real update is coming soon, I promise.

• Currently reading: Song of Kali, by Dan Simmons

I want to thank everyone who sent congrats for my having secured the full-time position of webmaster/communications assistant. I received several messages on this journal, my LiveJournal, by e-mail, by phone, and in person. It really means a lot that so many people care so much.

Some things I said I was going to do if I got the job:

1. Start exercising again.

I’m not a whale or anything, but my lack of energy is, quite frankly, pathetic. I’ve really gotta stop putting butter in my coffee.

2. Start running again.

Different from #1, which is more sit-ups, push-ups, etc. I used to run but fell out of practice when I moved to Toronto. Now that I live in the ‘borough with all the scenic paths and trails, I have no excuse. So once I pick up some new shoes and running togs, I’ll be back out there hoofing it old school.

3. Start drawing again.

I don’t draw often, but when I do the results aren’t usually half-bad. I’m my own worst critic, but when it comes to drawing I think of Mr. Burns critiquing Marge’s painting: “I know what I hate, and I don’t hate this.” That’s about as close as I get to confidence in my artistic ability. It helps that I tend to draw chiefly for others, who seem to like what I produce, be it a picture of Kat’s favourite lighthouse, or Thor passed out on the couch.

4. Start writing again.

For the past two months (what I think of as my forced hiatus), I’ve been writing notes for short stories and my novel, but not doing anything with them. Now I’ve begun the work of transcribing those notes. Once that’s done, I’m going to work on a short story or two before getting back to work on the novel. It’s been awhile and I need to ease my way back into it.

I’ll report back in a few days and let y’all know exactly what I’m working on.

For now I have some celebrating to do. This long weekend Kat and I are headed to Ottawa, and I plan to partake of much beer and bbq with my sister-in-law Carrie and my best man Glenn. There will be movies, some Lost talk, and apparently I’ve been tasked to help with the drywalling of their basement. I’ve never done that before, so here’s hoping I don’t accidentally wall up the cat. I promise nothing!

• Currently reading: The Children of Men, by P.D. James

I got it.

I haven’t posted anything lately because there hasn’t been anything to report, and also because I’ve spent the last week getting rid of the tables I use for the layout of my website.

Using CSS, I’ve replaced the tables with containers. I’ve gone with a fixed-width layout rather than a liquid layout, because the liquid was doing strange things when viewed in Microsoft IE. It looked fine in Firefox and Opera, and while I would normally have said that was fine and screw IE, I realize there are still a lot of people who use it for their web browsing, and I want the site to be enjoyed by as many people as possible.

So, until Microsoft can come up with a browser that renders CSS properly, I’ll have to go with a fixed-width layout for now.

I haven’t gotten rid of all of my tables, alas, but those that are left, like the one for my story tracker, are used to format tabular data and shouldn’t pose a problem to screen-readers and the like. Tables tend to hinder accessibility when they are used for laying out information in a nonlinear way, with tables nested inside tables, etc.

In other exciting news, Kat and I finished watching Twin Peaks. Like most people, she felt the second season was somewhat lacking, and the finale was mostly unsatisfying. This was almost certainly due to the show’s creators, David Lynch and Mark Frost, having gone off to direct movies during the production of the second season. I don’t know who was running the show at the time, but the lack of any real direction is clearly evident. But still, it had its moments.

We also watched the movie, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, and Kat seemed to enjoy it for the most part. Violent, twisted and weird, but that’s what you expect in a Lynch movie (I’m going to show her Blue Velvet next, heh-heh).

FWWM was a prequel, so Kat was disappointed that there wasn’t any resolution of the cliffhangers of the series finale, and she wanted to learn more about the Lodge inhabitants and the freaky meetings they had, but Lynch isn’t really one for linear filmmaking or providing a lot of hard and fast answers.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been doing this weekend. That, and getting ready for my interview on Monday. The future of my job will finally be decided, and frankly I’ll just be glad to have the whole thing over with, regardless of how it turns out. These past two months have been extremely stressful; I haven’t gotten any significant writing done, and I’m physically and mentally exhausted.

So, I’d appreciate it if you all kept your fingers crossed for me tomorrow.

• Currently reading: The Rising, by Brian Keene