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moonlightreal · 4 years ago

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Strange Fate linkdump: Questing, Empathy and Endgames

Huge long post! Linkdump and many many thoughts that wandered through my mind while going through these links.

Last Lullaby stuff:

https://www.thebookseller.com/news/hachette-signs-new-l-j-smith

About the international licensing of The Last Lullaby in 2013. Strange Fate is the big obvious lost book but it’s not the only one.

https://booknode.com/the_last_lullaby_0705503

French bookseller page about The Last Lullaby, with back cover blurb in English but no cover picture. So whatever happened happened before an artist could be commissioned. The book seems to follow unscarred teen Brionwy rather than scarred child Crispy who we met in the Strange Fate chapter

https://spotlightreport.net/featured/burn-bright-presents-l-j-smith-interview

2013 interview about The Last Lullaby. In this interview Crispy and Brionwy are two different characters, though I’d always had the impression that they were the same person and Brionwy was Crispy’s real name. Maybe just because Brionwy is the name in the title and then it’s Crispy’s story, back in whatever first incarnation I read of it whatever incarnation that was. And it’s poetic nfor the scarred child to have a beautiful name.

So we have the short story Brionwy’s Lullaby about Brionwy in the harem and the Strange Fate chapter about Crispy in the ruins. Two pieces. Less than we have of Strange Fate, but there is a looooot of worldbuilding in Brionwy’s Lullaby. Lots of worldbuilding but no hint of where the story goes next. Do Brionwy and Crispy meet? Is there some connection between them? How does the story end? In the Strange Fate incarnation of the story this future is traded for a happier timeline when characters in our time avert the apocalypse but as a separate story how would it conclude?

Honestly I’m sadder about this book than I am about Strange Fate; I loves me some YA dystopias and the whole dragons and vampires thing is just neat. But this book’s as lost as lost can be.

Recent Stuff:

https://www.reddit.com/r/YAlit/comments/krlvr1/lj_smiths_night_world/

Reddit thread from two months ago. The rabbit hole is real and nobody else seems to have found the bottom.

https://deadline.com/2020/05/greg-berlanti-productions-adapt-the-forbidden-game-novels-lj-smith-as-tv-series-the-vampire-diaries-author-1202944224/

Article about the upcoming Forbidden Game TV series. Forbidden Game is a Simon & Schuster series, not Alloy, so while I’m sure Ms. Smith has no say in how the show will go she will at least get royalties! However much royalties book authors get from TV shows, no idea how much that is.

https://micky.com.au/the-vampire-diaries-writer-reveals-new-fantasy-horror-series-the-forbidden-game/

“LJ Smith has just revealed that its horror trilogy novels...” Um. Not quite.

I looked through half a dozen articles about the Forbidden Game TV series and none of them had anything from Ms. Smith. I knew the chance that this would draw comment from her was only a tiny chance, but it seemed worth looking.

Interviews and Stuff:

https://www.saltlakemagazine.com/qa-the-vampire-diaries-creator-l-j-smith-on-writing-and-losing-the-series/

2012 interview about Vampire Diaries

https://peoplepill.com/people/l-j-smith-1

Just a biography page.

http://theliteraryconnoisseur.blogspot.com/2014/05/an-interview-with-new-york-times.html

2014 interview with a blogger. Ms. Smith does seem to be an absolutely lovely person.

https://areiterowski.wordpress.com/2013/02/10/author-profile-l-j-smith/

2013 Blog post about Ms. Smith, ending with a quite long list of “things she’s currently working on.’ the medical stuff didn’t happen until 2015 though with six projects in progress it’s believeable that she didn’t finish any of them before being felled by illness in 2015.

http://luanatormesdemattos.blogspot.com/2013/11/interview-with-one-and-only-l-j-smith.html

2013 interview with a blogger.

Into the meta: Aubrey Clark and the ghostwritten books

https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/5760167.Aubrey_Clark

Books by Aubrey Clark. Secret Circle and Vampire Diaries. I assumed Aubrey Clark is a woman and the other book listed is by a man with the same name, but Aubrey is traditionally a male name and modernly a female name so who knows. Hardly the first time a dude wrote a series aimed at girls under a female name.

https://www.romance.io/authors/54558f9b87eac323ffb2cc31/aubrey-clark

Bio listing Ms. Clark as a she, and classifying her books as romances. Says she’s been writing for eight years. Just on the VD/SC stuff or did she write before? Alloy hiring an existing writer to ghostwrite and that existing writer using a pen name so her new work wouldn’t be connected with her old work is perfectly possible. I swear I read somewhere that Ms. Clark was Ms. Smith’s editor, or her “person” with Alloy, making her signing on as ghostwriter a bit of a betrayal… but I can’t find my source.

And how much of a betrayal is it really, if Ms. Smith got fired it’s not Ms. Clark’s fault if the series got offered to her, and who could say no to getting to write for a series you know? It’s a job and a chance to be a published author and nobody should be judged for grabbing that candy if offered it.

I wish we could hear what happened from Aubrey Clark’s side, just because the story of What Happened to Strange Fate is a mystery I to figure out… it’s easy for me to forget this mystery isn’t a Nancy Drew video game, it’s people’s real lives. Ms. Clark is not the villain, she’s a writer in a situation we don’t fully understand but she’s just a writer like any writer.

http://debrasbookcafe.blogspot.com/2012/11/book-review-secret-circlethe-divide-by.html

Review of Secret Circle: The Divide

http://bookandbroadway.blogspot.com/2016/02/the-temptation-tsc-6-by-aubrey-clark.html

Review of Secret Circle: The Temptation. The reviewer was not impressed.

http://yepireadbooks.blogspot.com/2013/04/book-32-temptation.html

Another review of The Temptation. This reviewer was a bit more impressed than the last one. I admit I ragequit the ghostwritten books after Ms. Clark started killing off characters, I don’t remember if I even hit book two…

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/The_Vampire_Diaries_(novel_series)

Publishing history of Vampire Diaries

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304058204579495491652398358

2014 “Vampire Diaries Writer Bites Back.” we’ve all read this one...

https://uniquelygeekygirl.com/2013/05/20/1223/

2013 “LJ Smith vs ghostwriter” from a blog called uniquely geeky girl. The next article on the blog is more about Alloy and its practice of hiring ghostwriters.

The Rise and Fall of Kindle Worlds:

https://the-digital-reader.com/2018/05/15/amazon-to-shut-down-kindle-worlds/

https://fanlore.org/wiki/Kindle_Worlds

https://www.thebookloft.com/fanfiction-and-kindle-worlds

https://www.hiddengemsbooks.com/amazon-closes-kindle-worlds/

https://gigaom.com/2014/08/17/amazons-fan-fiction-portal-kindle-worlds-is-a-bust-for-fans-and-for-writers-too/

https://www.wired.com/2013/05/kindle-worlds-fanfic-copyright/

http://www.roxannestclaire.com/barefoot-bay-world-kindle/kindle-worlds-faq/

https://www.bustle.com/articles/36237-amazons-fan-fiction-site-kindle-worlds-is-flopping-but-why

It rose, and it fell. As far as I can tell Alloy is the only publisher to put its works out on Kindle Worlds, I guess because that’s what they were already doing with their hired authors! Other authors seem to have opened their worlds individually and I guess not many of them signed on.

LJ Smith and Kindle Worlds

https://www.theawl.com/2014/02/the-writer-who-beat-the-system-how-one-woman-resurrected-her-sexy-vampire-brothers/

https://www.mhpbooks.com/fired-vampire-diaries-writer-takes-to-kindle-worlds-for-revenge/

http://floor-to-ceiling-books.blogspot.com/2011/02/l-j-smith-fired-from-writing-vampire.html

A blog post with some comments so you can read the state of the fandom at the time.

https://www.dailydot.com/parsec/fandom/vampire-diaries-lj-smith-kindle-fanfiction/

http://leegoldberg.com/tag/alloy-entertainment/

“Read the contract.’ This one is interesting because it’s the only one that isn’t in defense of Ms. Smith. She should indeed read her contracts unless she wants to just be a fanfic writer, which�� I don’t think I’ve ever heard of an author going from published to fanfic, but why not?

Also, good question, where was Ms. Smith’s agent? And where is Ms. Smith’s agent these days when someone should maybe be being the Strange Fate Police?

Unrelated: I swear I read an article from Alloy’s perspective about what happened. Maybe it was this one and I thought it was from Alloy when it wasn’t. It is the only article not in support of Ms. Smith that I could find.

https://editingeverything.com/blog/2014/04/25/fanfiction-is-letting-lj-smith-tell-her-vampire-diaries-story/

https://www.tvovermind.com/vampire-diaries-lj-smith-fired-book-series/

https://thegameofnerds.com/2018/03/03/originals-10-facts-about-the-woman-behind-the-vamps/

https://dc.uwm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1952&context=etd

https://www.cbr.com/the-secret-circle-why-the-vampire-diaries-author-l-j-smiths-other-cw-series-failed/

I watched one episode of the Secret Circle series because I loved the books so much, but the CW style is not my jam. But it is interesting to read the pitch for a fewer-character second season.

https://anovelbookblog.com/2014/06/12/leeching-off-the-talent-writing-for-hire-the-dark-side-of-publishing/

About the Secret Circle sequel novels and Alloy

https://www.jeanienefrost.com/2019/02/ghosts-in-the-machine/

Ghostwriting and plagiarism and ethics.

https://www.fanpop.com/clubs/stefan-and-elena/articles/94267/title/lj-smith-fired-from-writing-own-novels

This is the full letter from Ms. Smith about getting fired.

https://teleread.com/thanks-to-kindle-worlds-fired-vampire-diaries-writer-continues-her-own-series-as-fanfic/index.html

http://iswimforoceans.blogspot.com/2011/02/help-lj-smith-vampire-diaries.html

2011 blog post

https://indecisiveturtle.wordpress.com/2014/05/29/assignment-4-ghostwriting-in-the-vampire-diaries-by-l-j-smith/

A long blog post that goes into detail about the writing of some of the books, how to tell Ms. Smith’s style from the ghostwriter’s, sentence length and similes and stuff, all very academic! I’ve retyped a couple pieces of Ms. Smith’s writing and I noticed she handles punctuation-with-quotes differently than I do, making it very weird to retype. This is an interesting one. Someone dived way deep!

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/10/19/the-gossip-mill

New Yorker article about Alloy

https://www.publishingcrawl.com/2012/05/29/the-not-so-secret-backdoor-to-publishing/

Article about Alloy and package writing

https://www.vogue.com/article/the-secret-circle-young-adult-witch-fiction

Just an article about the Secret Circle books and how they’re kinda bad but actually good. Which they are.

That’ll keep y’all busy for a while!

Quest wishlist: I wish we could ask someone in the publishing industry about rights to series and rights to “publication canceled” books and how all that stuff works. And I wish we could hear Aubrey Clark’s side of the story, but it just seems unkind to reach out to her to ask about this.

But the problem is… I call it “the quest for Strange Fate” because I’m melodramatic and like calling things quests, but what it the victory condition for this one? The obvious: we win if we find and read Strange Fate, but I don’t think that will ever happen. No matter how much we learn about what happened that won’t make Strange Fate appear.

I do wish we could tell LJ Smith that plenty of authors these days have a Patreon. If the people who still care about the lost books and the story of Ms. Smith could turn that caring into actual useful help for the people and maybe the books too that would be the best outcome. That would be a successful quest.

A darker timeline possibility: maybe S&S read Strange Fate and it wasn’t any good. Ms. Smith is a good writer. But take a good writer and give her 20 years off from writing, and make those the 20 years where the teen experience of life changed radically, her genres of choice became big and popular and evolved and built up tropes, and language itself did… things…

I stan language but it’s a little sus how new lettery bois go brr everywhere I look. I love it, but it’s humbling having to ask my niece what all the new words mean, and why so many of them seem to begin with S!

And Ms. Smith is sixty and has twenty years of rewriting Strange Fate, pulling it apart and tinkering until it probably doesn’t much resemble the book she started in 1998. Stir up all this in a pot and we’ve got a recipe for making a talented author drop a mediocre book. Maybe S&S read it, said “it’s a dud, the fandom is 20 years old, let’s just not” and Ms. Smith retired from public life in defeat.

This makes an unhappy sort of sense, but it doesn’t answer the question of why The Last Lullaby never appeared either.

Anyway. This has been a long post, lots of links and some thoughts on the philosophy of questing.

#ljsmith strangefate #LJ Smith #Night World

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