General
musesfool - you got your peanut butter in my chocolate - I don't want to have conversation with the creators of the works I'm fannish about (see below). The fannish work I produce *is* the conversation and it doesn't involve them. It involves me, the source text, and, if I'm lucky, other fans.

clotho123 - I suddenly had the urge to write about Mary Sues - What defines a Mary Sue isn't what a character IS, it's what you DO with her/him.

lyorn - Looking up the MZB fanfic lawsuit - Google gives 15 hits on "marion zimmer bradley" "fan fiction" "law suit" here

ixarachnexi in fanthropology - To Blur Plagiarism's Lines, Look to 'Star Wars': Commentary from NPR - "This week, there are two stories of novels that draw too heavily on the work of other writers. Novelist and book critic Lev Grossman says that Kaavya Viswanathan deserves all the criticism she is getting. But, Grossman says, Melissa Jareo (who wrote an unauthorized Star Wars book) is one of the unsung heroes of the wired, post-modern cultural universe: a fan-fic, or fan fiction, writer."

viciouswishes - What I Learned From Fandom Today - Since Fandom already taught me that the reason women write m/m slash is to be fully liberated from their sexual oppression by only ever writing about the Great White Cock and never dealing with another vulva in fiction or acknowledging that any member of Fandom could enjoy reading about vulvae, I really thought I knew it all.

ptyx - Fanfiction: between two poles - anfiction is always in the middle between canon and original fiction. No fanfiction is ever entirely "canonical" (and its characters are never entirely "in character"), nor is any fanfiction entirely original (or it wouldn't be "fanfiction").

vee_fic - untitled - There's a difference between saying to yourself, "That sucked!" and saying same to a group of people ready and willing to lambaste along with you. By myself, I can't enjoy making fun of crap; it's just crap, and not worth my time. As a social enterprise, crap has a certain amount of conversational value.

Fandom-Specific ( Cut for possible spoilers in Harry Potter and BSG fandoms. )

On Creating and Criticism
lobelia321 - thematic concepts - Recently, I wrote about three things that I love about writing fic: writing for others, writing for myself, and writing for the words. Last night I remembered a fourth one: writing around thematic concepts.

mmmchelle - GIP and pairing thoughts - I've been thinking for a while about why I write certain pairings and not others.

astrogirl2 - fanfic : pro-fic :: lazy: original? - One thing that I've seen several people say over there basically amounts to: "Well, I don't necessarily have a moral/legal/whatever problem with fanfic, and I'll admit that not all of it is awful, but I don't necessarily have all that much respect for it, because it seems like a lazy and unoriginal thing to do compared to creating your own worlds and characters and etc., and the more dependent it is on the source material, the more that's the case." This reaction fascinates me, because it's so very, very different from the perspective that fandom seems to have.

janedavitt - POV shifts? Bring them on! - I was absorbed in an epic length fic this week, soaked in it, and having fun, when I noticed that the POV shifted mid-scene all the time. 'Oh,' I thought. 'The beta should've picked up on that. That's wrong, that is.' Then I realised I liked it.