The doctors lied.

Please never breed.

Love,
Widge

Here's the announcement. Go read it.

Okay…maybe I've lost my mind here, but help me. Here's a bit from it.

The filmmaker and I will make an agreement to release all ancillary rights to the film (and its source material, the novel), five years after the film's debut. In other words, after a waiting period during which those rights would still be restricted, anyone who cared to could make any number of other kinds of artwork based on the novel's story and characters, or the film's: a play, a television series, a comic book, a theme park ride, an opera – or even a sequel film or novel featuring the same characters. For that matter, they can remake the film with another script and new actors. In my agreement with the filmmaker, those ancillary rights will be launched into the public domain.

First up…I want to say up front that I respect Lethem's decision (not that he would give a shit one way or the other what I thought, naturally) and respect his right to do whatever the hell he wants with his book and the rights to it.

But here's what I don't understand. Back when I was offering up short stories for sale to magazines, you would sell a certain amount of rights to it. For example, First North American Serial Rights. That basically meant that you, North American magazine, would get the right to publish it first in North America before anybody else. You could sell any set of rights you wanted. World Serial Rights. European Serial Rights. Whatever.

Now, I've never had the burden of having to deal with film rights to one of my writings. So there could be a perfectly plausible explanation for these things. I'm sure that in a standard movie deal you're selling every right under the sun to your book apart from the right to keep on printing copies of the book. They get sequel rights (a standard bit of the contract that Stephen King finally killed after Children of the Corn XVI) and probably remake rights and hell, I don't know, breakfast cereal rights.

But if you wanted to offer somebody just the film rights, you could do that, right? Without having to send things into the public domain, I mean. Without having to put a five year cap on it. In theory, Lethem could sell the film rights to one group and the collectible card game rights to another group. Right?

Granted, if I'm Paramount, I'm going to want it all. But a smaller group of folks would probably realize that no, they never wanted the musical-on-ice rights to the thing and forego that.

Anyway, if this goes public domain I think I might just create a collectible card game out of it just for the sheer hell of it.

Found via Boing Boing.

An interesting little film. It has some very valid points to be made.

I would like to make one additional one. There are people who want to kill us. And as one Holocaust survivor said, paraphrased, when somebody says they want to kill you…believe them. So I'm not against taking steps to prevent getting killed. I don't think anyone I know would disagree with this.

But as I've mentioned before, a lot of the laws and regulations that are being enacted will do nothing to keep us safe. They are instead grandstanding by politicians who want to make you feel better about what they're doing–much as in the film they're "dressing up" all of this surveillance as a positive thing. And yes, in the wrong hands, they can be used in damaging ways.

And here's the thing: I don't believe anyone in government right now is competent enough to be actively pushing us towards a police state. A true sign that you don't have a handle on things is to just throw everything into a state of lockdown. I think we'll get to a police state by the sheer stupidity of the government, if nothing else. And I, for the most part, agree with the Bullshit episode which talked about the inability of government to really effectively use all the data that they get in thus far.

Really, the most disturbing portion of this is the surveillance of e-mails and communications. It's true–we all do stuff online at some point, and to varying degrees, that we wouldn't necessarily want people knowing about. I'm reminded of a bit in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged (and I'll paraphrase, since the idea of flipping back through that tome to find the actual line is daunting) where it's explained that governments control criminals and so if they want to control everyone they simply make it impossible for you to exist without criminalizing yourself. Anything in that sound familiar?

Thanks to ScottC for sending over the link. Direct link here for the feedreaders.

Something Ken Hite was writing about here got me thinking.

While I think there's something to be said for grounding a story in an actual location, so you can get the feel of a real place, he referred to the "no-place" of Poe–and that struck a chord with me.

Reason being is that I've always had it as part of my setup that the location the story was taking place was not really something to be considered much. It's obvious that Mystics takes place in the southern United States. Overkill is set in the same community (which fewer people have caught on to that I would have suspected–there's a bunch of links between various stories that people haven't caught yet).

None of my other stories jump out at me about being distinct about their location. This is by design. If you pay attention to the clues I give about the geographical location of Macomber County, it becomes patently clear that if you're looking at a map of the United States, there's no place where Macomber County could be that would match up with all the clues. I think there's three or four specific things, mentioned in passing, and I picked them specifically to make that happen.

The reason it's important to me, I think, that the location remain ambiguous is that I don't want it to be important. While some of the subject matter of Mystics makes it relevant specifically to the southern U.S., I want it to be relevant everywhere as well. So I try to keep it being grounded some place and instead want it to be potentially next door to you, wherever you are.