I considered setting it up to be my desktop, but I decided that I prefer to just set it as the home page on my browser so that whenever I open my browser it is the first thing I see. That way I can leave the desktop area on my work computer for stuff sort of like those inspirational posters you see around regular offices.

How do you organize your work to-do lists?

The question is raised because of the reaction of some fans to the addition of an outcry of “No!” in the scene in which Darth Vader throws Emperor Palpatine to his death in Return of the Jedi. Added for the Blue-Ray release of the original three Star Wars movies (Numbers 4, 5 and 6 for those who know the Star Wars numbering system), the outcry has caused an echo among the fans of the original movies, and raised a question. Does Lucas have the right to make that change? Or has he, for lack of a better way to phrase it, given the story to its fans in a finished form that can never be altered?

Leonardo da Vinci once said, “Art is never finished, only abandoned.” And that it is true, for what artist is ever fully satisfied with something they have created. Who can not see ways in which to improve something they created, even after it has been called finished. Should someone be able to go back and add, or remove, something in the interest of making their creation more like what they envision for it to be? Does a man, like Lucas, have the right to make changes to their creation when a new version is going to be released?

Fans can be a treacherous slope to some creators. By now most of us are likely familiar with Stephen King’s horror novel Misery. A story in which an obsessed fan keeps her favorite author prisoner and forces him to write a new novel about her beloved character, just for her. Such extreme cases can only be hoped to be confined to the realm of fiction, but there is definitely a strong connection to someone else’s fictional creations when it comes to fans. This connection level varies along a very broad spectrum, one that could be an article on its own, and includes a sub-group of fans who, unlike the fanatical fan of King’s novel, write their own stories when the creator of a series has failed to write what they want.

The intricacies of copyright law and fan made works is a complexity that fills multiple volumes of books, and it narrows down to a simple focal point: Who controls the base creative product?

A significant number of artists, both writers and the creators of television shows and movies, set a precarious balance with their fans. Creators such as Gene Roddenberry and J.K. Rowling have been known to express their approval for fan made stories, while others, such as Anne McCaffery, creator of The Dragonriders of Pern series, were as equally well known to abolish any instance of fan made material as soon as it was discovered. McCaffery has recently changed her stance on fan made works, but it is still a precarious companionship for most creators. And not without good cause.

Marion Zimmer Bradley, author of the Darkover series, was extremely outspoken in her support of fan made stories set in the world she had created. Bradley even went so far as to voice disapproval with those, such as the Conan Doyle estate, who would seek to squash fan made fiction. In Fan Fiction and Copyright, Aaron Schwabach quotes Bradley as having said of fan made stories in her Darkover setting:

When I was a little kid, I was a great lover of “pretend” games, but after I was nine or ten, I could never get anyone to play them with me … And now I have a lot of fans, and friends, who will come into my magic garden and play the old “pretend games” with me.

Far, far away somewhere in the middle of the Galaxy, and about four thousand years from now, there is a world with a great red sun and four moons. Won’t you come and play with me there?

The idyllic shared play that Bradley loved was ended, and she withdrew all of her permissions and placed a ban on fan made works, following an incident in which Bradley was accused of plagiarism by a fan. The fan demanded equal collaborative and monetary credit for one of the stories that Bradley was writing, claiming the idea to have come from a story the fan had written set in Bradley’s Darkover world. It resulted in Bradley’s publisher refusing to publish the novel in an effort to avoid a lawsuit, and in authors everywhere taking a strong second look at fan made work.

Before the age of the Internet, Lucasfilm seemed to recognize the importance of fans to a work such as Star Wars when they created a licensing bureau for fan fiction:

At the height of the original Star Wars phenomenon, Lucasfilm was wary of giving its stamp of approval to the tremendous amount of fan fiction being published. Their solution, according to Gran, was to set up a no-fee licensing bureau that reviewed material and offered criticism about what might be considered copyright infringement.

After the 1990′s, the Lucasfilm stance shifted, but remained marginally accepting of some forms of fan works, according to a November 7, 1999 article at Space.com:

Fan fiction not welcome
While the news indicates that the Star Wars empire is taking a few cautious steps toward an “open source” model, Lucas is far from giving away all the keys to his kingdom.

The site is very stringent about only wanting “parodies and documentaries” — no “attempts to expand on the Star Wars universe will be accepted,” ensuring that George Lucas and the company he founded remain the only sources for canonical information and stories about Star Wars and its characters.

And that focuses us back to the key point here: Who has controlling power over a created work? Does the creator have the right to go back and modify a story before a second publication, or do they owe something to the fans and therefore must leave it forever as it was when it was initially released?

Can the creator never make modifications to craft their artwork into something more like what they envisioned it could be? Yes, there is a certain level of ‘It’s finished now, leave it alone,’ that is presumed. And in the case of a marble sculpture there is always the chance that one more chisel strike will break it, but is it not the right of the creator to adjust a bit here or there to make it more like what they want it to be – even at the risk of destroying their own creation.

Perhaps with all of the extras that the Blue-Ray format can accommodate there could be a copy of the original unmodified version of Star Wars included in the Blue-Ray edition, along with the Director’s Vision version. That way the fans who want to see the movie they saw in the theater can watch the original version, and those who want to see the movie George Lucas wanted to make can watch the Director’s Vision edition. Allowing them to see what Lucas now wishes he had thought to do before he released the movies the first time.

Whether or not Lucas includes an original edition with the Director’s Vision, the basic foundation of the matter remains the same. George Lucas, and anyone that has created a world and characters, should be able to adjust their creation if they feel it is necessary. The fans can complain, but in the end, it is up to the creator to make the final decision on whether they listen to what others say, or follow their hearts and create the story and world they wanted to the first time around.

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Critique This

Thank you for reading the entire article. I know it was a long one for the internet. I wrote it as practice for writing magazine length articles, so now that you have finished it I would welcome any critiques you might have on it. If you see something that was done wrong, or if there is something you particularly like about the article, please leave a critique comment on it. Your comments on this article will assist me in writing better articles in the future.

I am looking for the following:

1) Did you see a single underlying point within the article? What was it? Did I stay on point?
2) Was the article easy to read, or did you have to force yourself to finish it? Was the article too long? (1,349 words)
3) Did I answer all of the questions the article raised?

Anything else you might want to comment on would be appreciated, and I have a thick skin, so if you think I made a million grammatical errors and can’t write my way out of a paper bag, please let me know. I’m doing this to learn to improve my skills in article writing, so tear it apart.

Thank you!

A lot of the time I had not even realized what I was feeling was depression, I just had no desire to really do anything more than I needed to do in any given day and pushed people away from me. Dark parts of my mind whispered that they hated me, that no one wanted to be around me, and in my depression I had no way to fight back – particularly when I am in a continual battle to not hide away from everyone and live my life inside my house. Yes, I hide it fairly well, but I am only a few panic attacks shy of being a shut-in. I steadfastly refuse to let myself become one, however, so even if it is just sitting on my porch to sip a cup of tea I make myself step outside when I find myself thinking that I could just live my life inside.

This inclination toward hermitage makes it very easy for me to listen when the voices say no one likes me, and that makes it rather hard to battle depression that leaves me feeling miserable and like my time would be better spent laying in bed than working. What is bad is that despite the fact that I knew that I was having issues with depression, have been battling it for years, I had not actually realized just how much it is affecting my work until I realized that I had not yet got my work back on track. I have been working, and making money at it, but when I step back and look at just how much I am making, it is just a bit over what the cost of my websites are. I am making enough that my sites are not costing me anything out of my own pocket (which is good since I can’t pay hosting companies with lint), but my sites are far from supporting me.

Part of that is my fault. No, it is entirely my fault. I let depression and feelings of low self-worth affect my ability to work. I allowed hackers to attack one of my websites when I was at the bottom of a depression and they left it in complete ruin. And yes, I do mean complete ruin. It was this website, which I am fairly certain has been blocked by a lot of search engines thanks to some bastard that hacked it and left some very vulgar and sexually explicit trash all over the site. I had not known anything was wrong with my own site until I hauled myself far enough above the depression clouds to start trying to work and realized that Google had banned the site from its advertising program.

My initial impulse was to ask them to reinstate the site, which I had torn down entirely and rebuilt from scratch, but then I decided that I should wait until I had rebuilt it some. And then the depression crept back in and I was left, once again, neglecting to get things done for I don’t know how long.

I am through with that. Or at least I am in a good enough mood today that I am telling myself I am through with it. I want to rebuild my sites, get them back up and moving along how they are supposed to be, and get back to working at a level that I am not only keeping my business from failing, but it is starting to turn enough of a profit to allow me to meet my bills once again.

So, I am going to start with a few websites that I have been managing to keep afloat, then expand outward from those once they are running smoothly. It is going to be a long slow rebuild, but I am determined that I am no longer going to allow depression to affect my work.

See…

I worked with Blender long ago, over 5 years ago at least, and am back into relearning it and expanding on what I had learned back when I first tried it out. I want to take some of the short stories I have but never got around to getting published, polish them up a bit, and try my hand at turning them into short 3D films.

It is going to take me a while to get to that level of skill, but I am fairly excited to see what I can do and it meshes perfectly into my original love of wanting to get into making movies. At the very least, I can make up all of the characters from my Heir to Magic world and start getting them loaded up onto that website. That is my first goal.

For now, Blender 3D is a very good fun toy for me to dangle at the end of the work day with a promise that once my work is all done I can play in Blender.

I am going to begin studying the Basic Care Coordination book tonight to get a start on learning to be a care coordinator and find out what I need to do to become a care coordinator in the state of Alaska.

As for what I want to do for a living… I still want to write, of course, and I would like to be able to do something like directing new family caregivers on what they need to know and do as they provide care for their loved ones. I’m aiming for nursing, but my end goal is a bit broader than just being a nurse, I have a bit of a specialization I want to aim for. Just need to line things up right to get there now.

I got all signed up to take a placement test on next Monday, then stepped back over to the counter to find out about what else I needed to do while I was out there. She told me I just need to take the placement test on Monday, then I will go back there and talk to a guidance counselor once my tests are all in. She then gave me a few pages of paper in response to my asking about who I could talk to about financial assistance. Apparently there is no longer anyone at the college, I need to handle my own financial assistance locating and applications at home? That does not seem right to me, but…. it’s what she said.

I left student services and headed down to locate the testing place that she said was across from the library. The building I was in was a new one since I had been to the college before, so I was sort of blindly feeling my way along looking for where I remembered the library used to be. I found it, and found the learning center. Just as I was pondering if I go in and ask the lady at the counter to be sure that was the right place a lacy in a MSCC shirt passed me in the hall and asked if I needed any help. I explained I was looking for where I take a placement test on Monday and she confirmed that was the place, then told me that I needed to go a bit further down the hall, and showed me down past the Atrium to where the place I pay for the test is located. I had assumed that I was to pay in the learning center, so good thing that lady thought to let me know there was a different place to pay for it. I jotted a few notes on my little note pad, then went back to a seating area just outside Student Services where, thank you whoever, I found maps of the new floor layout for the college. I spent a few moments sorting out what buildings were supposed to connect where on the disjointed map, then marked out my route for Monday, grabbed some degree fliers off a nearby stand and headed home.

Now I just need to check out the practice tests online and brush back up on my poor algebra skills that have not been used since the last time I went to college… over 15 years ago.

Still, I am able to do reasonably well at keeping up with notes, it is just the direct quotes that are still giving me fits. I have not yet perfected the technique of writing as fast as people can talk. Thankfully, however, my memory recall skills are getting better, so as long as it is not very long, I can recall a direct quote long enough to get it written down.

This morning I think my favorite direct quote came from President Obama when he was talking about turning fifty. “Which means that by the time I wake up tomorrow, I will have an email from AARP… asking me to call Obama, and ask him to protect medicare.” I even manged to recall most of the exact wording without needing to refer back to my note on the quote.

I think my morning news watching with a notebook will be a good skill builder for being faster at note taking, especially if I can get the hang of recalling the shorthand I learned when I started writing twenty years ago.

Back then, a paragraph like this one would look a bit more like the next one, with shorthand making memory prompts so I could get an idea out fast.

Bk thn, a PP like ths 1 wld lk a nit more lk the nxt 1, w/shrthnd mking memory prmpts so I cld get an idea out fst.

While there were some secretarial shorthand marks that I would make when writing, it was mostly abbreviations, leaving out vowels and replacing numbers with the numeric form rather than spelling any out. I also used to only write a name once, then use easier references when I could (he, she, they), or just use an initial in place of a full name.

Somewhere over the years, and under all of the stress, I think I just lost confidence in my ability to recall things. A loss that extended to the point that I lost faith even in my ability to recall what the shorthand references meant.  I am slowly rebuilding my self confidence in my skill to recall information accurately, but self doubt is an insidious beast that does not like to let go once it has sunk its claws in.