Roald Dahl stamps from Royal Mail: [link]
Literary Buffistas 3: Don't Parse the Blurb, Dear.
There's more to life than watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer! No. Really, there is! Honestly! Here's a place for Buffistas to come and discuss what it is they're reading, their favorite authors and poets. "Geez. Crack a book sometime."
Interview with Lev Grossman, author of The Magicians and The Magician King, which explores fan fiction. It's from August, so it might have been linked already.
Crossposted with FanFic.
Not just Roald Dahl stamps, but also Quentin Blake.
The Plagiarist’s Tale. The amount of pathos in this story is staggering.
IO9's 10 worst mistakes that authors make in alternate history. I 100% disagree with #10. How arbitrary is that? Write your own fanfiction and leave the author alone.
#1 or #10?
#10.
Der.
::edits surreptitiously::
#10, the first one: I agree with ita. There's no need to bring it to the present. Look at Temeraire, after all.
Write your own fanfiction and leave the author alone.
I feel that way about most of these, actually.
[eta: It's a list of "things that made some fans made that one time", which is a pretty huge leap away from "worst mistakes" authors must avoid. Avoid these 10 and your fans will get mad about some other list of things. Doesn't mean it's a bad book.]
I think many of them are good things to take into consideration when making sure your story is tight, things likely to pop up with this trope.
Showing the 2012-or-whatever version of the alternate timeline strikes me as entirely arbitrary. So what if you wonder? What does that have to do with the plot and the characters of every single alternate history story ever?