Welcome to Literary Ashland

Follow

Ghost writing has been extensively researched. However, what could be categorized as “ghost writing” in other industries? There are large corporations who are under a singular name but have many employees, so it’s hard to understand what to categorize as ghost writing in the context of developing, writing, painting, or creating in any way.

Below is a list of many tasks that could be/are considered as ghost-creation.

• Writing
• Developing
• Painting
• Game creation
  Board
  Video
  Card
• Academic
• Music
• Movies
• Websites
• Etc. . .

The ghost writing in these types include a wide variety of tasks in these companies, such as:

• Figure making

This refers mainly to the figures used in tabletop gaming or complex board games, also including the 3D modeling of action figures from a series. One author or artist may not do the designs or create the figures, even though their name goes on the packaging.

• Character development

The back-story of a character (in games, not necessarily film or books) is often developed by other sources.

• Character design

There is often a large group of employees who concentrate solely on creating the physical figures and also the designs of each character. This includes game art, but also books with cover art and tabletop gaming figures.

• Backgrounds

Many times in history, now-famous painters had large squads of other artists, commonly apprentices, working on different sections of their art that specialize in backgrounds, wildlife, water, clothing, and many other features in a painting. Today, this can be seen in some different artworks: though many still remain a mystery.

Follow

Note: This is a neutral commentary on the creation of fan works! I strongly encourage you to use this information and other sources to create your own opinion.

No one thinks deeply on the nuances of publishing and copyright until there’s a problem. The question I’m going to pose is simple: How far should a company go to protect its content from being stolen? We’ve all heard about the big internet scandals where the government is trying to “crack down” on music piracy, but how much deeper does this go? There are creators all over the world who create both original works and adaptations of others – the adaptations sometimes being accepted, and sometimes completely forbidden and immediately taken down.

Recently, my friend sent me a cool adaptation of the Avengers trailer. Unfortunately, by the time I was able to see her message and click on the link, the video had been removed from YouTube under violation of copyright. Where should the line be drawn? The author wasn’t gaining a profit from the content, and if anything was creating interest in the film itself (not that the whole world wasn’t interested in said movie).

Another example is how tight a hold Anne Rice has on her content. Rice has completely banned the use of her characters or ideas in all fan created works, all “fanfiction” completely forbidden and taken down as soon as it goes public.

So how much is too much? While the artists have the legal right to pull anything that’s created with their original ideas in mind (or intellectual property), some don’t mind at all. But here’s where the laws get complex. Artists hold full rights over their original characters and ideas, but courts in America grant protection to parodies! Some fan art can also be categorized as parody… Actually, quite a lot of fan art. As good ol’ Wikipedia states, because of this fact a lot of copyright cases are very long and tedious.

Along with the artists that are strict with their copyrights, there are also those that are extremely lenient. While it’s still illegal to reproduce their works in original art or stories, some artists and companies don’t pursue the perpetrators at all. While most individuals don’t sell their fanart, some do. The most common example is selling art prints, plushes, or other works in which there is a copyright on the character, but the art is copyright to the artist “stealing” the design but creating the artwork. This happens often in conventions such as Comic-Con or other conventions (science fiction, anime, etc) to appreciate a genre or other type of work. While there is a section for licensed companies to sell their merchandise, a convention also typically includes a completely separate section for small businesses or thrifty individuals to sell art they’ve created themselves. These are curious galleries, because the majority of the art pieces for sale are of copyrighted characters, and therefore very illegal to sell! However, these pieces rarely get targeted by the original creator. Why?

The answer is that most artists recognize fan works generate interest in their own product. In a poll of artists who do fan art, the majority state that selling their work is only a novelty; most artists only break even after production costs and profits, if that.

So, who’s right and who’s copywrong? There is a plethora of laws and legal issues surrounding fan creations, which should definitely be glanced at if you’re thinking about drawing that cute Watchmen picture or creating a fan trailer of a movie. However, Fanart is a running trend that will most likely continue strong.

Follow

The presentation of the HD Reader, along with the growing significance of audiobooks–which have been around for much longer–leads us to a natural question: what is reading? Does it include these new technological steps where we listen and imagine instead of literally looking at the words on a page? Or is this something else entirely?

It’s kind of a cheap answer, but I think it all depends on how you define “reading.” Consider that one of the things many teachers and scholars say is that reading is good for your brain because it exercises your imagination. In that sense, it is the act of imagining that functions as the “reading,” and audiobooks have the same effect. We hear things instead of reading them, sure, but we still see them in our heads, so the mental part is definitely present. On the other hand, when we describe children listening to stories read by parents, we don’t think of them as “readers.” We think of them as “being read to.” We say that reading to our children is healthy because it helps children learn how to read, not because it’s actually reading.

But something interesting to note about this phenomenon that I’ve heard comparatively little about is how it’s possible to read words without actually reading. See, I’m someone easily distracted by his own wandering thoughts. Therefore, even as a grade school student, I could be sitting there staring at the pages, going through the words, but not get anything from them. This frequently led me to have to reread pages over and over again, and by the end of a month, I’d be lucky if I’d finished 100 pages of a story. Now I could have continued “reading” in spite of having gained nothing from the words and I can assure everyone that I’d have finished tons of books by now, but that isn’t really what we think of as “reading,” is it? To read, one must also be paying attention and follow the story. When we think of it this way, it could be argued–assuming it is easier to pay attention to a speaking voice than to words on a page–that some people “read” better with audiobooks than with written text.

So that leaves us with the big question that we started with: what is reading? If you were to put a gun to my head and demand I tell you exactly what I thought constituted “reading” and what didn’t, I’d probably call either the cops or a psychologist as you would clearly need some medical attention. But assuming that option was off the table, I’d say that I think the answer is smack dab in the middle of it all. To read the actual text constitutes “technical reading” regardless of whether you pay attention, and to pay attention as you read constitutes both “technical” and “mental” reading. Audiobooks constitute “mental reading,” but not “technical reading.”

The HD Reader is some combination of all of those that will allow more people to get involved in the market, whether that’s through the more technical avenues of reading or the more mental aspects of reading.
Regardless of what we call reading or not, what I believe is that we’ll move farther away from the “technical” aspects of reading over the next few years and farther into the “mental” realm of reading. Why? Because it’s easier to listen while we do our chores than it is to sit still and stare at a page. The latter can even be sleep-inducing, while the former keeps us wide awake. Call it better or worse, but that is the future I see for reading.