Blogging at Wikia

We can now make blog pages at the Fiction Wikia (example). Only the creator of a "blog article" can edit it; a major departure from the usual open editing of wiki pages by multiple editors. Other editors can comment on blog articles. The blog posts can even include video (shown below).

Good and Evil

see no evil, hear no evil, write no evil

While working on The Search for Kalid I've been thinking about this story as an example of space opera. In space opera there are often very clearly drawn "good" and "evil" characters. One of the first novels I ever read was The Skylark of Space which has Marc DuQuesne as a "bad guy", but also a character with a certain amount of honor.

I guess I have to admit that I am not very good at creating evil characters. My problem is, I do not find a stark dichotomy between good and evil interesting and in fiction, totally evil characters do not seem realistic.

source

In The Search for Kalid the story starts with one character explicitly labeled as "The Evil One", but as the story unfolds, it becomes clear that this label is the subjective opinion of a long-time rival. The reader can decide if any of the characters in the story is really evil.

More about evil in fiction: 2010  2012 2013 2015 2016 2017 2018

Image credit: No evil by Nouvelles Fables (GFDL)

Firefox 3.5

I'm interested in making use of audio and video to enhance online stories. Firefox 3.5 has built-in video playing ability.


video source

This video (above) should only play if you are using Firefox 3.5....it works for me!

New License, new Text Editor, new Collaboration

New License. A funny thing happened on the way away from the forum. Back in April I saw no evidence that Wikia would switch from the GFDL to the CC-BY-SA license, but the switch did take place (switched to CC-BY-SA).

People can do a
Google search for "free" content. For example, this blog comes up if you search for free content on the web that mentions the story VirileMail. Hopefully Fiction Wikia pages will start showing up in such searches soon.

New Text Editor. Another change for the Fiction Wikia is that a rich text editor is now available. Hopefully this will help make it easier for people to participate at the Fiction Wikia.

New Collaboration. Fiction Wikia has long had One-word-at-a-time. We recently started One-paragraph-at-a-time. The first story being made using this format is I'm not you.