Club Jade

The blogosphere has been fairly quiet on the Lori Jareo front lately, but via Lee Goldberg we have another sighting – Publisher’s Weekly.

Entries on Jareo and Another Hope have also shown up on Wookieepedia and Wikipedia.

Meanwhile, here’s a timeline of CJ’s coverage:

Thursday, April 20th: A user asks about the Amazon listing for Another Hope on the starwars.com VIP thread. Lucasfilm Licensing editor Sue Rostoni (‘Eeusu Estornii’) says it’s “Not one of ours” and passes the word onto Lucasfilm’s legal department. Word spreads and writer Lee Goldberg blogs about the incident.

Friday, April 21st: Writer John Scalzi blogs about Jareo; his post will become one of the most-linked items regarding Another Hope. The news also makes Fandom Wank, spreading rapidly across the general fandom community. Publishing blog Galleycat also posts about Jareo.

On Friday afternoon Jareo and Wordtech take down the book site thenaberriegirls.com, leaving a brief message that the book has been removed from Books in Print and “will be removed from book distribution channels effective Tuesday, April 24, 2006.”

Saturday, April 22: Teresa Nielsen Hayden posts about Jareo on Making Light; Star Wars author Karen Traviss immortalizes Jareo in Mando’a; items on several fannish Livejournal communities.

Sunday, April 23rd: Amazon removes reviews that don’t address the actual work. Thenaberriegirls.com ceases to direct to anything. Calm analysis of the situation begins to appear.

Monday, April 24th: Several sporkings of the books text appear on Livejournal; more analysis. Amazon page remains up.

Tuesday, April 25th: First mainstream news coverage from Sci-Fi Wire. Another Hope finally becomes unavailable for order on Amazon.com.

Wednesday, April 26th: Book pulled from Amazon; Column on Jareo and fan fiction appears in the Daytona Beach News-Journal.

Thursday, April 27th: Time magazine writer Lev Grossman discusses Lori Jareo and fan fiction on NPR.

MetroDad’s Modern Jedi’s Guide to Parenting.

The Infinite Force considers Palpatine’s manipulation of information.

Jkthunder explores Buddhist parallels in Star War

And over in Lori Jareo corner, takes on the controversy and what it means for fanfic in general from Imadra-blue and Lazypadawan.

Time magazine writer Lev Grossman discusses Lori Jareo and fan fiction on NPR’s All Things Considered.

Another Hope: Going, going… gone.

Ironically, we now have a second mainstream media sighting.

‘THIS TITLE IS CURRENTLY NOT AVAILABLE.’

Sci-Fi Wire has a news item on it, complete with quotes from Lucasfilm’s Lynne Hale:

“We recently found out about the book, and the author has agreed to cease and desist,” Hale said in an interview. “There’s nothing more that we have to say.” Asked whether Jareo had removed the listing, Hale added: “Yes. … She was happy to do it.”

No matter how cruel it may be, I just can’t look away from the Lori Jareo all-fandom bender. (Yes, the Amazon listing is still up.)

On the mocking end of things, Jareo’s Ryoo Naberrie is sporked, then the Another Hope press release.

Meanwhile on the analysis end, there’s interesting post on fanfic and copyright from Tilted Windmill and a theory that WordTech published the book to make a statement about copyright. I’m not so sure, but at this point, who knows?

The feedback is getting more and more cut-throat, but having been aware and reporting on this since Thursday, I’m over it; the entire situation is just getting sadder and sadder.

Not only does Lori Jareo claim to have a journalism degree, but her huband and WordTech partner/co-founder Kevin Walzer used to work for the Associated Press, the world’s largest news organization, according to an article about WordTech Communications in Poets & Writers magazine. Journalism is not a field that is typically ignorant of copyright law – why did it not occur to either of them that publishing a work explicitly set in a galaxy they did not own was a bad idea?

Although Amazon has yet to remove the listing for Another Hope, they did delete the many ‘reviews’ that did not address the actual work. And perhaps most disturbingly of all, the sales rank has jumped from #35,860 on Saturday to #13,371 on Sunday. (For comparison, the sales ranks of the latest licensed fiction releases, Republic Commando:Triple Zero and Outbound Flight, are fluxuating in the 1000 range.)

I expect Another Hope will be gone by Monday evening (though I said that about Friday as well.) The message left on the website earlier leads me to believe that LFL has served a C&D and is leaving the business end to WordTech for the moment.

But that’s just more of the same. Whatever they were thinking back in July 2005, they know better now; thenaberriegirls.com no longer works at all.

Anyway, the best post today is this thoughtful analysis of the situation by Chris Meadows.

Meanwhile, Playing in George’s Sandbox, a thread at TFN’s FanFic forum, explores (in-between yet more outrage) the possible repercussions for the SW fanfic community in general. In short: Don’t go flushing your WIPs down the toilet quite yet.

Yes, Jareo did something phenomenally stupid, but demonizing the woman more isn’t going to help anyone. She knows. We all know. All we can do it wait and see, and I expect Jareo, WordTech and the Print-On-Demand industry, not Star Wars fandom, to take the brunt of the fallout.

Mediabistro’s publishing blog GalleyCat: I Bet She Finds Our Lack of Faith Disturbing

As predicted by our own Zeynep, Teresa Nielsen Hayden on Making Light: Annals of short-lived phenomena: Star Wars fanfic on Amazon.

And just before I went to post this, Star Wars author Karen Traviss schools us on how one says ‘death wish’ in Mando

The saga of Lori Jareo is over… Or is it? We don’t know what’s going on beyond the scenes, but the Lucasfilm lawyers must have finally gotten through, since her book site (thenaberriegirls.com) vanished this afternoon and was replaced with the following statement:

Thank you for your interest in Another Hope. The book has been removed from the Books in Print database and will be removed from book distribution channels effective Tuesday, April 24, 2006.

And the fandom outrage keeps rolling in… Another Hope is still up on Amazon, but certainly not for long. Not that I would recommend buying it – if you must read the thing beyond Amazon’s preview pages, ask around for copies of the PDF.