From: Stephen Martin (ilium@juno.com)
Date: Wed 02 Jul 1997 - 07:11:11 EEST
Nick Brooke <Nick_Brooke@compuserve.com>
Re: Wastebaskets
Jane> Steve asks... that we stop referring to Greg's unpublished
snippets...
>> as being from his wastebasket. I'm not at all convinced that anyone
was
>> doing so in a derogatory way: I suspect a comparison was being made
with
>> the huge volumes of Tolkein's works that have been published over the
>> last few years.
>As originator of this useful phrase, I can confirm that this was
uppermost in
>my mind when I first scribed it. Comparing Greg to Tolkien is IMHO an
honour.
>Noting that die-hard Tolkien fans have contempt for the wastebasket
tomes
>is a salutary reminder. (I write, of course, as a founder of the Oxford
Tolkien
>Society: I know whereof I speak).
It's funny -- I've been a die-hard Tolkien fan since I was 10 or so
(that's 20 years now), and I have, with few exceptions, loved the twelve
+ books Christopher Tolkien has published on his fatehr's works. I don't
view any of them as wastebasket material (though the multiple-version
Lord of the Rings _was_ trying most of the time). Just goes to show how
different tastes are.
And, BTW, I apologize for my own rude remark to Peter Metcalfe. I plead
heat of battle and all that.
But I stand by my statement that I, at least, find the term derogatory no
matter how it is used. I think "Apocrypha" was a good term, though how
about we just agree to cite such material as "unpublished sources", given
the (what seemed to me to be a) general consensus awhile back to cite
sources?
Okay, I was content to stop there, but then Nick just had to keep going.
Everyone, feel free to skip to the next post now.
Jane>> But the term is, after all, inaccurate... The [items] we're
discussing are
>> those which he is still working on but has yet to publish.
>Sadly far from the truth. Sufficiently dweebish fanboys (*) can get
excited
>about a long-extant, long-unchanged fragment of "Gloranthan Lore",
written
>way back before RuneQuest or WB&RM were ever imagined, and
>self-evidently=
>replaced, reconsidered or discarded in subsequent (published or not)
work
>This includes e.g. campaign notes (full of French-named Sartarites),
dungeon
>maps, ephemeral fragments of non-starting fiction, etc.
Hm, I don't recall any of these subjects being discussed anytime recently
- -- we were referring to cultural notes, histories, things like that. I
guess The Broken Council Guidebook is only good for "dweebish fanboys"
(there's Nick, always the friendly and sensitive guy), is that what
you're saying Nick? Since 90% of it was taken from "Greg's Wastebasket"
by such "dweebish fanboys" as Eric Rowe, Paul Reilly, Shannon Appel, and
myself. And I'm just so sure that you and David Hall have never relied
upon such "wastebasket" material to write anything about, say, the
Malkioni sects or or a History of Malkionism or the Lismelder Tribe of
Sartar. Is that right -- you took _all_ your material straight from
published sources or your own imagination? Nothing snatched out of Greg's
"wastebasket" when he wasn't looking? Nothing at all?
>Greg's files are vasty and somewhat-sorted. But as soon as you get back
>before the Age of Word-Processing, you can essentially give up looking
for
>any draft/pre-publication material, and have to concentrate on finding
some
>"nuggets" to fuel your own creative processes.
As the only person in two decades to go through those files in an
organized method (when I was helping out at Chaosium a few summers ago) ,
I can say that there is a hell of a lot of good material there, even the
stuff which was (gasp!) typed or (horrors!) handwritten! Sure, some of
the stuff is pure crap, and some of it has been "replaced, reconsidered
or discarded in subsequent (published or not) work", but much of it,
probably 50% or more, is about areas which have nothing in print, and
which Greg has not written about in twenty years. How can such material
be irrelevant to the place and time it discusses? Most of this material
is NOT irrelevant or out of date or discarded.
I think Nick is being a bit disingenuous (since he has made use of such
material himself). I think he is being a bit petty, trying to defend a
phrase which _he_ first used, as a derogatory statement against me. And I
think he is being unfair to the Digest, trying to belittle sources of
information for the sole reason, as far as I can tell, because he doesn't
like ... something, I can't tell what.
Stephen Martin
ilium@juno.com
- -----------------------------------------------
The Book of Drastic Resolutions
drastic@juno.com
------------------------------
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