Thursday 22 December 2011

Spoiling a story

John Green, an author and member of the Vlog Brothers announced today that one of the publishing companies releasing his new book The Fault in Our Stars has shipped out a portion of the books prematurely. Twitter and Facebook were filled with sympathetic messages and statuses about how upset he was.

I was extremely puzzled by this when I first found out and simply did not understand the problem. Then I saw a link on his Twitter feed explaining the situation further, so naturally I read and then everything made sense.

http://fishingboatproceeds.tumblr.com/post/14578172294/the-leaking-of-the-fault-in-our-stars

The problem is not the mistake itself, as John so humbly points out himself. The trouble is that it opens a very wide door for spoilers. John Green is a writer who genuinely loves his audience and is fuelled by the joy he gets in creating a world for his readers. It is this attitude that created the online community of Nerdfighteria (who i should mentioned recently had another year of success with the Project for Awesome, http://projectforawesome.com/, sorry I didn't post about this before the event guys) who love to read and enjoy sharing their reading experience with others in the community.

John is upset because people will inevitably post spoilers online; ruining that special world he has created for a portion of the Nerdfighter community.

My hope is that those who seriously call themselves Nerdfighters will either choose not to post spoilers or will not read spoilers. Having said that if someone chooses to then as long as they do not ruin the story for those who don't want to know then this is fine.

I personally do not like being kept in suspense, various times when reading I'll flick through the last page or so to see if key characters are really dead or such and such. Everyone reads differently.

Apologies for the lack of posting the last few days, no doubt I will leave large gaps over the festive period. Tomorrow post will be a rant about half of our population, so no doubt that will rattle a few feathers!

DFTBA

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