obvious noob questions from a writer

[Drashner1]

Well...okay then. Quite an amazing response, really.

So basically...I can rape and pillage at will, lift all these great ideas, and all OA wants...is an attribution?

Basically yes. Although if you'd like to also become a member of the OA community and a contributing member of the project, we certainly wouldn't complain Did I happen to mention that one of the other hats I wear is Associate Editor of the ezine? And I'm always on the lookout for new stories for an upcoming issue (the next one will be coming out in late Jan or early Feb sometime).

Well...yeah. I can do that.

Consider me on board.

Nifty Welcome aboard!

a) authonomy is sponsored by HarperCollins, a largely Brit-based publishing house...

Thanks for this - perhaps some of our authors might like to play there. Anyone?

b) As far as providing feedback...yeah, I'd be more than happy to do that. I did a little digging and didn't see the pay scale stuff, but I can tell you that the first thing I saw is that the sheer scale of your Universe presents some interesting problems for a prospective writer.
<snip>
Reading some of the Encyclopedia Galactica, I'm pretty much having to cross-click links incessantly for definitions and chew slowly and digest in increments...and I still get the idea it'll take months to get totally up to speed. Which is cool (and honestly, exciting, it's a treasure trove!)...but it also means the macro scale of the OA Universe seriously needs to be broken down into micro lumps for dispensation.

The pay scale stuff is currently located here:

http://www.orionsarm.com/xcms.php?r=oa-p...ioncontest

We used a different process for the first book, but decided to move to this one because we think it will let us get more money to our authors faster in the long term.

Re your other points...certainly no argument here Trying to make the setting more generally accessible is something I think we'd all like to do. Both to give you an idea of what we have so far along these lines, and to help you with getting your arms around the setting, here are some resources for new members that we currently have on hand:

Illustrated Backstory:

http://www.orionsarm.com/xcms.php?r=oa-backstory

The OA Primer:

http://www.orionsarm.com/xcms.php?r=oa-p...primer_toc

OA Canon:

http://www.orionsarm.com/xcms.php?r=oa-p...=gen_canon

FAQs:

http://www.orionsarm.com/xcms.php?r=oa-faq

Glossary:

http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/4b816f633b041

Note that we are also open to improvements to these resources as well. Also any suggestions you might have for other ways to make the setting more easily dispensed. Once we get the current book project completed, I think we're going to be spending some time on various improvements to the project, including some consolidating and reorganizing of various things.

The thing that I saw, clicking on some of the fiction here, is that the macro scale of the Universe was overwhelming some of the narrative sensibilities of the authors. You click on some of these stories and you get an overpowering fire-hose blast of geekdom square in the face. Which is cool if you speak the lingo...but when even a Gibson/Vinge/Niven guy like me doesn't know what the fark you're talking about, what it means is you're talking some obscure dialect of geek that's completely inaccessible not just to the masses (which I know is not your target audience), but also to the reasonably well-educated...and that is a problem.

This is definitely a challenge for us. There is a strong tendency to want to try to include every setting element in a single story. Which can lead to 'laundry listing' of elements and infodumps. We do have rather a tendency to create neologisms as well

The most obvious thing I saw was: this universe could badly use some windows into it. The obvious parallel is Linux...Linux was a shared collaborative geek endeavor that was once largely exclusive to the uber-geeks because it didn't have a user-friendly GUI (which rendered it inoperable to all but the true technophiles)...but add a user-friendly interface and all of a sudden you've got Ubuntu running on hundreds of thousands of systems worldwide. This division of your boards so that the right-brained can talk amongst themselves...seems wise, on your part.

'Windows'? Could you expand on this a bit, please? Any suggestions on this front would be welcome.

Thanks for your thoughtful responses. It's certainly a lot more than a noob expected to get. [/i]

Thank you for your thoughts and input If you have any other questions or concerns or just thoughts and ideas, please feel free to share them.

Todd