Yeah, it's never easy to balance kids and work and hobbies-that-keep-us-sane-at-home. Pretty crazy, indeed.
The Bolivia set-up from the movie is actually very different from the books, starting with oh, wait, they weren't in Bolivia. But it worked for the movie. It's been a while since I read them, so I'd have to look up the details, but Fadhil was a bit of a different character, not in charge at all. It was traumatic for Cougar to kill him, and then he had the whole helicopter crash thing and not being able to rescue any of the kids because of the heat of the fire... Clay explains it all to Aisha at one point in the second book, I think, Cougar's damage and history.
Your yahoo group experience, except for how public it was, sounds much more like the listerve/LOC letter system I still prefer. ;-)
I think right before LOTR movies fandom was going through a shift to more "social" writing, where people posted whatever they'd just thrown together because writing had become part of being active in fandom. Then if you even hinted that you saw a flaw, there was an explosion of "OMG you said something NOT NICE! WHY U HATING ON MY Epxression of LURV? It's JUST A HOBBY!" Made me VERY leery about offering any kind of critique to anyone, whether via email or comment or even if I was asked to beta. Instead, I defaulted to mostly just not commenting--not to mention that when a story is posted publicly, the consensus seems to be that the time for offering criticism has passed. (But it pains me to see a good story with what I think may be a plothole, so I'll sneak something in sometimes, like when I asked about Cougar's family's reaction to his running away in your last fic. It's neat to know that you don't mind. ;-)
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The Bolivia set-up from the movie is actually very different from the books, starting with oh, wait, they weren't in Bolivia. But it worked for the movie. It's been a while since I read them, so I'd have to look up the details, but Fadhil was a bit of a different character, not in charge at all. It was traumatic for Cougar to kill him, and then he had the whole helicopter crash thing and not being able to rescue any of the kids because of the heat of the fire... Clay explains it all to Aisha at one point in the second book, I think, Cougar's damage and history.
Your yahoo group experience, except for how public it was, sounds much more like the listerve/LOC letter system I still prefer. ;-)
I think right before LOTR movies fandom was going through a shift to more "social" writing, where people posted whatever they'd just thrown together because writing had become part of being active in fandom. Then if you even hinted that you saw a flaw, there was an explosion of "OMG you said something NOT NICE! WHY U HATING ON MY Epxression of LURV? It's JUST A HOBBY!" Made me VERY leery about offering any kind of critique to anyone, whether via email or comment or even if I was asked to beta. Instead, I defaulted to mostly just not commenting--not to mention that when a story is posted publicly, the consensus seems to be that the time for offering criticism has passed. (But it pains me to see a good story with what I think may be a plothole, so I'll sneak something in sometimes, like when I asked about Cougar's family's reaction to his running away in your last fic. It's neat to know that you don't mind. ;-)