In the time frame I sent out the preview to a few friends on that anime forum, I also sent it to Mark and [E] on here.  I'm open to sharing with JNP too.  But I'm not comfortable sharing it to the public in unpublished form.

Saohc said, December 13, 2014, 06:06:48 pm

Writing forums are the exception, because they usually have a thread or a line of text in the footer that says "Works are copyright of original owners", are affiliated with Creative Commons or something else of that nature to protect the copyrights of their members' works. 

Ideas are not copyright protected. so if your novel has an original idea, it's more likely to get stolen in a writing forum.

Might be best if all related posts are moved to the relevant thread.

M: Kiryu is the way yakuza used to be. We kept the streets clean. People liked us. We didn't bother ordinary citizens. We respected our bosses. Now, guys like that only exist in video games.
S: I don't know any ex-yakuza running orphanages.
K: There was one a few years ago. A good guy.
M: You sure it wasn't just a tax shelter?
K: Sure it was a tax shelter but he ran it like a legitimate thing. You know.

It doesn’t take more than a cursory look at overwrought television series like “Arrow” and “The Flash,” or jingoistic blockbusters like “Man of Steel” and “The Dark Knight Rises,” to find the supergods of DC Comics on their last, wobbly legs. Even the forthcoming, painfully titled blockbuster “Superman v Batman: Dawn of Justice” is coded more like a marketing bonanza than a transformative narrative with anything important to say about the globally warmed Earth our children are inheriting.

And you’re correct: the “crisis” is now the default superhero storytelling mode. Every comic book hero — TV heroes too, like “Doctor Who” — must inevitably, relentlessly, repeatedly face a dedicated threat to his or her very essence and core. It’s no longer sufficient to commit a weird sort of crime in Gotham City; any given baddie has to gnaw at the very roots of Batman’s being, fuck up the private lives of his friends and relatives, make him doubt his raison d’etre, set his postal district on fire and blow up his cave. Poor old Batman seems to lurch from one apocalyptic life-ruin epic to another these days with barely a pause for breath, making me long for the days when he jumped around at night helping people or solving mysteries that didn’t lead to some aeons-spanning plot by the ultimate villain to do the ultimate Bad Thing. And the Caped Crusader’s not the only perma-victim of the Ebola-like “crisis” epidemic. For a while it was genuinely thrilling to watch our heroes facing such directly focused threats to their meaning and relevance, but now the “crisis” approach, where every day is “The Day Evil Won,” is beginning to feel like another grim, played-out sales strategy with diminishing creative returns.