Star Stuff:
I'm not sure if JMS is "personally" connected with the JMSNews site or not. (Like earlier archives of his posts I'm sure it has his permission, but beyond that I don't know what involvement, if any, he might have with the site.) Either way, the associated forum, which is a whole separate issue and involves all the usual dangers of a semi-moderated environment where every incoming message is not subject to some kind of automatic or hand-moderation. My gut instinct is that he will stay away from the forum for all the usual reasons.
I don't know why vague speculation based on something equally vague that JMS said always seems to get a specific date attached to it, and how that date then becomes "JMS said" on the boards.
It happened with the possible feature film, season 4 and now JMS's passing reference to a couple of possible
B5 projects that were in a talking stages. Not blaming you, Star Stuff, you're reacting to what you've read or heard. Just commenting on the phenomemnon, which I keep seeing on different sites and on different subjects.
No, JMS didn't say he'd have an announcement about
anything in mid-October. What he did say, about a month ago, was that there were some talks going on about a couple of
possible projects, that it was too early to say anything beyond that because nothing was decided yet, and that he
might have something more to say "in a few weeks". (Which as a practical matter can mean anything from two weeks to about ten.)
So far he hasn't said anything. His saying something would depend on two things: 1) One or both of the ideas actually getting to the deal stage where contracts are signed and/or money has changed hands and 2) Word getting out from someone else. Normally this would mean Warner Bros. and/or a television network making some kind of public announcement (even if only a blurb in
Variety that nobody outside the industry is going to read.) Hollyweird protocol is such that the entities footing the bill, not the lowly writer, gets to make such announcements. The only exception would be the word leaking in some other way - which nearly happened when the Sci-Fi Channel picked up the
B5 reruns and
did happen with the S1 DVDs - when someone from the National Captioning Institute posted a message on the moderated newsgroup asking for help with the spelling of the alien names.
Once that was out in public, JMS no longer felt contstrained by protocol and he confirmed that the DVDs were on their way. (After giving Warner Home Video a head's up so they could rush the official announcement out ASAP.)
Geo Kuutio -
While a lot of fan posts are pretty illiterate, this is not always the case. One fan on the old non-moderated newsgroup wondered what would happen if someone sentenced to the death-of-persaonality somehow regained the memory of his previous life - and that resulted in the already-written
Passing Through Gethsemane being postponed for a full season until JMS could track the fan down and get a signed release from him. That wasn't a "lousy" idea, it was a good enough one that JMS had already used it, even if the episode hadn't been filmed yet. Another fan posted a piece of fan fiction to a site an SF novelist maintained and the result was that an entire unpublished novel by the author was rejected by her publisher. The fan's story was too close in plot to the novel, and the publisher was too concerned with the risk of a lawsuit.
Regards,
Joe
