Why do some lists take off and some lists never really go anywhere? I was doing my usual semi-annual skim through YahooGroups to unsubscribe from the 75% of my lists that I've never even bothered to read, when I stumbled across the name of a virtually moribund little list with an interesting bunch of members who should be chatting up a storm.

The ostensible purpose of this list was to let fanfic writers who cared about things like the craft of writing talk to each other. There aren't many members, but most of the people there are more than capable of talking at length on any number of craft-related subjects.

No one ever talks, though.

Why do some lists take off and some lists never really go anywhere? Is it the moving spirit behind the list? Do some people have a gift for organizing a chatty list while others don't? Is the presence of at least someone who disagrees with a lot of the other members necessary? Is discussion only inspired by disagreement? Is a commonality of fandoms required so that only writers sharing the same fandoms really enjoy talking to each other? Is "commonality" a word?

I have friends. This may surprise some of you, but there you go. I do. At the moment I can't think of any of my closest friends with whom I currently share a fandom, largely because I'm not actually in a fandom right now. But those friends and I discuss writing endlessly.

(The thought occurs to me that the net may be littered with lists where writers discuss these things at length and I just wasn't invited to join any of them, but that's okay. I'd just like to know that somewhere, people are talking.)

Why do some slash fandoms take off while others don't go anywhere? It can't have anything to do with the quality of the show, because The Sentinel, while amazingly slashy, was hardly the epitome of quality television entertainment and yet it attracted a very large fan following. Smallville, which I've already heard some fans proclaiming the death of quality in after one season is a huge fandom. Few of even the most dedicated fans pretended that Phantom Menace was Academy Award movie material but thousands of people read and wrote slash for it anyhow.

Maybe it's a cheese factor. A show has to be both slashy and cheesy in the right way to inspire the viewers to turn, en masse to slashing it? A certain outrageousness in the premise that leaves room for a lot of imagination.

And yet, The X-Files in its early years was amazingly well-written. West Wing is hardly mindless entertainment. And both of those gathered significant fan bases. (Granted, in its last three years, TXF certainly fulfilled the cheese factor requirement but by then the fandom was fading significantly, so that couldn't be called a component of the inspiration for the fandom.)

I don't have anything interesting to say on this subject. I was just wondering.

Once a Thief is going to start airing in a substantial number of American television markets this fall.

This is an incredibly slashy show, ostensibly a love triangle but one where the two guys are so focused on each other that the female lead is irrelevant to the emotional content of the show 75% of the time. Two amazingly attractive guys who can barely keep their hands off of each other on-screen, and who are so married every single time they forget, just for a second, that they don't like each other. A cheesy set-up that includes a Secret Government Agency and a mandate to fight crime in any unorthodox way that succeeds.

It should be slash heaven, but there's a point of badness beyond which even the fans won't follow, so this show isn't going to develop a big following.

Owing to TPTB deciding that doing an episode-by-episode hommage to all the most-noted, most recognizable directors in cinematic history was a better use of the set-up than, say, actually developing the characters and creating a cohesive universe for their concept to live in, the show is barely watchable.

Individual episodes were superb but the overall feel of the show is disjointed and crazy, and not in a good, let's recreate the Marx Brothers kind of way. Lines are interchangeable, as are the attitudes of the characters depending upon the requirements of that week's directorial style. The look of the show bounces from noir to farce with no explanation or blending of the shifts. Secondary characters introduced throughout the show's mercifully short run vary from fascinating to mind-numbingly stupid with little ground in-between. Several good actors, as well as a surprisingly intriguing premise were entirely and sadly wasted.

If anyone is interested in seeing the show, I'd strongly, strongly recommend that you ask someone who has seen it already to recommend the three or four episodes worth seeing and avoid the rest of the show at all costs.

It isn't that I don't want the show to succeed in the U.S., although I do think that might be a tiny ray of good taste shining through the wasteland of crap that American television viewers apparently embrace, it's just that I'd like to see a few good writers offering some stories in the fandom and I think I have a better chance of that outcome if said good writers are only exposed to the few episodes where the characters and the plots were properly developed.

Even in those episodes, there are scenes I think should be edited out before anyone with a brain views the tapes.

So far I've been able to find two stories I thought were worth reading in this fandom. Two good stories. That's sad because, as I said before, I think the premise is intriguing and the characters, once you work out the inconsistency problems, are great story fodder. This fandom lives in a secret little place in my heart and I just know there are fifty decent writers who could do it more justice than TPTB did.