Talk:Mercedes Lackey

Before creating seperate pages for the various series, I suggest taking a look at Wikipedia:WikiProject Fictional series. I also suggest NOT creating pages for either series or individual books unless there is enough content to have such pages be more than stubs. DES 28 June 2005 17:02 (UTC)

Controversies

Lackey's explanation over her abandoning the Diana Tregarde works and withdrawing from fandom are, to put it charitably, not universally accepted; they should be mentioned, but not reported as fact. Salsa Shark 07:35, 5 Jan 2004 (UTC)

I went looking for stuff about this via Google. I found a whole lot of discussion about an alleged incident at DragonCon 1997, for which I haven't found a satisfactory conclusion (yet but RL intrudes yet again :-), but nothing yet about the other incident in her famous Last Straw message [1] involving IIRC a small child taking refuge in their home being killed during a court-ordered contact session. Does anyone know whether it's possible to confirm whether or not either of these stories is true. I will admit that I had only ever seen the Last Straw message and it hadn't occurred to me that there might be any question of it being true :-( Phil 15:06, Jan 5, 2004 (UTC)

The DragonCon event, at least, would have generated a police report if it had gone down the way Lackey claimed. One skeptic on Usenet posts that they searched for one - it would have been quite distinctive - and came up empty. Salsa Shark 08:02, 8 Jan 2004 (UTC)

I have added links to some of the usenet discussion of this issue, as archived on google. DES 28 June 2005 22:06 (UTC)

POV

The section "Opposition" seems quite POV as curretly written. Sources sould be cited for opnions, or at least pro and con views should be given equal treatment. DES 28 June 2005 17:11 (UTC)

Merges

I have moved the content from the separate pages for By The Sword and Oathblood onto the main page, and converted those pages into redirects. Both pages were stubs. In the case of By The Sword I have expanded and corected the content a good deal, as well. DES 28 June 2005 21:21 (UTC)

I initially came to ask another question, but first: have you noticed that someone has restarted the By The Sword article? I only did whilst reading this discussion. Anyway, the other question. What to do with the link on this (Mercedes Lackey) page to Oathblood now? It redirects back to this page. Just remove the link and make it italicised, or what? --Telsa 16:55, 9 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I have now simply removed that link. I've also removed a few more links in the Serrated Edge stories: they link to entirely the wrong pages. See next topic :) Telsa 17:21, 14 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

All these links to book titles

This page has something like 70 book titles as links. Of those which are blue links rather than red, they are links to anything from Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield (ca. 1824–1876 ... the best-known black concert artist of her time) to disambiguation pages. Is there really an encyclopaedia article in every single one of Lackey's books, including compilations of her short stories? I can see that there is in the Arrows books, and possibly the Vanyel books. But in general, would it not be better to have articles on "SERRAted Edge (Mercedes Lackey)", "Bardic Voices (Mercedes Lackey)" and so on? And then all the information can be collected in one place for each, and book details all on the same pages? Now that the Oathblood info is on the main page, I shall try and demonstrate what I mean with the Vows and Honour series as an example. Telsa 17:21, 14 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

My own suggestion would be to link the book titles to, where available, complete works or sample chapters. Baen has a lot of Lackey's books available for free in their entirety, either via Webscriptions or via the CDs hosted on the web with permission; many of those not would have sample chapters available. I made some such links in the paragraphs I added talking about the stories the other day. --Robotech_Master 17:49, 27 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Whilst I largely agree with you, that link went down earlier today, (right as I was reading one of them): the same message now appears all over as on the main page: the maintainer can't afford the bandwidth since it suddenly shot through the roof, so has removed the CDs. I am having difficulty locating the equivalent pages on the Baen site so far. If you know where they are, some link updates are needed! In addition, it is possible that the links should be in an External links section towards the end? I am not sure on this, though.. Telsa 22:41, 27 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Zounds!! Typical that, after all this time, it would happen right after I updated the links in here. And thanks to a robots.txt file, archive.org doesn't even have them.

But ne'er fear, I've found another site that does still have them, and I'll be going through and revising the links accordingly. This one being a quasi-official Baen fan site and having a long history of hosting other high-popularity Baen files (collections of preview snippets for books not webscripting yet) I expect it will be more stable.

As to the question of whether they should be in an external links section...I've always looked at those sections as kind of appendices for linking to general reference type material. If there's going to be a link to something that's covered in detail, I feel the link should be from where the detail is, so that the prospective link-follower isn't inconvenienced by having to go all the way to the bottom to find it. (Indeed, how is he supposed to know such a link would be at the bottom; he hasn't gotten there yet.) --Robotech_Master 19:06, 29 August 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Velgarth series order

As I was looking over this article I was thinking that maybe readers would like to know the publishing order of the Velgarth series and/or the Chronological order of the books. I would like to do that but I thought I'd bounce it off someone first. I know I personally like to know the chronological order of various large series (like Pern) so that I can have a good feel of where I am when I pick up a given book.

Also in the question of if the various series are moved to seperate articles and the name for the Queen's Own, Last Hearld Mage, Gryphons, Mage Winds, etc. I would hightly suggest calling it the Velgarth series since some of them have nothing to do with Valdemar.