Terry Goodkind supports new Save Our Seeker Contest

It seems an incredible opportunity has opened up for the Legend of the Seeker fans who want to Save Our Seeker. Laura from Save Our Seeker has teamed up with Terry Goodkind to offer some great prizes for a month-long letter-writing campaign that may have a real chance at bringing the show back to production.

It turns out that the person whom Legend of the Seeker fans most need to convince to work toward that goal is Ken Biller, Executive Producer of Legend of the Seeker. We need to call out all the fans and the friends of the fans and the fans' families to send Ken as many postcards and letters as we can to show him there is a great and loyal fandom for this show.

Remember, it wasn't poor ratings that killed Legend of the Seeker -- it was Tribune's bankruptcy, in response to which the Tribune Company pulled expensive programming from its USA TV stations, thus depriving Legend of the Seeker of 1/3 of its US market. The remaining 2/3 of the market simply could not take up the slack. But if Ken Biller puts his heart into bringing the show back, with our support, he can find a new distribution channel.

Heck, given the popularity of some Internet-only science fiction and fantasy programming, maybe now is the time for an online LOTS channel on Hulu, Netflix, or YouTube!

Laura has posted all the contest details here as well as a list of the prizes. The top prize is a "Limited-edition silver Sword of Truth pendant & necklace co-developed by Terry Goodkind and RockLove Jewelry". What more incentive do you need than that?

But after you join the contest you can help promote it. I've compiled a few ideas to share with you. Feel free to add to the list:

• Share links to Laura’s post ( http://legendofseeker.livejournal.com/993899.html ) on all your social media accounts like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, et. al.
• Share links to Laura's post on any science fiction or entertainment forums or mailing lists you participate in.
• Write a blog post about the contest like I have.
• Ask your friends and relatives to join the contest and help promote it.
• Create a cool graphic to promote the contest and put it on your blog or Website.
• Create an 8×11 flyer to promote the contest and post it on bulletin boards at your schools, community centers, local science fiction book stores, gaming shops, etc.
• Share scans of your creative flyers at the Save Our Seeker Contest Thread on the LOTS.Org forum.
• If you have a podcast or radio show, mention the contest to your listeners.
• Ask your local science fiction and fantasy meetup, book club, or fan group to join the contest and help promote it.

So, don't wait any longer! Get started! We have work to do!
____________________________________________ SF-Fandom is a moderated, fan-run community devoted to science fiction, fantasy, history, and mythology. SF-Fandom was founded in 2001 and is part of the Xenite.Org network. Free registration is required to post. Please be sure you read our Posting Guidelines.

Video for Craig Horner's Birthday Tweetathon

Here is a video I found on YouTube that promotes the January 24, 2012 Birthday Tweetathon fans of Legend of the Seeker are scheduling for Craig Horner. Craig of course played Richard Cypher/Rahl on the show. He moved to Los Angeles after Legend of the Seeker ceased production. I know he spent some time online but then withdrew. Here's hoping he is keeping busy. You may want to check out this State of the Save Our Seeker Movement on the SaveTheSeeker blog. ____________________________________________ SF-Fandom is a moderated, fan-run community devoted to science fiction, fantasy, history, and mythology. SF-Fandom was founded in 2001 and is part of the Xenite.Org network. Free registration is required to post. Please be sure you read our Posting Guidelines.

Middle-earth Comes to Life on Xenite.org

As part of the campaign to recondition and revive Xenite.Org I have been writing a lot of new research articles for the Middle-earth sub-domain on Xenite.Org. Since July (and up to the time of this writing) I have been able to publish over 350 articles, including many old essays from my Suite101 collection (which is no longer available on Suite101). Here is a breakdown of what you can find on the Middle-earth Website:

• Tolkien and Middle-earth essays from the Suite101 collection. So far more than 50 have been republished here.
• Feature Articles on Middle-earth topics that don't fit elsewhere. So far more than 5 have been published.
• Interviews with Tolkien Scholars. At this writing 7 have been published but more are planned.
• Introductions to issues of online Middle-earth Journals. This series has so far focused on the discontinued Other Hands journal but other journals will also be covered.
• Middle-earth Talk Radio episodes. All the old announcements now have broken links because the Website has changed. This series of articles introduces fans to the talk show and links to current download pages.
• Middle-earth Unplugged -- a collection of the most ambitious essays I have ever written. They are a blend of fan fiction and fact written in the style of National Geographic anthropological travel articles.
• Tolkien and Middle-earth News collects some recent off-road Tolkien news (mostly announcements about plays and festivals) with older Lord of the Rings news articles that still receive a lot of interest.
• Tolkien questions, Hobbit questions, Middle-earth questions -- at this writing almost 200 articles of various length answering questions on just about everything you can imagine have been published. More are planned.

I have never before attempted anything on this scale. Publishing over 300 articles in six months -- most of them newly written -- has been no small feat. The site publishes 3 articles per day, five days per week. I cannot promise to maintain that grueling schedule indefinitely but I'm committed to doing as much as I can before I have to stop and move on to something else. ____________________________________________ SF-Fandom is a moderated, fan-run community devoted to science fiction, fantasy, history, and mythology. SF-Fandom was founded in 2001 and is part of the Xenite.Org network. Free registration is required to post. Please be sure you read our Posting Guidelines.

Have you checked out this fantasy movie princess gallery?

It is no secret that Xenite.Org fell on hard times in mid-2011 when the Google Panda algorithm downgraded the site for having too many broken scripts and empty stub pages. The only solution to the Google problem seemed to be to clear the site completely of all content and start over. Unfortunately, deleting 20,000+ pages of content seems to have hurt Xenite's backlink relationships with other sites, so we have been slowing rebuilding science fiction and fantasy fan awareness of our return to activitty. While only a fraction of the old articles have thus far been republished the Google search engine algorithm seems to be satisfied with what it is finding at Xenite. Our recent Emma Watson Pictures Gallery has been incredibly popular and successful. The pictures are all fairly recent and tasteful but they definitely flatter the lovely Emma and present her in some of her best poses and outfits. So following on that success Xenite.Org has now published a fantasy movie princess gallery that should please many fans of great science fiction and fantasy movies and TV shows. Of course you cannot be Xenite.Org and not publish something about Xena: Warrior Princess so the gallery starts off with four images of Lucy Lawless in costume. It also has four pretty nice shots of Renee O'Connor (Gabrielle). After those lovely ladies comes Gemma Arterton, who co-starred as Princess Tamina in the otherwise forgettable "Prince of Persia: Sands of Time" movie. Don't hold the movie against our gallery -- we think Gemma is beautiful. And one cannot have a fantasy movie princess gallery without Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia. For some reason Wordpress munged the thumbnail shots and they will have to be replaced at some point, but just click on them to see the full pictures. They're great! We were so impressed with Princess Leia we just had to show several other lovely ladies dressed up as Leia. In fact, Olivia Munn made such a great impression on us we gave her four shots of her own. And despite Wordpress' continued munging of thumbnails we also included four fantastic images of Natalie Portman as Padme Amidala. You'll fall in love with her all over again. Rachel Weisz fans won't be disappointed, either, as we included the incredible Evy Carnahan from "The Mummy" and "The Mummy Returns". And though you may not have enjoyed the "Dungeons and Dragons" movie very much Thora Birch was a real gem as Empress Savina, so we brought along four pictures of her in costume. And finally we just had to include Snow White and the Evil Queen from ABC's Once Upon A Time, so you can browse four pictures each of Lana Parilla (the Evil Queen/Mayor of Storybrooke) and Ginnifer Goodwin (Snow White/Mary Margaret Blanchard). We were also thinking about doing a fantasy movie hero gallery at some point, where we feature some of the great guys from these movies. We'll let you know when that happens. ____________________________________________ SF-Fandom is a moderated, fan-run community devoted to science fiction, fantasy, history, and mythology. SF-Fandom was founded in 2001 and is part of the Xenite.Org network. Free registration is required to post. Please be sure you read our Posting Guidelines.

Legend of the Seeker fans celebrating Craig Horner birthday

Just when you thought the Legend of the Seeker fan community had given up, they have come back in the past few months with new campaigns to raise awareness of their interest in the formerly syndicated TV show. You may recall that Legend of the Seeker was cancelled a few months after it lost 1/3 of its US market distribution channel due to the Tribune Company's filing for bankruptcy in March 2010. To cut costs, Tribune dumped expensive programming in its syndicated slots and replaced those shows with cheap shlocky fare like talk shows. Meanwhile, sites like Hulu and Netflix have been working hard to prove that online TV viewing can turn a profit, giving fans of cancelled shows hope that they might find a network or online service willing to take a chance on either reviving the TV show or financing one or more movies based on the Terry Goodkind Sword of Truth novels. Bridget Regan, the lovely co-star of the show who played Mother Confessor Kahlan Amnell has since gotten married and given birth to a lovely daughter but fans remain hopeful that if the right opportunity were to open up she might return to the franchise. She did enjoy a successful run of her play "Camp Watanaka". SF-Fandom's Seeker Fans Twitter account has been helping to rally the troops and inspire confidence in the fans of the show. They held a 2-hour Tweetathon on November 20, 2011 and have planned another one for January 24, 2012. January 24 is Craig Horner's birthday and fans want to show they are still there for him. They are returning to their Twitter accounts, setting up Tweets through Tweetdeck, Timely.Is, and other scheduling tools, and setting aside time to be there for Craig and the Seeker from 12 Noon to 2 PM Pacific Time on January 24. If you follow the Seeker Fans account you'll see links to still active Seeker fan sites and occasional updates on the latest news. You can also check out Save Our Seeker, the flagship fan site that is leading the campaign. Seeker fans are still showing up at science fiction and fantasy conventions to show their support for the show. There were approximately 2 million American viewers of Legend of the Seeker, which was very respectable for a syndicated show, before Tribune pulled out of the distribution deal. All options have since expired but fans know that given the right circumstances a new deal could be struck. ____________________________________________ SF-Fandom is a moderated, fan-run community devoted to science fiction, fantasy, history, and mythology. SF-Fandom was founded in 2001 and is part of the Xenite.Org network. Free registration is required to post. Please be sure you read our Posting Guidelines.