WANTED: Your ideas for Sally
Here’s a list of ideas for a number of new pages (and have received a few suggestions). Skim through them and see if anything catches your interest. I no longer write new pages for sallys (sorry! 
), but you could still contribute to this homage to Stieg Larsson if you want to. If you are not sure what to contribute take a look at the list below and see if anything catches your interest or contact me – the friendly webmaster @ chris_at_sallysfriends.net
Thanks!
Chris
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THE LIST
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The Books –
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- Characters (extensive bios on each major character and some of the minor ones)
- Coolest Scenes & Quotes- vote and submit
- Inspirations (more about Stieg Larsson’s inspirations when writing Millennium)
- Kalle Blomkvist
- Rocky
- Crime novels
- Quentin Tarantino
- Neo-nazism fight
- Scenes and Locations
- Lots more pages for both characters and important events + maps
- Characters (extensive bios on each major character and some of the minor ones)
Themes –
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- Politics and economics in Millennium
- Gender roles
- Sex and Relationships in Millennium
- Exposé journalism
- Hacking for Justice?
- Famous Women (Warriors) in history
Other ideas –
- Wallpaper section expand
- A page about Eva Gabrielsson’s upcoming book + all of the Swedish and other foreign language books on Stieg Larsson’s life (I’ll be damned if I can remember the titles, though …)
Categories: From the Fans, News
25 Comments » (Including 7 Discussion Threads)
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January 3rd, 2010 at 9:57 AM
lisbeth and mikael’s song is definitely smashing pumpkins-ava adore (we must never be apart
)
thom yorke -and it rained all night (my favorite song )
we fell to earth -the double
massive attack -dissolved girl -lisbeth’s song
linkin park-nobody’s listening
janes addiction-just because
marilyn manson-arma-god-damn-mother-f.ckin-geddon (lisbeth’s t-shirt’s song lol )
Queens of the stone age- sick sick sick ,
Flyleaf -I’m so sick
… =)
January 13th, 2010 at 9:35 PM
More on Stieg Larsson. For example, I would love to see quotations (things he said, not things his characters said). I’m looking forward to the books about him, and would love to see more about him on the website.
January 14th, 2010 at 4:00 PM
There’s a new book out by Larsson’s old activist-friend, Kurdo Baksi, “My friend Stieg Larsson”. It’s in Swedish but fortunately it’s still within my Scandinavian language range, so I’ll try to get it as soon as possible and review it here on sallys. There should be plenty of quotes there to begin with! (And thanks for the great idea, by the way!) Stay tuned.
January 14th, 2010 at 10:34 PM
Thanks! Not having any Scandinavian languages, I appreciate the translation. Surfing the web one day I found some interesting comments he wrote about his characters (but sadly did not note the address).
January 25th, 2010 at 7:08 PM
SOunds like his “friend” makes Stieg out to be a less than careful journalist and a bad writer. Could the “friend” be cashing in?
January 26th, 2010 at 1:32 PM
Oh, you mean Kurdo Baksi in his book “Min vän Stieg Larsson” (My friend Stieg Larsson), in which he claims that ‘Larsson could not write’? Probably – at least such a claim gives him extra attention and may result in extra sales.
This ‘debate’ – about Larsson’s writing skills and share in the actual writing process – has been going on in the (Swedish) media for a week now. For example: This morning Eva Gabrielsson was quoted in a Danish newspaper for saying she had ‘a larger role’ in the writing process than she had admitted previously. But she still was not very specific.
The whole thing comes of as a bit petty, if you ask me and I don’t really feel inclined to write about it myself. But I would like to make an in-depth article about the pros and cons of Larsson’s writing. I’ve already discussed these in other articles, where I praise his creativity, originality and sense of pace but also note that I don’t like his manifold subplots that don’t really connect to the main plot (such as Erika moving to another newspaper in Millennium 3).
January 28th, 2010 at 4:39 PM
If I can add a comment, could I recommend that you add in a forum of some sort? It would probably be easier to have real discussions of the Millenium books and establish a community if you have an onboard forum (and given that enough people join on).
phpBB3 or any other popular forum software (not phpNuke though) would be cool
My 0.02GBP.
January 28th, 2010 at 5:34 PM
I’d love to have a forum, but I think we need to wait a couple of more months. So far there’s been about 100 comments over 4 months, and half of them my replies
I receive about 2-4 comments on average per day. I’d say that when we reach at least 5 times that volume, and we would be at a point where a forum could be sustainable. (And thanks for the software suggestions, BTW!)
January 28th, 2010 at 6:09 PM
I have to disagree. I’ve seen other websites (particularly fansites for small film / book fans – such as http://www.let-the-right-one-in.com/) thrive simply because they had a forum to begin with and some good content. After a while, word of mouth (and a higher Google pagerank) spread and the community is fairly sizable.
The two things that I would say would help this website would be a small but active fan forum (don’t add lots of categories, that just makes it look empty if you’ve only got a readership in doulbe digits) and the addition of (good) Millenium fan fiction,as those are the two things no other fansite has yet.
First though, I suppose, is to get more content up and a higher pagerank
.
January 28th, 2010 at 8:24 PM
I’ll second that.
Leaving comments is OK, but it gets a bit hard to follow when a topic gets busy.
January 29th, 2010 at 12:57 AM
Okay, on second thought you are probably right. The layout of nested comments isn’t exactly, well, nice. I’ll check out Stormbringer’s suggestions out and see what I can do. And when.
January 29th, 2010 at 1:01 AM
I would love some more contribs – on all topics, but I have to admit that I’m not holding my breath. It’ll probably take at least some months before there’re enough readers to squeeze out that small percentage of regular quality contributors, which can really light up a site.
Actually, I’d like some fan fiction most of all but it’s funny … I’ve prowled the net far and wide and deep and so far I’ve found absolutely nothing! I would have thunk that Millennium would spawn a zillion fanfics already but so far … zilch! If anybody sees anything out there, worth reading, do let me know!
January 31st, 2010 at 12:04 PM
I might write something about it someday – I haven’t tried writing in Larsson’s style yet. At some point I might add some contributions as well, by the way.
February 26th, 2010 at 10:20 PM
Bueno Chris te deseo mucha suerte con tu emprendimiento, espero que aumente la cantidad de lectores asi podes poner el chat.
Realmente nose que pasa en internet que no hay mas sitios interesantes sobre millennium como el tuyo, crei que iba a pasar algo similar a lo de Crepusculo, pero por un lado mejor no tener a ese tipo de gente… bueno nose como describir a los fans del crepusculo ,jaja.
Saludos.
February 28th, 2010 at 6:23 PM
Gracias, AixaDanixa!! Chat, tu dices? Hmm … voy a considerarlo! Hasta luego – Chris
April 15th, 2010 at 1:24 PM
I think a list of characters would be crucial! That is actually how i stumbled across this site in the first place!
Without giving anything away, it would be great to see a list that was ordered in appearance, or broken down by book/section. I am halfway through the third book now and am really struggling to keep all the characters straight. Who is good, who is bad, who is undecided… It doesn’t help that i cant speak a work of Swedish, so i have no idea how to go about pronouncing any of the names. Most the time it is Mr. B or Mrs.M but now there are so many MR B’s and Mr. N’s… it is enough to make my head spin. Please tell me i am not the only one with this issue!?
April 15th, 2010 at 4:42 PM
Haha – you’re not the only one with that request – or, erm, challenge. Larsson was not very good at trimming his lists of not-so-relevant B, C and even Z-characters (just like his lists of irrelevant furniture brands!
). Anyways, the only reason I haven’t done this yet is that it is Very Time Consuming, but it’s on the top of my to-do list and I guess I might as well start small, and then, at one point, there will be a nice long index.
June 21st, 2010 at 11:23 PM
Wouldn’t it be wonderful to recreate the website for the hackers. Where you click on the O in “error” and you get a piccie of Lara Croft (another of my heros) and so on! With a chat room? Or is this too annal an idea.
I love all the computer stuff about Millenium, although it’s odd that Kalle uses IE to paste a web address to when he is using a Mac. Or am I wrong? I would have though they’d use safari or Firefox.
So that leads me to the idea of having a nerds corner for discussion about the computing aspects of the novels.
All of course would be good in a nice forum. I really want to find a useable forum for Millenium stuff.
Mary
June 22nd, 2010 at 8:40 AM
I would like a new front page soon, any suggestions are welcome – and this one is certainly noted. Problem is that most people haven’t read Millennium as closely as you and I, madmary, so they’ll usually end up leaving the site instead of clicking on the right place when they come in from a Google search. Since I’ve been so idealistic (or foolhardy, depending on how you view it) to buy a domain that doesn’t have either “Lisbeth Salander” or “Stieg Larsson” in it it has taken me about 9 months to get to rank as high with Google as crap sites that just paste a resume of the three books and then a lot of ads. Rest assured, nerd-stuff is important – but so is traffic
I tried a discussion forum a while ago and it didn’t really work out… there wasn’t enough traffic overall to warrant a forum, bc only a small percentage of visitors actually leave a comment and an even lower number go on to join a forum. For now, I hope you’ll be content to share your Millennium experiences with other Sally friends here in the good old fashioned WordPress-comments-field.
The most visited ‘forums’ are the various fan-pages for Millennium or aspects of Millennium on Facebook but many of them aren’t really that ‘deep’ as regards discussing aspects of the books and so on; it’s mostly just people chipping in to say they loved the books or advertising people posting the latest something about a new premiere of the Swedish movie adaptations somewhere in the world.
And… I hate to say it, but http://www.stieglarsson.com – which is another site with very little content and a lot of ads – probably has the most visited ‘discussion forum’ for a broad range of Millennium fans, so you might want to check that site and see if you can’t find a thread that you like. But as with the facebook-pages and groups I’ve almost given up on that ‘forum’, since the ‘deep’ posts are few and far between.
My own facebook-group, Millennium Forever, is mostly a forum for news about the site but there is a little core of Sally friends who post news, fun stuff and analyze the latest goings-on, so you might also want to at least have a look at that, if you haven’t been there already.
Stick around!
June 23rd, 2010 at 6:33 PM
I realise that my idea for recreating the hacker’s republic is a bit off the wall, and I certainly don’t have the skills to do anything like that, but it would be a fun easter egg for this site for those who did know.
I know you say that traffic is slow for a forum but it’s a chicken and egg situation. I have seen a lot of the forums you mention and I agree it’s just tedious reading about people who love the books over and over and who is going to be cast in a Hollywood film version.
I’ll pop in from time to time here then if I may and discuss little bits and peices.
I haven’t actually “read” the books. I’m on my second listen of an unabridged reading by Saul Reichlin. I truly recommend a listen. His voice is wonderful and unintrusive. I think he catches the mood of the books beautifully.
I know I shall listen for a third time as each listen I find something new in the stories.
Mary
August 11th, 2010 at 5:39 AM
I would like to see more discussion of Lisbeth as an iconoclastic view of woman. What fascinates me about Lisbeth’s character is that she is the marginalized woman of society and to a certain extent she has internalized this view. I have read on some other posts that they cringe at the idea of Lisbeth slowly becoming “normal.” I’m not sure what that person means by “normal.” But had Stieg Larsson lived to complete the entire saga, I would have enjoyed watching Lisbeth realize her full potential — Already by the end of the third novel she was wearing regular clothes and “sensible” shoes. If she stopped dying her hair, and became the redhead she really is and who knows took up studies in neuroscience and classical guitar and even managed to have a child. Would she be any less of a badass? I think she still could be.
As a black middle aged woman I love that this character is non-traditional. But you can still be a badass warrior and conform a little. As a woman of color that’s what I have to do — but it doesn’t change who I am underneath. Anyway, in the American reviews of the trilogy much is made of what a freak Lisbeth is and no way too much emphasis is placed on her asperger syndrome. I don’t think she is. She’s odd, yes — not just because of what she has suffered. But to me she is very human. She controls her emotions, but she is full of passion. I love this woman!
August 11th, 2010 at 5:49 AM
As a matter of fact, Ginette… another friend of Sally’s recently told me she wanted to do an essay about Lisbeth, with a psychological angle. I’ll pass your request to her and see if it’s something that sparks inspiration. Then I’ll also get an excuse to check how the essay’s going
Thanks for your suggestion. They are definitely some good observations, you have there… and I’m inclined to agree. In my fanfic, over at stieglarsson-forever.net, I want the story – the 1% of it or so that I have planned – to progress with some sort of inner struggle in Lisbeth; she tells herself that she’s better off just remaining a ‘freak’, but deep inside yearns for some sort of ‘normality’ and – more importantly – a better chance at realizing some potentials – skills, talents, relationships, etc. – that she can only just begin to hope to glimpse across a Very Distant Horizon. And yet they are there. The only problem is, when you are as damaged as Lisbeth arguably is, how do you get from ‘here’ to ‘there’ – to that horizon. How do you even begin to be able to define for yourself what your kind of normal is?
So you raise some very interesting points and I for one hope to be able to deal with them in the near future in the fanfic. Now, if only the day had more hours… and the night too. Alas, I can only promise more “blatantly irregular updates” as long as I’m pretty much doing most of the sitebuilding here. But I’m going to keep doing that so eventually I’ll get around, one way or another, to explore more about these characters. AND share it with all of you and let your ideas, etc., be part of it.
Larsson left a lot hanging but I think he left enough for us to make som reasonable assumptions about where Lisbeth would be going, what her personal struggles would be in the future, etc.
February 2nd, 2011 at 4:06 PM
I really like that comment on the pyschological essay of Lisbeth, that would be so interesting, at the beginning of the book I actually thought she may have had asbergers syndrome! Lisbeth is such a great character, its amazing how Steig Larsson created such a persona, she is like a real person, too bad like in so many books, they are only fiction. I also always wonder what Lisbeth would be like as a mother, I think she’d be pretty cool (of course the if she ever had children, the father would evidently me the one and only Mr.Blomkvist!) Maybe some fanfictiony sort of stories, the fanfiction website doesn’t have many!
February 2nd, 2011 at 8:01 PM
I wrote a fanfic until some time this summer.
My original idea had something to do with Micke and Sally coming together again after Millennium 4, and after a Very Long Break, where Micke had more or less migrated to the US, teaching journalism and democracy at a prestigious media institution and Sally had, well, disappeared – again. This time to Southern Africa where we find her on the road.
Events conspire to bring them together, as noted and not wholly unexpected… ‘Events’ being a group of neo-nazis – The Brotherhood – plotting to kill certain ‘left wing hate objects’, like Mikael Blomkvist and, perhaps, do an even greater act of terrorism.
Note: As of late 2010 the fan fic has been discontinued!
A very long flashback is a subplot about John, a young American expat in Nazi-Germany just at the outbreak of WWI. He meets a strange young girl, whom he eyes from afar, in an odd camp with barbed wire fence – near his father’s summer cottage in German Poland. He will never forget her, but will he turn out to be a friend or foe 60+ years later when he, as an old and very powerful businessman seems to be the only one to turn to, in order to stop the Brotherhood – ?
And that’s where I pulled the plug! – both on the fan fic site, and on this site – sallysfriends.net proper. Sallys, however, will remain as a combined archival+homage site and I will pay for it for some years to come, and answer the occassional comment – such as yours!
Reasons? Well, will they really surprise anyone? I had worked on sallys for a year (summer 09-summer 10) and it had been fun and I had learned a lot but… I was increasingly pressed for time in my private life – I have a full time job, a family etc. and I wanted to use my precious sparetime more on original projects, such as my Shade of the Morning Sun novellas – 10 of which are now up on lightoversea.com/shade.
And so the story goes…
But I WILL put up an archive of these fan fiction files at some point on sallysfriends.net – with an extended page on my original plot ideas. Who knows… I may want to continue the story at some point, but for now you’d probably best look forward to the US movie and the hypothetical Millennium 4 which Stieg Larsson’s girlfriend has now confirmed she would like to finish IF she can get the rights.
And yes, I am also hoping for world peace this year… :-]
February 5th, 2011 at 11:36 PM
Thanks, your idea sounds very interesting, and I hope his girlfriend does! I wish there was still the 10 book idea. The American movie I amnot so sure about, Lisbeth’s eyebrows are bleached! Thats not how she looked in the book, and there is already a movie, and the original actress who plays Lisbeth- Noomi Rapace- looks so much more like how I would have imagined her!