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Do You Mind?

  • Feb. 14th, 2010 at 7:10 AM
Numinous World
A reader asks, "Do you mind if people write fanfic for your books? I know some authors do mind."

No! I do not mind in the slightest! In fact, I'm incredibly flattered. I can think of no greater success than for my characters to mean so much to someone that they want to take them into their lives and continue their adventures. As someone who's written fanfic since I was nine years old, I feel honored to have inspired that kind of thought and love.

There are a few fics for Black Ships and Hand of Isis out there. There is a small lj community for my Numinous World series here. You can also find a few stories on An Archive of Our Own under book fandoms. (Which incidentally is where my SGA and SG-1 fic is archived. And no, I will not say under what name!) *g*

Comments

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padawan_aneiki
Feb. 14th, 2010 09:26 pm (UTC)
Wow, that is an incredibly generous take on things, and I think that's way cool. I've been dabbling in fanfic since I was 12 years old and I've found it to be my "cheap therapy." I've dabbled in numerous fandoms but SGA has been my current "home." lol

So now that you're a published writer...do you still read fanfic or even scribble the occasional one-shot? Just curious.
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jo_graham
Feb. 15th, 2010 11:03 am (UTC)
I've written in a lot of different fandoms. I got my first story in a paper zine when I was thirteen -- they thought I was eighteen! (Oh, back in the spring of 1982....) I still write fanfic all the time. I wrote about a hundred thousand words of fanfic last year, though I have done fewer ficathons and challenges. I just can't keep up with them when I'm on a deadline, and it's so rude to default. The only one I've done this year was Yuletide.

In terms of reading, I have to be a little more careful what I read, especially in SGA and SG-1. For example, I absolutely have not read any of the virtual season sixes out there. I can't when I'm working on Legacy. I only read a few friends, and the occasional amazing rec, like Long Ago and Far Away by kristen999 and everybetty. Part of that is liability. If I haven't read it, nobody can say that I stole their idea. Unfortunately that's something I have to think about.

And part of it is not lapsing into fanon. There are certain takes on the characters which are pure fanon and are so popular that they're everywhere. I have to steer away from that. Legacy has to read as if it could be filmed, as though you could be watching it, which means it needs the tone and tenor of the canon. We want it to feel like you suddenly discovered a new third season! So no fanon. Fic is for those things that couldn't be filmed!
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gelbes_gilatier
Feb. 15th, 2010 02:29 pm (UTC)
Hope you don't mind if I intrude but... I seem to be the only one out there that's not wholly averse to people... borrowing ideas ;) While I absolutely understand your concerns (since there's a legal proportion to consider here as well... even with my meagre legal knowledge I shudder at the intricacies of that ;)), I'd just like to state that sometimes borrowing someone else's idea could also be seen as a compliment ;)

Also... in college I got taught that there aren't more than ten basic plot ideas anyway ;)
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jo_graham
Feb. 15th, 2010 04:37 pm (UTC)
Unfortunately, it's a legal tangle. A number of years ago a fan sued Marion Zimmer Bradley, claiming that some things in one of the later Darkover books were stolen from her fanfic and that she should be paid for them. It turned into a very nasty lawsuit.

I've been advised to read no fanfic at all. I can't quite manage to do that! But I am careful not to read anything that's close to what I'm writing. It's one thing to read an AU like the one I mentioned in the post, where what they're doing is completely different from what I'm writing, but I'm very very careful not to read anything set after season five or futurefic.

Some things are going to show up time after time because they're logical. Atlantis returns to Pegasus. Well, there's no story if it sits around San Francisco! So pretty much everybody is going to do the same thing. Then there are only so many basic ways how, so many logical reasons why. Like, four. Maybe five. So anybody writing it is going to pick one of those four or five reasons.
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