the Mathematician cheers up

That’s wonderful! I’m very glad to hear it, that must be a great relief to both of you.

Yippee! I must say, though, I hope he doesn’t overdo. My husband is felt ‘way better’ so went back to a light-duty version of his regular life and regressed to the point of having to take the dreaded prescription medication again. He’s going in for his discectomy (way less invasive than the fusion they were originally planning) on Monday.

Nice article. Its funny, I love his stuff whenever I happen across it, yet I’ve never gone out of my way to track it down… Odd.

Anyways, when I think of it as an unpublished sort, it seems to me that people are writing fan fiction because there is some need of theirs that is not being filled by the author’s original work. (I.e. – Say I dislike the outcome of Carolyn and Rivera’s storyline in Tied to the Tracks, so I rewrite that into how I want it to end. Or maybe there’s a scene I felt should have been included that was omitted so I write about what may have taken place at that point in time.)

I’m not even referring to slash specifically, just fan fic in general. I have never written it myself but I know quite a few people who enjoy it. I don’t understand why some authors get so upset about it.

People have to really love your work for it to get inside their head so much that they want to add to it. They have to be truly familiar to write fan fic as things have to fit in the known universe and some series have certain rules that are canon. So we’re talking some hardcore study of the subjects. I like to think of fan fiction as a literary encore, when the fans are dying for just one more tune…

If anything puzzles me about fan fic its finding that people write stories about comic book characters. Some have been out for decades with hundreds and in some cases thousands of issues published, besides the crossover novels and tv shows and movies. It makes me wonder what else could the fans possibly be lacking with these characters?

I write fanfic (for tv series; haven’t done so for a novel or literary series) for a number of reasons, many of which Kenzie touched on. I like it as a way of ‘sharpening’ my writing skills – and I have always argued that writing in someone else’s universe, far from being the easy option, is actually more difficult as you are bound by the conventions and canon of the established universe. And if you’re going against those established factors, then you need to be a damn good writer to pull it off. There’s a big challenge in both of those tasks, and it can be immensely rewarding to pull it off.

I don’t always write because there’s something lacking in a character or missing in a scene, though that can be the case. Sometimes it’s the challenge of trying to turn a scene that is very powerful visually into a written piece that is equally powerful – how, as a writer, can you capture the sense of loss and defeat in Starbuck’s gutted scream in the closing scenes of “Kobol’s Last Gleaming Pt2”?

Sometimes it is about supplementing the original ‘verse. Generally, I am disappointed in series tie-in novels. There seems to be the odd author or two who really ‘get’ the universe they’re writing in – Nancy Holder and Christopher Golden, writing for Buffy, both do a wonderful job – but on the whole, no. As a fan, I’m seeking more than just an episodic adventure packed into a formula 150 page novel. I want the tie-in to supplement the universe, to expand it – to show me a piece of the world I cannot get in 40 minutes of tv, no matter how well that 40 minutes may be done. It is my experience that good fanfic, rather than series tie-in novels, does this much more effectively and stays much truer to the characterisation and canon of the original ‘verse. There are pieces of fanfic out there that are literary gems. Of course, for every great piece of fanfic out there, there are a hundred more that are utter crap. But I find it’s worth wading through it to get to the good stuff.

Oh and: I fixed the flickr link.