Fan fiction: Yes or no?

With the addition of Kindle Worlds to the lineup of sites Amazon has made available for the use of indie authors, the question of fan fiction, legitimate and legalized or otherwise, raises its head. I'm usually mum on the subject, but my opinion was recently asked and I didn't have much of an answer.

But I've been doing some thinking about fan fiction, and my guess is my opinion would not be a very popular one.

Frankly, I'm not crazy about it.

Now before someone jumps down my throat and informs me of all the great things about fan fiction and about how information should be free, etc., etc., let me add a few things. I do not hate fan fiction. I have no plans to try and stamp out fan fiction, which would be a useless endeavor. I'm not opposed to someone writing fan fiction about my own writings, though I would hope they would ask my permission or at the very least make me aware of it. I do not think less of those who write fan fiction. And I am not making any moral judgments about fan fiction or those who write such.

I simply do not understand fan fiction.

It makes no sense to me.

I'm a writer. I create worlds and characters and events. I do so with various themes, some at the front of my thoughts, some twisting around in the back of my mind. To my way of thinking, trying to write fan fiction would be like hamstringing myself. For me, writing is about creating something new of my own, not building upon the work of others. It seems limiting.

It's not that I can't understand a certain amount of joy in playing in others' worlds or with others' characters. But I have role playing games for that.

And working with other writers for a shared-world anthology or collaborating with another writer on a project doesn't feel like fan fiction to me, because we set out to intentionally work together to build something.

Maybe there's no difference. Maybe writing is writing. But it seems different to me. Maybe it's because I now write fiction for a living and I subconsciously separate my writing from fan fiction.

I don't know.

But I do know I've written three pieces, maybe four, of fan fiction in my life.

The first was a very short James Bond novel. I wrote it in fourth grade. I've still got it around here somewhere. It's absolutely awful, but every few years it's kind of fun to break it out and look at it.

The second piece of fan fiction I wrote was a Mack Bolan (aka The Executioner) novel I wrote when I was in Sixth Grade. It's also pretty bad, but it does show lots of improvement over that James Bond book. It also will never see the light of day.

The third piece of fan fiction I wrote was a Star Trek (original series) short story for a contest back in the 1990s. The writing is awkward, but that's okay since the story didn't win, place, or show in the contest and will never be seen by readers. I'm not even sure if I have a copy of this story. But I do think the plot was pretty good, the tale being a combined sequel to both the "Squire of Gothos" episode and "The City on the Edge of Forever" episode, two of my favorites.

Above I mentioned a possible fourth bit of fan fiction from me, but what I have in mind isn't prose writing. When I was in early grade school, I drew and wrote some of my own comic books. They feature familiar characters, mostly Marvel, but with some of my own creations thrown in. I have none of these now and wish I did. I'm sure they were stinkers.

So, I've done some fan fiction work. Yet I still don't understand the allure. If I'm going to write, I want the creations to be my own, at least for the most part. Maybe it's a control thing, but I'm usually not a controlling person.

What are your opinions of fan fiction?

Books read in 2013: No. 37 -- Word eBook Formatting

by Charles Findlay

Started: July 27
Finished: July 28

Notes: There's a lot of talk among e-book authors about formatting, and in my opinion much of the advice is needlessly complicated, at least for fiction writers. Formatting for most prose fiction doesn't have to be all that complex. For instance, I don't use any special software or jump through any technical hoops for my e-books. I use Word, or Open Office (depending upon which computer I'm at). So, when I saw an author had an e-book that focused upon Word formatting for e-books, I thought I'd take a look. My guess is this author works pretty much the way I do myself, but I might learn a few things.

Mini review: Yep, this was about what I expected. This author and myself do pretty much the same formatting in Word. This would be a good e-book for those starting out or those who want to see just how easy e-book formatting can actually be. It will help if you already know at least the basics of using Word. A nice addition in this e-book is an appendix which shows how to use Calibre software to make things run even smoother, but personally I don't see a need for it.

'Mage Hunter' now available in print

My five-part Mage Hunter series has been collected and is now available in print at 378 pages with a price of $12.99.

Turn the Page (redux)

On a long and lonesome weekday
East of Arkansas
You can listen to the ink pen
Drawin' out words much too long
You can think about the people
Or the plots you wrote the night before

But your thoughts will soon be wandering
The way they always do
When you're typin' sixteen hours
And hardly have a clue
And you don't feel much like readin',
You just wish the book was through

Here I am
On the page again
There I am
Stuck in a cage
Here I go
Playin' god again
There I go
Turn the page

Well you walk into a convention,
Your shoulders heavy and bowed
And you feel the eyes glaze over you
As you go where you're told
You pretend everyone knows you
But your soul is just hollowed

Most times you don't hear 'em talk,
'Cause you haven't got a fan
You want to set the world ablaze,
But there doesn't seem any way you can,
And you never sell a book,
Go home without shaking a hand.

Here I am
On the page again
There I am
Feeling my age
Here I go
Playin' author again
There I go
Turn the page

In here in the blacklight
You never see the day,
Lacking any energy
You try to stay awake
As the fingers tap out a story
Another that won't pay.

Later in the evening
As you lie awake in bed
With the rustle of the keyboard
Tickin' in your head
You drink the day's last bourbon,
Rememberin' what characters said.

Here I am
On the page again
There I am
Stuck in a cage
Here I go
Playin' god again
There I go
Turn the page

Here I am
On the page again
There I am
Feeling my age
Here I go
Playin' author again
There I go
Turn the page
There I go
There I go

(my apologies to Bog Seger ... please don't sue me, Bob)

I write alone, with nobody else

Every morning there's no breakfast
I only need me some coffee or tea
Just me and my good ole Macintosh
That's all I ever need

'Cause I write alone, yeah
With nobody else

Yeah, you know when I write alone
I prefer to be by myself

The other night I laid sleeping
And I woke from a fabulous dream
So I caught up my pen and paper
And wrote a midnight scene

And I wrote alone, yeah
With nobody else

Yeah, you know when I write alone
I prefer to be by myself

The other day I got invited to a party
But I stayed home instead
Just me and my pal Smith Corona
And his cousin pencil lead

And we wrote alone, yeah
With nobody else

Yeah, you know when I write alone
I prefer to be by myself

My whole family done give up on me
They think that I've gone mad
The only one who will hang out with me
Is my dear old mouse pad

And we write alone, yeah
With nobody else

Yeah, you know when I write alone
I prefer to be by myself

(with thanks to George Thorogood)

My road with Sword and Sorcery and the speculative

I first discovered Sword and Sorcery literature when I was about 10 years old. Unlike many readers and writers, my introduction to this sub-genre of fantasy was not through the likes of Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock, nor through other well-known names linked with S&S. No, my very first S&S readings were with the first Thieves' World anthology.

The Thieves' World books were each a collection of fantasy short stories. Each story had a different author, but the characters existed within a shared world, mainly the city of Sanctuary. The first book began with a story titled "Sentences of Death," by John Brunner, which featured a shape-shifting wizard by the name of Enas Yorl. The most interesting aspect, for me, pertaining to Yorl was that he (or she or it or whatever) was under a powerful curse. Yorl changed form on a fairly constant basis, and not all of those shapes were remotely human.

So, I suppose Brunner's story was my first real introduction to S&S.

At the time, I did not realize this, and I had never even heard of S&S literature nor Robert E. Howard. In my limited experience as a 10-year-old, fantasy was fantasy. I had read Tolkien and some Terry Brooks, but in 1979 that was about all that was available in my neck of the woods growing up in central Kentucky. I was vaguely familiar with Conan the Barbarian because of the Marvel comics and the occasional slim paperback I would spy in a store, but I did not differentiate such tales from those of general fantasy.

By the time the Conan the Barbarian movie came out in 1982, I was 13 and somewhat more familiar with Sword and Sorcery and its place within broader fantasy. The movie did help to make me more aware of the character and the author. The Thieves' World books were coming out about one a year at that time, and it was about the same period I began to play Dungeons & Dragons.

Whether one loves or loathes the game and its influence, I cannot overemphasis the importance of Dungeons & Dragons upon my early fantasy readings. It wasn't just the game itself, which did help to link me with other fantasy fans, but the game's rule books held a ton of information about the fantasy genres. The tome that was the Dungeon Master's Guide even included lists upon lists of fantasy authors and books worth reading. Those lists were often the first time I came to see particular authors' names and books and story titles.

Maybe growing up in central Kentucky in the 1970s and early 1980s was like living on a frontier, at least when speaking of the access to speculative literature. As I pointed out, Tolkien and Brooks were about the only fantasy reading I had readily available in my few local book stores. Even the libraries were short on fantasy, though they did have some science fiction from the likes of guys name Asimov, Heinlein, etc., and I ate that stuff up as often as possible; at the time, the differentiation between sci-fi and fantasy was still in the early stages, at least for the young me, so any kind of speculative reading was great. These days I don't care much for most science fiction, at least not the modern stuff, but I don't hate the genre and will occasionally dip into it.

It was also during the early 1980s when I discovered the Science Fiction Book Club through advertisements in books and magazines. At the time, you joined the club by buying something like four books, and you only had to pay a penny plus the shipping; the deal was you had to buy three or four more books at regular price sometime during the next year. That sounded like a great deal to me, so I signed up. With my limited access to fantasy literature, the SFBC was like a slice of nirvana. It was through the club that I discovered Michael Moorcock, Anne McCaffrey, and even Stephen King.

In 1986, a new book store opened up in my home town. It was Joseph-Beth Booksellers. This book store changed my life. It made available to me all kinds of literature which I'd only heard about, and quite a bit I had never heard about. Lovecraft became known to me, as did Fred Saberhagen, early Dean Koontz, and a number of others.

At this point the fantasy world was changing, at least for me. How? By becoming more available. Slowly but surely, fantasy was reaching out into the mainstream world, or at least finding its place within the mainstream world. No longer did one have to hunt and hunt and hunt simply to find a fantasy book to read. Things have only become even more so in the last couple of decades, to the point I find the speculative genres have inundated the mainstream world and I find it kind of silly when fantasy fans and similar groups talk about not being accepted by the broader world. How much more acceptance do we need? Speculative fiction is in our movies, our TV shows, our books, our games, all over the Internet. There are sub-cultures and groups and conventions and game rides and everything under the sun pertaining to fantasy, science fiction and even horror. To someone who remembers the original Star Trek as being the only sci-fi available on TV, Tolkien being the only fantasy author in stores, and (before Star Wars) practically no speculative films in he movie theaters, today's world is inundated with the speculative, maybe even too much at times.

But I digress.

By 1990 or so, I had read all the so-called masters of Sword and Sorcery, with the exception of Karl Edward Wagner. I was familiar with Wagner's name, but I did not have the pleasure of reading him until 2005 or thereabouts. But then, I missed out on a lot of fantasy reading for a little more than a decade.

Why?

Well, there are lots of reasons. For years I was busy with college and then starting my career as a journalist; I still read fairly often, but not nearly as much as I did in my early days and not as much as I do today. Also, while I always knew I wanted to write fiction, from the late 1980s until about the year 2000 I was mostly focused upon horror writing, or the idea of being a horror writer. I still generally feel more comfortable writing horror than fantasy, but I tend to find more enjoyment in the finished product when it's fantasy. Weird, I admit. Because of my shift to horror, I was obviously reading more horror literature and related non-fiction during that period. What little fantasy I wrote during those years was usually stuff to show off to my role playing buddies.

Then, about a decade ago when I began to get serious about writing fiction, I switched from horror and focused upon fantasy. To be honest, I'm not exactly sure why that happened. It might have had something to do with the fact I had this imaginary world and its characters in my head and they wanted to get out. I also had plenty of horror ideas at the time, but fantasy felt right for some reason.

So, I still focus on fantasy but with the occasional foray into horror and other genres.

As for my reading, the last couple of years I've shied away once more from fantasy reading, specifically epic fantasy and Sword and Sorcery. The reason for this is because a couple of years ago I had penned two epic fantasy novels one right after the other, and I was reading the ten-part epic fantasy Malazan series by Steven Erikson.

Frankly, I was a little burned out. I wanted to try different things for a while. I knew I would come back to fantasy, but I needed a break.

That break is about over.

Currently I am getting some other readings out of the way, non-fantasy books and e-books I've been meaning to get to for some time, but I have a big pile of epic fantasy novels waiting for me and a long list of epic fantasy e-books on my Kindle.

I'm looking forward to it. I kind of miss swinging a sword.

Books read in 2013: No. 36 -- Cla$$war #1

by Rob Williams

illustrations by Trevor Hairsine

Started: July 15
Finished: July 15

Notes: I'd never read a comic book or graphic novel on my Kindle, so I thought I'd give it a go. I figure this will be no easy task as my Kindle is one of the older K3 models.

Mini review: I was right. Reading a graphic story on my K3 was a pain, but I found this comic online and managed to read it there. Good art, better than most, but didn't really stand out as anything different or unique to me. The story was right out of today's headlines, and it felt a bit cliched to me, superheroes getting caught up in modern America's troubles, basically taking sides on politics but with some fists flying and explosions. Not a bad story, but nothing exceptional in my opinion. I might check out some other issues to see where the story goes.