Not just how I feel about Fanfic based on my work... but how a host of different authors feel, alphabetically, pro- and con...
In case there’s any question in the future regarding where I stand on fan fiction, I’d like to warn you that, on publication of my first book, if anyone does indeed write fan fiction involving any of my characters, you run the risk of me showing up at your doorstep with a good bottle of wine. I might also cook dinner.
I started writing fan fiction when I was very young, before I had yet figured out how to write stories of my own. I think it started when I was about eight - I found a book at the store - an actual, sanctioned book of published, authorized fan fiction for The X-Files. I thought - wait. WHAT? You can DO THIS? I can write about this?
And eventually, through the borrowed use of other people’s creations, I learned how to make things myself.
So it bothers me when authors oppose fan fiction. It bothers me a lot. But luckily, based on this list, there aren’t actually a lot who do.
I’ll leave you with this quote from my favorite, C.S. Lewis, from a letter he wrote to a young fan: “I am delighted to hear that you liked the Narnian books. There is a map at the end of some of them in some editions. But why not do one yourself! And why not write stories for yourself to fill up the gaps in Narnian history? I’ve left you plenty of hints – especially where Lucy and the Unicorn are talking…I feel I have done all I can!”
(Source: neil-gaiman)
And they made a sound going in. Like: ccchhhhhh.
In the hospital waiting room, the receptionist tells me I should be a model. I’m wearing thrift store shorts and an ancient X-Files tee shirt.
“Oh, thanks,” I say. ”Um.”
“It’s the eyes. You have very pretty eyes.”
“Thanks. I um… not a model. I’m not a model. A writer. Actually I was wondering - “
“You could be a model, though. Right? Doesn’t she look like she could be a model?”
” - if my mom has been brought in yet? She’s had, um, some sort of - they’re taking her by ambulance. Some sort of head trauma.”
“Oh, what’d she do, then? Fall?”
“I think she just, um - hit her head? On a cabinet? I think I beat her here, though. I think I beat the ambulance.”
“Just have a seat over there. You’ll probably see it before we do. Just have a seat over there and we’ll let you know when she’s all settled in.”
When they let me see her, I am unprepared for the amount of blood pooled and congealed in her hair.
“Oh geez,” I say.
“Oh geez?” she says. ”What do you mean: oh geez?”
“There’s a lot of blood,” I say.
A doctor enters.
“This is Gary,” she says, pointing. ”I told him you had copper hair.”
“Hi, Gary.”
“Hi,” he says.
I know Gary. We met last year. He treated my grandfather, who died a week later. But that wasn’t Gary’s fault.
“She’s going to need a few staples,” Gary says.
And later, I think to myself, Oh. It is an actual staple gun. It is an actual staple gun with actual staples. Well, I’m not sure what I was expecting.
I’m doing a GIVEAWAY to say thanks to all the new followers and of course to those who have stuck by me since I started this blog a year ago. :)
HOW IT WORKS
- There are three 10” x 8” mounted prints up for grabs and so there will be three winners.
- Reblog this post, without removing any of the text, to enter for a chance to win.
- After the deadline date I will enter the usernames into a randomizer to select the three winners.
- The first winner will have first pick of the three prints, second winner will get to choose between two, and the third will receive the last print.
- After the drawing I will message the winners to choose their prints. (Make sure your ask box is open! If I can’t contact you I’ll have to select another winner.)
- I will ship the prizes free of charge, even to international addresses!
- You can reblog multiple times if you like but your name will only be entered once.
- You don’t have to be following me to enter, but it would be nice.. :)
DEADLINE: 3:00PM EST on June 10th, 2012 (One week from today!)
Happy reblogging!
Amazingly talented artist. Follow and reblog! :)
BAU BABES
I found Thomas Gibson’s blog so I’m going to be pretty busy for the next few days.
In which I did not kill anyone in my sleep.
In my dream, I have killed two people.
This happens a lot.
I kill people, and I regret it. My brain attempts to rationalize a crime I can only vaguely remember. Was I protecting myself? Did this person I kill try to kill me first?
In one such dream I sat with my mother at a kitchen table and confessed everything. She said, “I already know. We’ll do everything we can. You must never tell anyone.”
Last night, my friend found out. I tried to tell him - but I think they were trying to hurt me! I was only protecting myself! You’ve got to believe me! - but he wouldn’t listen.
“You can’t just go around killing people,” he says.
“It was only…it was only two people,” I say.
I somehow killed them. The memory is foggy. Afterwards, I drag their bodies into separate bathtubs and hit them on the back of the head. So now, when they are found, it will look like they’ve only slipped and fallen and accidentally died.
But I can’t remember why I did it. Did I do it just to do it or was it really self-defense?
In the middle of the night, I wake up. There is always that second. That moment. That terrifying flash of time when the room is buzzing and your eyes won’t open and you’re held paralyzed against your bed and you are so scared you’re going to wake up to a jail cell. You think - why would I do that, why did I do that - and then you shake yourself and you pull yourself up and you look out your bedroom window just to reassure yourself that you are still on familiar ground.
You did not kill anyone last night, you say. You have been watching too many crime TV shows.
You look half-hopefully around your room for Matthew Gray Gubler or, perchance, Fox Mulder, but come up dishearteningly blank.
fossils.
“Have I told you that one before?”
“It’s just easy, Jet. All your riddles are easy.”
She scowls, disappointed.
What she doesn’t know is he found her riddle book once and he read it front to back and he has, among other things, somewhat of a photographic memory. And by “found” I mean he snuck into her room and searched the most hidden corners until he unearthed it under a dozen worn copies of National Geographic. Jettie wants to be an anthropologist. I think. Something with ancient civilizations, bones, and old pottery. Once she tried to steal a fossil from a small museum on the coast. They caught her at the door but she was only seven so they didn’t press charges.
I was embarrassed but my parents were strangely pleased. In the car, they quizzed her about her choices. It was a prehistoric fish in a flat, smooth rock. She said she admired the way the rib cage had been preserved complete; it looked like a puzzle.
“You’re a freak,” I had whispered to her in the backseat.
She looked at me demurely and gave me her best condescending shrug.
“Miriam, don’t call your sister a freak,” my mother had admonished.
“Although we shouldn’t steal things,” my father adds later. We’re still driving but it’s an hour later and we’ve all moved on.
“I don’t think anyone can own a fossil,” Jettie had said. “I think a fossil can only belong to the earth.”
That was my sister in a nutshell: waxing poetic about fossils and crying an ungodly amount of tears. From the littlest paper cut to the death of our mother.
on books.
Some books you remember reading.
The Silence of the Lambs: Public Library. An uncountable amount of times. It was an old hardcover edition. A beige binding. No dust jacket.
Intro to Psychology: Brother’s Room. It was a college textbook kept squashed in a book under his bed. I read the introduction, which was mainly about Van Gogh’s reasons for cutting off his own ear, three or four times.
The Complete Shakespearean Sonnets: My Bedroom Floor. It was read aloud to me once when I was high. After that, I couldn’t understand what he was saying unless I was cross-legged on my carpet.
Babar: I Couldn’t. The Public Library’s editions featured tiny, handwritten cursive text. I tried so many times to read those fucking books but never, ever could.
The Magician’s Nephew: Under the Christmas Tree. And the whole time I kept thinking - someday I’m going to write a book like this. I don’t care how long it takes me, someday I’m going to write a book like this…
The Dud Avocado: Apartment in Manhattan. With the windows open and the summer heat radiating around my body like a headache.
Let the Great World Spin: Airplane home from Poland. Nearing New York, the boy in the seat next to me leaned over and said - How can you be reading? Aren’t you getting sick yet? How can you be reading?
He offered to drive me home. He lived just a few streets over. As we walked through the parking garage I thought - is this how I die? A ride accepted from a stranger? Is this the way I die?
His name might have been Mike. He helped me with my bags. He did not kill me.
a brooklyn wedding.
I woke up sluggish and with a mouthful of unexplained canker sores clogging up the roof of my mouth and the back of my gums. I tried unsuccessfully to eat a bagel, dumped a sizable heap of cream cheese on my brand new dry clean only dress, and set out in the pouring rain of Brooklyn to meet my agent and editor for lunch.
I like housesitting for my brother and sister-in-law because they always keep such interesting snack food: jars of salted nuts, greek yogurt, dried figs and cherries and every healthy alternative to potato chips you can imagine. The flavor of their sorbet is blood orange and I twirl it around in my hand before replacing it untasted. I haven’t exercised in days and I’m already feeling guilty for the amount of wedding cake I consumed on Sunday, fast bites while holding my sleeping, twitching niece.
The weekend was nice and flawless in a way that wedding weekends rarely are. Aside from a few hiccups (five minutes before the ceremony my three year old niece got a running start, launched herself at my gorgeous vintage dress, and promptly fell to her knees, the first layer of delicate embroidery ripping apart in her sticky, guilty fingers (I pinned it up with my earrings and no one was the wiser)) I danced, I ate good food, I saw people I haven’t seen for the better part of thirteen years, and I watched my brother exude the sort of peaceful happiness he is rarely able to achieve. Usually he is hectic, mildly panicked, late in every date he endeavors to keep and almost purposefully stressed about something but this weekend he was relaxed, smiling, glowing. It was as if he’d finally reached a state of bliss one only dreams of achieving - the perfect house, the doctor’s prestige, the truly perfect bride crying rivers of mascara before the ceremony even begins.
“Eat anything you want,” she texted me from the road, following six separate messages containing explicit directions on how to feed and water the cats and fish, “but leave the wedding cake. I guess we’re supposed to save that.”
I eat dried figs and ignore one bulging, swollen lymph node. I work lazily on a manuscript. I read three books at once, one chapter at a time. I stand for long minutes just watching the backyard waterfall. I think: this part of New York. This is one part I’ve missed. But then I step outside in the pouring rain and navigate labyrinthine subway construction sites and I don’t miss anything else. No - the veggie sushi. I’ve missed that. But the rain. It’s hard to love New York in the rain.
seaside swag.
In the dress store I sit on a sofa and drop my sunglasses off the top of my head sixteen times while waiting for my mother to come out with her next fancy collection of threads. Both my brothers are getting married in the next five months and she is unlike me in that she changes her mind a thousand times. She has bought a dozen dresses, returned them all, bought more and returned them in this vicious retail cycle.
This store is strictly final sale. I haven’t yet told her.
The trio of girls that file in are all east coast seaport townies - thin and tan with long, ocean breeze hair and skirts with little whales and anchors on them.
“We’re looking for dresses,” the tallest one says. She’s the leader. The shortest, she bends down to pet my dog.
“Short or long?” the salesgirl says.
“Short,” she answers. ”It’s for a middle school semi.”
In middle school my mother had to beg me to go to the year’s only dance. She bought me the dress, made me the hair appointment, supplied me with the corsage, and pushed my unsocial ass out the front door to take some photos in front of her rosebushes. My grandparents even came over to watch. It was like - this fucking event. I was out of my bedroom. I was wearing a dress. I was attempting a variety of smiles.
“Middle school?” I say, and the salesgirl is the only one who hears me. She laughs and we exchange a little look - a sort of code where we both silently acknowledge that we are being out-hotted by a group of twelve year olds who look like passable college freshmen. I’m wearing a racerback maxi dress from a thrift store. She’s wearing some khaki shorts and a white shirt. We are suddenly not cool enough, although we had been fine just moments before.
I watch the tall one try on impossibly short (short) sequined dresses. She examines herself in a mirror with pursed lips and mean girl squinted eyes. She has legs that - literally - are endless. Up to her eyeballs. Legs that don’t even make anatomical sense.
Finally, a lone mother walks in. She is these girls in thirty years. Bored, tired, a little too much nip and tuck around the eyes. She has a younger girl with her. A girl I can relate to. She hasn’t yet found the energy to keep her shoulders back, pick out a decent pair of shoes.
“Mom, mom,” she says, yanking at her mother’s hand. ”Look at the cute little dog!”
“Yeah, yeah, he’s great,” she says. ”All right, what do we got? Show me what we got. That’s a little tight, huh? Do you have a bigger size? You sure you want something that long?”
My mom has to whistle to reclaim my attention and she gives me this look like - Yeah, I know. I know. But how does this dress make my ass look?
