Comments on: Playing in someone else’s sandpit

By: mythusmage

mythusmage — Sun, 12 Jul 2009 04:19:01 +0000

For a somewhat different view take Naomi Novik, author of His Majesty's Dragon. She got her start doing fanfic, and she has put together the Organization for Transformative Works, dedicated to supporting fanfic and similar efforts in their various forms. The best one can hope for is that one's creations are treated with respect, and that the new tales are well written. Lovecraft encouraged people to use elements from his stories, because he wanted others to share in the joke. His friends reciprocated, and so the Mythos was born. Eric Flint found people writing about the world of his novel 1632 and it became the shared world it is today. Eric did not intend his one-off tale would go on as it had, or in the way that it has; but it has and he has embraced it. How you handle the matter is your business, I just thought I'd let you know about a couple of different ways of approaching the subject. So Glenda, were people to approach you about doing stories in the Isles of Glory universe under your direction, how would you handle such a project? And Karen, there's a ton of stories to be told of Dexterity Jones. Who would you like to see telling them?

By: glenda larke

glenda larke — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 18:42:20 +0000

I think you are right, Karen. I don't want to know and I will never go looking. But if it impinges on my public persona as a writer – that's a different story.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 17:00:46 +0000

Thanks to the internet, fanfic is here to stay in more and more perverted incarnations. Seriously, you don't want to go digging too deeply. When it's just fans taking the work and going to town on it, there's no point trying to fight it. Ignorance is easiest. But when a fan (and it's usually a deranged fan) crosses the line, as with a Star Wars fan and more recently the whole Twilight debacle, where fans wrote fanfic and then tried to sell it commercially to make money and justified their actions with such gems as 'She never illustrated her work so there is no copyright attached', then you go in all guns blazing because that's theft.

By: Jo

Jo — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 16:20:47 +0000

Thanks for your comprehensive answer Glenda. I was basically thinking of recognised authors borrowing your worlds presumably with your permission. I never thought of anyone who might be a pirate. I was thinking more of something like The Witch World series where all kinds of different writers set novels in that world.