musings on fanfic

[julesjones]

There was a bit of a blogstorm last week on the subject of fanfic, with the usual accompanying navel-gazing on how authors feel about their stuff being fanficced. Now, obviously it would be very hypocritical of me to say "keep your filthy keyboards off my characters". :-) In fact, my reaction was more along the lines of "dear god, if only my books were that popular", with the standard rider of "try to make money off my toys, and I'll set my publisher's lawyers on you".

I could go into more detail than that. However, on catching up with my blog reading after the long weekend, I find that Scalzi has already spelled out in detail a fairly useful set of guidelines for the "I don't mind, but don't expect me to look at it" viewpoint:
http://www.scalzi.com/whatever/005139.html

It's worth reading, especially if you are a fanfic writer who would like some guidelines on what could cause problems for an author who is in principle fine with the idea of fanfic of their work. As for me, I'd go along with pretty much all of that with regard to my profic (plus what pnh said in the comments), with the obvious exception of hey, I want to see the yaoi art. Maybe one day it will be more than hypothetical for me...