Category: fanfic

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blakes-7 books fanfic getting published launch party writers

Book launch season and a very special debut from Sarah Hilary

hilary_someone_elses_skin_posterSpring is the season for book launches. After a few years as an author, this means lots of friends with new books out. Which means – book launch parties! Hurrah, as we say in the book industry.

So far I’ve been to three. (I know, lucky!) First up was Jo Cotterill’s LOOKING AT THE STARS, which was the loveliest cake party packed with other kids authors from Oxford and the environs as well as a bunch of Oxford school’s loveliest librarian. All-round kidlit sugary goodness to celebrate an actually rather serious book about a girl who uses story-telling to help her comfort her family and to survive a harrowing journey of exile.

Then last week, to get down for the first book of Robert Muchamore’s new series ROCK WAR (the link is to an interview he did on the BBC about the new books). The Rock War launch was a rollicking rock and roll party in Camden with invites mocked up as classy rock-concert tickets. Little Daughter and I went with another mother-and-daughter couple, friends from Oxford. The tweens strutted their stuff amongst the hordes of other young people while Clare and I looked wistfully at the buffet table of goodies and wished we maybe hadn’t just stuffed our faces with yummy Chinese street food of yumminess. We also chatted to all the other kids authors who were there, this time the London lot. Robert was busy all evening signing books and taking photos with fans, announcing his imminent retirement, probably, until he decides to launch a comeback.

As exciting as all this was, it wasn’t until the last day of the month that it reached the highlight of book launches, probably for the rest of my year. Because my dear friend Sarah Hilary, a friend since our teenage years, was finally and spectacularly published by Headline with the blisteringly good detective thriller – SOMEONE ELSE’S SKIN.

We were probably fourteen years old when we met for the first time. It was outside the stage door of the Rex Theatre in Wilmslow, where we’d both come (alone) to see our favourite actor from TV series Blakes 7, Paul Darrow, starring opposite Rula Lenska in Mr. Fothergill’s Murder. So taken by this event was I that I ended up recreating the scene in what is technically my first novel, the post-modern, experimental Blakes 7 fanfic novel, BETWEEN LIFE AND DEATH. (Come on, every writer has a po-mo experimental fanfic novel in the drawer, admit it.)

After having our hearts set a-flutter by meeting the sexy Mr Darrow at the peak of his handsomeness, Sarah and I remained in touch.

From the beginning, Sarah made it clear that she wanted to be a writer. I, on the other hand, had swapped that very early ambition for another, possibly more difficult one – being a film director. We lived quite far apart in Manchester so saw each other intermittently over the next few years, principally to get together to watch Blakes 7. We went to college, the relationship became one of correspondence. Sarah was writing an original screenplay. She was writing an adaptation of a Philip K Dick book. My ambitions to become a film director had been thrown aside, this time for a career in science. Sarah, meanwhile, appeared to be studying something creative and getting on with the plan.

I was fairly certain that soon enough, I’d be seeing movies with Sarah’s name attached as writer.

We grew into our twenties. And lost touch.

Fast forward to 2004. Sarah wrote to me via the website of the IT company I co-founded and where I worked. As it turned out, she lived close by in the Cotswolds, had a young daughter a year older than Little Daughter. We met up. Of course, my first question was – what happened to the writing. Sarah shrugged. She’d gone down the path of getting published – it hadn’t worked out. I’m thinking of trying it, I told her. Have an idea for a technothriller about the Mayan apocalypse in 2012. Good luck, she said, with honesty. It’s not easy to get published, but you should definitely try.

Then we talked about fan fiction. Sarah hadn’t spent years reading and writing fanfic, and was fascinated. Especially to hear that I’d gone cold-turkey on fandom, around 1997. (Yes that is how committed I was to getting published, I even gave up my hobby so that my mind would be clear of Blakes 7 and ready to develop original ideas. )

Sarah Hilary launches Some Else's Skin
Sarah Hilary launches Someone Else’s Skin

In the next few years, I began writing seriously. Sarah began to write fanfic. She was really, really good at it. Soon she began to write a literary novel. I loved her first manuscript. It certainly got agent attention. But the usual thing – not quite what they were looking for, difficult to find a market. It was a bit of a re-run of what Sarah had gone though years before. But this time, she didn’t give up. There we both were, bloody-minded and determined to get a book deal.

At Cadbury World, I told Sarah of my planned sequel to Failed Ms #1 – title THE FIFTH CODEX. This eventually became INVISIBLE CITY – my first published novel.

At an indoor kids playground in Carterton, Sarah and I chewed over her own progress with agents. It wasn’t happening. Why don’t you write crime? I said. You certainly know how to write violence and fear and suffering. Crime’s got a lot of that, hasn’t it? You’d be brilliant. Sarah wasn’t sure. I’m not sure I can do plot. One can learn how to do plot, I said, and anyway I think you can. Your books keep me up all night.

So began the Sisyphean task of breaking ground as a new crime author. I won’t pretend to know anything about the genre, except that Scandi stuff is popular, isn’t it? And a cool woman detective.

Finally, about two years ago, Sarah sent me something to read that she was hoping would get a book deal. If not, she was going to self-publish. That ms was SOMEONE ELSE’S SKIN. When I finished it I emailed Sarah. I couldn’t imagine a world where this book wouldn’t get a book deal. It had everything a great crime novel should have – terrific structure, a wonderful twist, as well as what had been present in Sarah’s writing from the beginning – wonderful prose and characters. It was chewy, I remember telling Sarah. This one’s going to make it. Just wait.

And it did.

Sarah’s blog Crawl Space is a great place to read about the crime genre and writing in general. Sarah’s also very active on Twitter as @Sarah_Hilary.

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blakes-7 fanfic other books

1st official Blake’s 7 gig: Big Finish’s Anthology

b7anthology_cover_large It’s been a busy year for me. The fruits of this year’s labour, as is usual for authors, won’t be visible until late next year when the books start to roll out.

I do, however, have one publication this year and I’m ridiculously proud of it. Because for a former writer of Blake’s 7 fan fiction  (IN YOUR FACE, CAITLIN MORAN!) there is no greater honour than to publish an official, licensed Blake’s 7 story.

The title is BLAKE’S7: ANTHOLOGY and the book features three novellas, each between 20-25k words, all set in Season 1 of Blake’s 7:

Berserker by RA Henderson
When the weapons research facility on space station Amber was shut down, something got left behind. Blake is determined to find out what…

Cold Revolution by MG Harris
Kartvel claims to have escaped Federation control – without bloodshed. But is all as it seems on this mysterious planet?

Trigger Point by GF Taylor
Infiltration and explosions are one way the Liberator crew can help the resistance on the corrupt planet Belzanko, but can a subtler approach work too?

The chance to have a story in this hardback publication came up last year, when my good friend and fellow author Una McCormack tweeted me  about the Big Finish open submission. It  was closing three hours hence. After a long day of working on a YA manuscript, I didn’t have time or energy to come up with something entirely new.  I looked through all the Blake’s 7 stories I’d ever written for something I could adapt and extend into a novella. Most of my fanfics were set before the first episode (known as Pre-Way-Back), S3, S4 or after the final episode (known as Post-Gauda Prime). Clearly, it wasn’t going to be easy.

Also, like many fanfic authors, I used Blake’s 7 as a template to develop relationship stories, so I knew those were out, at least the plot-thin examples. Perhaps less commonly, I also used the fanfic as a way to experiment with different writing styles. (If you don’t have the cash for a Creative Writing course I can recommend this – homework for this week is to write a Star Trek:DS9 story in the style of Graham Greene!)

It didn’t leave me with many options for what might be adapted in time for the submission deadline.

I realized, however, that the events of a S1 episode Bounty could be used to set up a political conspiracy thriller involving most of the S1 cast. There were a few political conspiracy stories in my collection: Urbi et Orbi, The Real Life of Roj Blake and Cold Revolution – the first two heavily influenced by Mario Vargas Llosa and the third, basically a ‘Canadian shack’ story featuring Avon and Soolin.

In the end I went with Cold Revolution, a story set in late S4 during the time when Avon is trying to broker an alliance between anti-Federation leaders. In the original version, Avon and Soolin act as election monitors to a world that is set to cede from the Federation.

The version I wrote for Big Finish is a much longer version in which Blake’s crew become entangled in the murky post-Federation politics of a ceding world. In this version it is Avon and Cally who represent Blake as election monitors. No shack-located naughtiness for them, however.

Here’s the tagline again:
Kartvel claims to have escaped Federation control – without bloodshed. But is all as it seems on this mysterious planet?

For anyone with a memory that extends to the early 90s, it should be obvious that this story is an allegory of the Georgian Revolution. I wrote the original version not long after the events of that revolution, following an intriguing conversation with a neighbour who was one of the United Nations monitors at the first election.

Back in the early 90s I shared a multi-flat house with Oxford historian Mark Almond. When Mark disappeared on a frequent trip to an Eastern bloc country on some ‘official’ trip or other, he’d ask us to feed his cat. These trips were so frequent at one time that we’d ask him straight out if he was a spy. At which point Mark would smile enigmatically and say ‘The Secret Services would never use someone as obvious as me. I go on TV, I write in the newspapers. They pick people that you’d never suspect.’ ‘Ah,’ we’d say, ‘but that’s what everyone would expect. That’s why no-one would actually suspect you.’

It was a friendly joke. We sort-of-didn’t really think that a mild-mannered guy like Mark would risk his life or at least his freedom spying on the last remnants of the Evil Empire. Turns out that we were wrong. Mark was in fact risking a great deal – not spying but working as a cold war bagman, taking CIA money to dissidents in totalitarian countries.

Sometimes he went as an election monitor for the UN. Returning from the election which was won by Shevardnadze, I asked if the election had been honest. Mark smiled a smile somewhere between cynicism and sadness and told me ‘Not remotely. I could have voted myself – a man with a gun asked me if I wanted to vote. When I pointed out that I wasn’t Georgian he just said “the whole world wants to vote for Mister Shevardnadze”.’

I was reading a lot of Mario Vargas Llosa’s political novels in those days, and writing a lot of B7 fanfic. It struck me that Blake’s 7 had a great deal to say about 20th century revolutionary politics. Especially the first season.

Mark Almond’s anecdotes about Georgia had me wondering what would happen to our heroes if they’d ever found themselves in that situation. The external environment of a ceding Federation world would be far more dangerous to an election monitor than anything the UN faced.

The loser of that faked election was Zviad Gamsakhurdia, the winner was the West-friendly Eduard Shevardnadze. The media referred to Gamsakhurdia as a ‘warlord’ – which sounds bad, n’kay? There’s a warlord in S4 of Blake’s 7 and he’s a total psycho. Yet according to Mark, this ‘warlord’ was the true people’s choice, not the apparatchik former KGB man, Shevardnadze.

Interesting, I thought. Very Blake’s 7 – things aren’t what they seem, even when the good-guys seem to have won. Too good a setting to resist!

Avon should have seen it coming, right? Of course he did, yet as ever he talks himself into following Blake’s suggestions. The fatal charisma of that crazy revolutionary!

I also fancied an opportunity to tell a B7 story set on a relatively low-tech, non-fantasy world. You see a lot of primitive societies in Blake’s 7 but too much  of societies with people who throw rocks and live in mud huts, not enough of low-tech societies who have at least late 20th century tech. Surely there’d be more a spectrum? Or low-tech worlds with some high-tech, the way you get very simple African villages where mobile phones and TV are normal?

Next time someone asks me if I have ever published anything for adults I won’t say ‘But of course! You mean you haven’t read my chapter on fibroblast growth factors in Molecular Endocrinology of Cancer?’. I will say, ‘hell yeah, a Blake’s 7 story, IN YOUR FACE Caitlin Moran.’

Anyway, there it is, my one official Blake’s 7 story. Thank you to Big Finish for publishing it and paying me actual money to write B7! (If you’re tempted to read the others you’d have to dig up some pretty old fanzines. And also know my fandom pseudonym *grin*.)

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blakes-7 fanfic

A small treat for Blake’s 7 fans – The Screenwriter

The Aquitar FilesHELLOOOOO and a Happy New Year! We made it to 2013. Thanks to Josh Garcia, as well all know, on this blog. As I now officially enter my post-Joshua Files writing life, I’m going to be featuring some different kind of stuff on the blog for a while. It might get biographical. There could be recipes. We’re going off-piste for a bit. And I’m working on four, count ’em – FOUR projects. Two – JAGUAR’S REALM and THE PRINCE are manuscripts I’ve been cooking for years. And two are Brand New and Very Super Top Secret.

Like all Blake’s 7 fans I’m brimming with excitement at the prospect of the Syfy channel’s reboot of the classic seventies BBC TV series, Blake’s 7. I loved that show so much, words can barely express it. All my early stories were Blake’s 7 stories.  My latest one is too – Big Finish have commissioned new Blake’s 7 novellas from three authors, to be published in November in an anthology. To celebrate my finishing the story – COLD REVOLUTION – and in honour of the upcoming new Blake’s 7 series, I thought readers might enjoy an excerpt from a novel (BETWEEN LIFE AND DEATH) I wrote in 1996.

In this chapter, Jemima, a Blake’s 7 fan (ardent would be too mild an adjective), travels to Sausalito, California, to meet Greville Davis, the British-born Hollywood screenwriter who’s been commissioned to write the blockbuster Blake’s 7 movie. She’s none too pleased with the idea that this new writer might go off-piste and decides to confront him.

Here’s an excerpt:

******************************************************************************************************

From the diary of Greville Davis

Tuesday 18th

Without any doubt, the ideal way to begin the morning is with a cup of black espresso, charred plum tomatoes with eggs over easy; at least two Marlboro Lights. I followed my own advice this morning as on others. Reading material: Variety. Music: Schubert symphony number 5, first movement only. I read that Gabriel Byrne has just finished shooting another picture; I make a note to tell Sonja to call him to read for Travis. Or Blake. Or, just possibly, Avon. On second thoughts, score that; he’s perfect for Travis; remember him as the Nazi in “The Keep”, or the Irish gangster in “Miller’s Crossing”. He could bring a real subtlety to the role; I’d have to write him closer to the original but with the disturbing self-containment of the second Travis. I wonder if the Coens would be interested in being involved? No; they’d want a hand in the writing, which no-one is going to have but me. Put down same for Quentin Tarantino; don’t be tempted!

Second cup of coffee, third cigarette; music change: three minutes and twenty seconds only, J.J Cale.

Standing on my balcony I look right across the marina; I can’t quite see my own boat from here; it’s too small. After the picture, I’ll buy a bigger one. I’m convinced, at last, that the opening scene is right. I’m not out to shock but then again I don’t want anyone to sit there thinking that they’ve walked into yet another spaceship blockbuster. Its strength always was the interior lives of the characters; let’s stick to that, dialogue and psychological thriller.

I’m still unsure that we made the right decision to do this as a post-Gauda Prime. There are so many constraints; Blake’s 7 in a fundamentally Blake-less universe. Alternative Universe Seven might be easier but it would never be accepted as canonical. Never-before-told stories are just a waste of time; we need a cash cow. Something to continue the adventures. We could bring Blake back as the original Blake and say that Avon shot the clone…but would that be stretching credibility? Perhaps I’ve too much respect for Chris to do that; no, the impact of the final episode must not be compromised. Ideally.

Another minor victory; Terry finally came around about not using his story outline. For a while there, I thought he’d never speak to me again, which would have been a shame because even though I resent some of his comments about my landing this deal, he’s still a great man and one of my all-time heroes. Plus, he has a great wine cellar.

Fourth Marlboro; reading; ‘Vanity Fair’ music; Simon and Garfunkel – ‘Mrs Robinson’.

Sailors are early risers; I can see them spilling out onto the wharf as I write, all decked out in Gortex and Reeboks. There’s a girl on the deck of one of the nearer boats. She’s been there for an hour at least; just reading; not wearing sailing clothes; doesn’t seem to have plans to go anywhere today. I wonder what she’s reading?

If only I knew whom they were going to cast as Avon, it would make my job a good deal easier. It’s a role that has to be defined in a large part by the actor. If we want him played like first or second season Avon then we have to get someone who can bring out that heroic element whilst still retaining the cynical wit. Or maybe we want the angst-ridden Avon of the third series? He could never vocalize those feelings so we’d have to get someone who can say it all with The Look. David Duchovny is interested, I know, but are we interested in him? Is there anyone out there who doesn’t see him as Mulder? Certainly our audience does. In any event, he’s too young; too whiny; doesn’t have the gravitas to pull it off. I still like Alan Rickman for the part. Like David, he’ll appeal to all the right impulses in the Avon-groupie brigade. Even now he still has that expression, that voice that just says: sex. But then…if Alan could do it then why not Paul? They’re of an age, for sure. Sometimes I just want to get on the phone to Fox and tell that producer what I think of his casting plans!

Memo to the producer; Rick; let’s get David Duchovny in to read. He has just the right deadpan wit; let’s see if he can do the temper and the angst.

******************************************************************************************************

If you’d like to read this whole chapter, you can download it here: THE SCREENWRITER excerpt from Between Life And Death

Categories
fanfic writing

We’re all writing fan fiction now

That Ewan Morrison has a lot to answer for. I spent yesterday morning listening to the Naked Book podcast in which he and best-selling author Barry Eisler had a giant row about self-publishing over Skype, then reading the pages of comments to Ewan’s Guardian article that prompted my own piece on NosyCrow’s website about my experience of self-publishing.

And then today Ewan wrote another article in the Graun, rather good for a broadsheet article about the niche and wonderfully weird topic of fanfic. @MrEwanMorrison and I had a Twitter conversation about it in which I mentioned an article I once drafted in 2006, entitled ‘We’re All Writing Fan Fiction Now’.

Ewan suggested I dig it out and publish now. I must not have enough displacement activities to distract me from the WIP because I agreed.

Amazingly, I was able to find the draft of my article. I read the first page and realised why I hadn’t published it in 2006. The article suggested that both Russell T Davies (at the time, the new producer of Doctor Who, at the time) and JK Rowling were, in fact, writing a kind of fan fiction.

In 2006, that might have been taken as a bad thing, so I stopped writing the article. I wasn’t yet a published author, and certainly didn’t want to annoy anyone in TV or publishing. I still don’t.

I began my writing career as a 100% fanfic author, and a co-editor of the first Blake’s 7 webzine, The Aquitar Files. So when I say that someone is basically writing fanfic, that is no bad thing.

Here’s the original article I drafted.

It’s all very well being obsessed with the characters in a TV show or a movie, but what’s to be done when the lights go dark?

No-one’s sure when written fan fiction started but as far back as the days of travelling troubadours people have been entertaining their friends with ‘what if’ stories based on well-loved characters.

Traditionally, adventure stories didn’t bother much with emotional subtext. Heroic characters, sidekicks and their shadowy counterparts in the realm of darkness would play out their roles in the fight between good and evil. How they felt about anything was left up to the imagination of the audience.

For some in the audience, however, that wasn’t good enough. This is where fan fiction really took the dive into innovation. By crossing into territory previously uncolonised by ‘canonical authors, fan fiction took on a flavour all its own. You’d never see Kirk actually fall in love, get married and have kids on ‘Star Trek’ – at least not without the famous ‘reset’ button that most long-running TV shows had at the end of arc-breaking stories. You’d definitely never see Kirk kiss Spock – ever.

When fans starting writing their own TV shows, however, some of the conceits of fan fiction began to invade the actual show. To some extent, the originators of this invasion were the creators of Star Trek – The Next Generation. Series 1 and 2 begin very much in the same vein as TOS. The first glimpse that we might see something fannish; arc-breaking and leaning heavy on the private lives of the main characters, was Data’s sexual encounter with Tasha Yar, followed by his robotic puzzlement and grief at her death.

Tasha Yar seduces Data

Ever since Russell T Davies, long-time fan of Doctor Who, became the series’ new producer, a fannish element has entered the show; the emotional life of The Doctor. Fanfic often explored the loneliness of the nine-hundred year old Time Lord, but we saw nothing more than a hint of it in the TV show. We may have suspected that Sarah Jane Smith was secretly in live with the Doctor, but with Rose Tyler, it’s not mere subtext any more.

But that’s fine too. Why shouldn’t the producers of a TV show themselves enjoy a bit of playing around in the sandbox of their own creation?

The 1980s detective-comedy ‘Moonlighting’ was a ‘shippers’ paradise (shippers being fans who obsess about the potential for a romantic relationship between two characters). More than this, it appropriated another device of fan fiction; the alternative universe setting.

Maddie and David

By experimenting with the narrative – setting the characters in a Shakespearean or a film noir context, for example – the writers effectively were writing canonical fan fiction.

Fan fiction is the open market for ideas around a popular TV show, novel or film. Everything and anything is up for grabs. Fan writers try everything and by some Darwinian process, the ‘echt’ ideas emerge. Having been exposed, as fans of a particular genre, exactly what comprise the key emotional triggers, the most appealing ‘what ifs’, today’s generation of genre screen and novel writers are hardwired to deliver the goods.

That’s why Harry Potter broods over the loss of his parents and his feelings for Ginny, whilst E. Nesbit’s adventuring children manage to brush over any grief they might have about their absentee parents. The painful emotional backdrops were always there – Lucy, Edmund, Susan and Peter as well as the kids from Mary Norton’s wonderful ‘Bedknobs and Broomsticks’ were war evacuees. They had to be running any gamut of emotions right there. It’s just that in those days, somehow, the adventure of the story was expected to be enough; the emotional stuff was left understated.

A.S. Byatt has written that it is ‘childish adults’ who read Harry Potter. As a self-confessed ‘childish adult’ and Harry Potter reader, I’ll admit that as a group we are probably responsible for the bleeding of fan fiction-esque elements into genre fiction.

Some of us even like our fiction peppered with literary references, mythology and symbolism, but then that’s geeks for you.

Henry Jenkins, author of what’s become a textbook on genre fandom, Textual Poachers, observed that fandoms build primarily around genre creations in which there is a significant mismatch between the intended audience for the ‘product’ and the hardcore fans. For example, the Harry Potter fandom was not built by 9-12 year-olds (the target audience), but (mainly) by women in their twenties. The fanfic then fulfils the unmet wants of the hardcore fans  – who will likely have rather different proclivities.

Fan fiction isn’t new, but as audiences become wider and reach parts of the population for whom they weren’t necessarily designed, the subtext is what is exploited. If we love stories of spaceships and exploration, we can merely create our own. Why waste creative effort writing stories about characters we already know, if not to explore what the canon does not or will not: the subtext?

That’s where I stopped writing. But now that the lid has been blown on fanfic, maybe it’s time to round off my reflections from 2006.

I’m not saying that these canonically unexplored proclivities are always sexual. My own years of dabbling with fanfic were also about finding a way to exercise my writing muscles, via pastiche; Blake’s 7 stories in the style of Italo Calvino, etc. But my own fanfic was also at least 50% about the sexual relationships between the characters.

There will doubtless be protestations on the comments of his article, but I’d agree that Ewan Morrison is right that of all these subtextual fascinations, the dominant one in fanfic is sex.

If fanfic is about exploring subtext, then we really are all writing it now; published or unpublished and on screen. Sherlock, anyone? Elementary? House of Silk? Professional fanfic.

But then again, so is any version of Robin Hood.

Ewan uses the analogy of Ouroboros – the worm that devours its own tale. It’s perfectly apt. One fiction’s subtext becomes the next fiction’s text.

Just look at the genealogy of 50 Shades of Grey:

Part of the many-layered subtext of Buffy was that in her relationship with Angel, her innocence was threatened by his dark side. Buffy and Angel stories were about control, who has it, who gives it up. Twilight stripped away most of what was extraneous to the urban paranormal story of Buffy and focused on the innocent human girl’s relationship with the tormented paranormal creature: Bella and Edward. But the subtext of that story, right away, was about the older, controlling male and the girl’s subconscious desire to submit. So EL James, like many other Twiglet fans, stripped away all the extraneous backdrop of that fictional universe and exposed the subtext: controlling older male as ‘Dom’ to the young girl’s ‘sub’.

And because of that,  now you may find yourself talking about BDSM to perfect strangers. Or your mum. Yikes.

It’s gotten so that once an author is aware of who the hardcore, active audience really is, they may even tailor the story for that audience. Easy to do if you’re entertaining adults – for example Torchwood, where apparently ‘the slash is canon’ (Thanks, @SympleSimon!). If your primary audience is children, you need to be smarter, but you can still manage it.

JK Rowling is a very cunning writer indeed and has laced her kids story with deliciously cruel, often adult subtext. If you didn’t know this, prepare to have your eyes opened by Top 6 Reasons Harry Potter Isn’t For Kids, 6 Horrifying Implications of the Harry Potter Universe and The 5 Most Depraved Sex Scenes Implied by ‘Harry Potter’.

Harry Potter invites fan fiction; a smart move by someone who is surely not blind to the benefits of letting your audience indulge a mania for your invention. Just like Twilight, HP has inspired a generation of authors who cut their teeth on fanfic. So far the most successful former HP fanfic author is Cassandra Clare, whose Mortal Instruments books explore the darker aspects of YA fantasy in a Manhattan setting.

It no longer a niche thing to write fanfic, it’s become one of the best ways to make money in publishing. Ewan suggested to me that this year’s as well as next year’s biggest publishing successes have their origins in fanfic. His article suggests that we’re moving to a situation where the original creation (if anything can be said to be original at all) earns less than the fanfic it inspired. E-publishing has enabled this to happen. Are we in danger of all new creation grinding to a halt?

Firstly I’d argue that we’re not. Every iteration shifts the debate along. Mortal Instruments, a by-product of Harry Potter fandom, is very different from The Worst Witch, an earlier version of the magical kids at boarding school story. There’s enough that is new; we rather seem to like stories that are just like the one we already enjoyed.

Secondly, I’d say that fanfics have already surpassed the earnings of their inspirational texts. All vampire stories are Dracula fanfic, but Anne Rice probably earned more than Bram Stoker and Stephanie Meyer earned more than Anne Rice. EL James looks set to earn even more than Meyer. Oh well.

Where I agree with Ewan is that because of epublishing, it is happening faster.

As a former writer of fanfic, I tend to stick to the original principles – it should be free. Like many, I was baffled by the craze for poorly-written erotica, not because I doubted that people wanted to read it, but because I was baffled that people didn’t know how to type ‘free erotic fiction’ into a search engine, and were therefore prepared to pay to download it.

There’s at least one solution – flood the market with cheap, easily available erotic fanfic.

Here’s a free idea for any tech entrepreneurs out there: design a search engine to index free erotic fanfic, scrape up the content and crunch it through something which spits the text out as mobi or epub. Charge a subscription and get subscribers via Kindle, iBookstore, Kobo. The subscription isn’t for the content but a service charge for the reformatted data, so you have no content fees.

Heck, on the Interwebs, someone is probably already building it.

Like most however, I do believe that author worth their salt ought to work on something at least slightly original. And the authors I most love and respect are some of the most original; Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, Haruki Murakami and Junot Diaz.

In fact, I was lucky enough to get Junot to agree to a brief interview for this blog. Junot Diaz is at the Edinburgh Book Festival on Saturday. Check back here on Friday for the interview, to find out about Oscar, about Yunior, and about Junot’s favourite salsa band.