Jungle Red Writers Present: Author-Originated Fanfic; or, Wouldn't It Be Fun To...

JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING: Yesterday, we had a lively discussion about fanfic courtesy of Paul Doiron and J.K. Rowling's new Harry Potter tidbit posted to Pottermore. If we think of fanfiction as a kind of style or genre, I think it's fair to say that Rowling wrote her own fanfic. She's not the first author to do so, either. At the end of Cryoburn, Lois McMaster Bujold expanded on the story with several drabbles, a type of short fiction of exactly one hundred words that originated in the fanfiction community. Diana Gabaldon spun off a secondary character from her Outlander books and made him the hero of his own series, a device frequently used by fanfiction authors.
Which made me think: Reds, if you could take your characters out and play with them like fanficcers do (Oh, the freedom of having no contracts and deadlines...) what would you write? Put your characters in the past (if contemporary) or the present (if historical?) Make them high schoolers or vampires/werewolves/witches? Give them marriages, children, and happy-ever-afters? PWP? (It stands for “Plot? What Plot?” because the stories are focused on, um, action of a certain kind. If you get my drift.) Focus a story on a secondary character? Crossover into another author's world?
I'm not treading into the murky undergrowth of slash fanfiction here, because I suspect none of us would write H/c (hurt/comfort), D/s (Dominant...well, you know), Alpha/Omega (don't ask) or mpreg (really, really don't ask.)

For me, I'd love to take my characters back in time to the French and Indian Wars, when New York state's Adirondack mountains were the western frontier and European empires battled each other on Lake George. I can just see Clare Fergusson as a plucky Scottish immigrant, and Russ Van Alstyne as the aristocratic Dutch patroon. Russ's deputy chief could become a Mohawk warrior. Young Officer Kevin Flynn would be a green-around-the-gills Redcoat.  Battles! Romance! Bagpipes!  It would be so much fun to write.

How about you, Reds? What would your fanfic be?

HALLIE EPHRON: I'd read that! Maybe I'd cast my old woman Mina Yetner in THERE WAS AN OLD WOMAN as Mrs. Bennett in Pride and Prejudice. Boy would THAT change the story. And probably make the book a whole lot shorter, too.

Or move my pregnant Ivy Rose in Never Tell a Lie to the Dakota in NYC and write a sequel to Rosemary's Baby?


HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: I've often thought of Jake and Jane as teenagers--what would they have been like, what did they do? And I may, actually, even write that, but don't tell.  Or an alternate world where Jane marries someone else. Also, actually, a possibility  Jane as a 9 year old. Also. Doing that.
What I  REALLY want to do is take all the JR characters and put them in the same book. Lady Georgie (somehow) comes to Boston.. She's a pal of Clare's, maybe. Something happens, maybe at a restaurant that Hayley is reviewing for her New England feature? And Jane is assigned to cover it, and find out whodunnit. Gemma (friend of Jake's ) shows up, and it turns out that Maggie Hope's granddaughter is actually the... well, I think it  could work.
DEBORAH CROMBIE:  Hank, I LOVE it!  You are brilliant.  Hmmm, how could we do this? There must be a way... Time travel forward for Rhys and Susan's characters? Or time travel backwards for everyone else's?

But while we're thinking about that, what I'd love to do is bring back characters from my earlier books to star in their own. Madeleine Wade, the massage therapist from Mourn Not Your Dead. Winnie and Jack Montfort from A Finer End, (what's going on in Glastonbury, I wonder?) Alun Ross, the slightly grumpy Scottish detective from Now May You Weep, whose wife ran off with a fertilizer salesman. And especially Ronnie Babcock, Duncan's old schoolmate in Cheshire, now a detective inspector.  
 
Melody and Doug could have their own books, too!  Oh, and I'd love to give Rosemary and Hugh Kincaid, Duncan's parents, their own mystery to solve. Now if I could just clone myself... And time travel...

RHYS BOWEN: Wouldn't a JR fanflc be fun!  And I was speaking at a library last night when one of the audience asked if I had considered spin-off books for minor characters that people love: Sid and Gus as detectives? Queenie on her own? (the mind boggles). 

My fans have also suggested that I write a story in which Georgie and Molly meet. That would be interesting and something I might actually do.  Or Molly's son is a detective in the 1930s and his case brings him to Georgie's London. I'd like Molly to prove to Sherlock Holmes that women make better detectives than men. I'd enjoy seeing Georgie get involved with Bertie Wooster.  Now all I need is a little time..... 


LUCY BURDETTE: I'm simply going to stand back and watch in awe as you women work! But I will say that I've brought Cassie Burdette into the forthcoming Key West mystery (DEATH WITH ALL THE TRIMMINGS, coming in December.) It turns out that her father is Hayley Snow's mother's cousin--who knew? (This was suggested by a friend from the golf mystery days.) It also turns out that two strong women sometimes butt heads:)--I can only imagine what would happen if all the Jungle Red characters got together. Who would be in charge???

JULIA: Okay, I think I've got it. Jane Ryland and Jake Brogan sneak away from Boston to a resort in Key West. Also at the vacation destination: Clare Fergusson, performing a wedding for a friend at St. Paul's, and her husband, Russ Van Alstyne. The British groom's best friend from university, Duncan Kincaid, is there, along with his wife, Gemma James. At the reception, catered by Hayley Snow, they stumble over a body - an historian killed while investigating a 70-year-old mystery originating at Naval Air Station Key West.

The story then switches to the early days of WWII, when USAF Cpt. Liam Sullivan, SOE agent Maggie Hope, Lady Georgiana Rannoch, Lord Darcy O'Mara and the young American WAC Mina Yetner must stop a Nazi plot to attack the vital south Florida shipping lanes with their deadly U-Boats. 


Will the collection of aristocrats and commoners be able to
work together? Who is the Nazi sympathizer at the Naval Air Station? Why is someone willing to murder to protect their secrets after seven decade? Do nonagenarians Mina Yetner and Maggie Hope hold the key to the mystery?

What do you think, dear readers? What fanfiction would you like to see us write? And what other mystery authors should delve into d-i-y fanfic?

J.K. Rowling, Fan Fiction, and Everything Authors Leave Out of Their Books; a guest blog by Paul Doiron

Kathy Reel is the winner of Anna Lee Huber's A Grave Matter! Kathy, please contact Anna at annaleehuber dot com.


JULIA SPENCER-FLEMING:  I don't have to say too much to introduce Paul Doiron, do I? He burst onto the mystery scene four years ago with The Poacher's Son, which introduced Maine Game Warden Mike Bowditch and nabbed a brace of prestigious nominations and awards, including the Edgar and the Nero.  

Fast forward to today. The fifth Mike Bowditch novel, The Bone Orchard, launches next Tuesday to rave pre-pub reviews (I can add mine to them; Paul slipped me an ARC last month and I read it in one sitting. Really good stuff.) What's Paul going to talk about? Moose? Maine state parks? 

How about J.K. Rowling and fanfiction?

Like most authors, I probably think as much about the things I don’t put into my novels, as the things I do. My new book, The Bone Orchard, is the fifth in my series about headstrong but big-hearted Maine game warden Mike Bowditch, so I’ve come to know a lot about him, not all of which has yet made it into the stories themselves. With each new novel, I fill in a little more of Mike’s unwritten history. 
 

So for instance, in The Bone Orchard I flash back to his first year as a warden to give him a friend I’d never mentioned before—a young man Jimmy Gammon, who is on his way to Afghanistan as an MP with the Maine National Guard. He returns home badly wounded and suicidal (a very real crisis among our returning vets), and the violent confrontation he provokes at the beginning of the book is the catalyst that triggers everything that follows in the story.

In my notes about Mike, I have many details about his past, but no matter how many more books I write, I know I’ll never fill in all the gaps in his back story. And that’s the way it is with every fictional character. A single author can only write so much. 
 

The emergence of fan fiction is an organic response to this problem. Readers want more Bella and Edward and so they tell stories about them set in an alternate dimension of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight universe (and some of them get quite rich doing so). The same thing happens with movies (Star Wars) and TV shows (Star Trek). If you want to bring on a case of the vapors, Google “Kirk and Spock sex scene”—or better yet don’t. Poor Gene Roddenberry is already rolling in his grave. 
 

I’ve been thinking about fan fiction this week because of J.K. Rowling. Unless you’ve been holed up in a cabin deep in the Maine woods (and if so, I envy you), you’ve probably heard that the richest woman in England has come out with a new Harry Potter story. Like most sentient beings I am a Rowling fan (No, I won’t apologize for reading the Potter books as an adult. Nor will I begrudge Rowling’s recent forays into crime fiction under the pen name of Robert Galbreith.) The story itself — set sixteen years after The Deathly Hallows—didn’t do much for me, it was fun but forgettable, but I’ve been struck by the media response to it.
 

While many reviewers found it delightful, others responded with a collective “meh.” A few, including, Esther Breger writing for the New Republic, saw the story as part of an off-putting pattern of behavior with Rowling, in which she can’t help herself from continuing to fill in the holes she left in the original books:

“Since ending the series, she’s revealed that Dumbledore was gay, that Harry and his cousin Dudley reconciled, and that Harry and Voldemort were related by blood. You don’t have to be a Barthesian grad student to chafe at Rowling’s impulse to clarify the words on the page. When writers adopt the paratextual world of fanfic as their own, they both diminish their books’ literary authority and interfere with the freewheeling spirit of fan writing.”

The language in that paragraph takes me back to my comp-lit days at Yale, but I think it roughly translates to: “Rowling should either put this stuff in a new book or keep her mouth zipped because it’s confusing for readers to learn about a beloved character’s unexpected sexual orientation from an author’s offhand comment.”

Put another way: “This new story reads more like fan fiction than the work of the genius who created Hogwarts.”

What do you think about J.K. Rowling’s decision to keep adding back stories to the characters in her books? Should she leave more to the imagination of her readers, or are you grateful for any new tidbit about the world of Harry Potter? Do you think writers should keep explaining their books by filling in information that never made it onto the page? Or should they leave these holes to be filled in by the readers’ imaginations?

And for the Reds and my fellow authors out there: have you had anyone write fan fiction about your characters and if so, how did you feel about it?

No one has written fanfic about Mike Bowditch yet (that I know of, at least). If they ever do, I’m curious how I’ll respond to it. Will I feel possessive: like the fictional world I’ve created belongs entirely to me as the author? Or will I be open to letting my readers flesh it out with their own imaginings? I doubt I’ll know the answers myself until some fan writes a scene where Mike Bowditch and his beefy blond friend Billy Cronk get it on.

Gulp. 

Paul will be giving a signed copy of The Bone Orchard to the commenter who provides the juiciest answer.

You can read more about the Mike Bowditch series, including excerpts from the books, at Paul’s website. Like his page on Facebook or follow him @pauldoiron on Twitter.