I agree. Mr. Goldberg is absolutely entitled to dislike fan fiction (even though I love it, and therefore everyone must love it!). What I find puzzling about his argument is the idea that fan fiction is equivalent to MP3 file sharing on the Internet. If a person scanned the text of one of Mr. Goldberg's Diagnosis Murder books and began distributing it to people via the Internet, then that would be piracy, but fan fiction? Despite the use of pre-made characters, fan fiction is original work.

Maybe I'm not the most moral person to be involved in this discussion, since I love file sharing.

Going off topic, I just have to wonder at what a small world we live on. Back in 1997, when I was a freshman in high school, I started reading Diana Gabaldon's Outlander series. When I ran out of novels, I did a search on books Ms. Gabaldon recommended, which lead me to your series, and the Anita Blake series by Laurel K. Hamilton. I loved your books, and the reference to Jamie, Claire, and Ian put a smile on my face. Sharing characters between authors like that is truly awesome. It really made me feel like there was this community of writers out there who actually liked each other, and weren't trying to cut each other down, or one up each other.

It's comforting to know that there are *cough*, as Lee Goldberg might put it, "real" writers out there who support, read, and love fan fiction. I have to say though, even if you weren't published, and I'd only read Into the Wilderness on a website, you'd still be a very *real* writer to me.

Thank you!

Cindy A. Best

Thanks, Cindy. I appreciate your kind words, especially as I struggle with the fifth book in the series.

So to follow Lee Goldberg's argument, if we give a kid some paper and tell them to draw something and they draw Spiderman or Snow White, we condemn them, tell them its wrong? I suppose then we have to ban fancy dress parties or silence a child who begins to construct his own idea of what Spiderman 3 will be about. Does Lee Goldberg not see that fanfic and all similar expressions such as fanart are labours of love? Once a writer writes a story, its out there, it becomes part of the reader's consiousness. (I thought that was the point). How then can one forbid or condemn someone from wanting to express themselves creatively and explore the boundaries of their imagination through those loved characters. Writing fanfic and profiting financially from fanfic are two completely different things, I believe. We all know that the two are not necessarily linked. Does Lee Goldberg?

And another point. Where in this does satire fall? Many a professional writer and movie studio have profited from using someone else's character to create a satire. Do they have to obtain permission from the copyright holder to do this? Does the local high school drama teacher have to obtain permission to do a satire of, say, Romeo and Juliet? Or what about the Year 12 (final year high school) student who writes a satirical poem about, say, Pride and Prejudice? Is that OK, Lee?

Fanfic sounded extremely suspect to me. However, I super fantastically love "Pride and Prejudice," so when this site mentioned "Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife," I thought I'd try it. (Knowing in my own mind, of course, that it would probably fall abysmally short of "P&P.;")But I LOVED Berdoll's sequel.

I will say this, though. Berdoll's book was fantastic, and I was happy to have a chance to visit with my old friends. But I never forgot that it was Berdoll writing their new adventures and not Jane Austen. And, more importantly, Berdoll never seemed to want me to forget it. She wasn't trying to usurp Austen's glory or criticize or warp the original text. She was performing the greatest homage possible--Berdoll loved the characters enough, just as many fans of Austen and other authors do, to not want the story to end, to wonder breathlessly what happened next. What greater praise is there than that?

Thirty years ago, I belonged to a Star Trek fan club. We had a small magazine published quarterly which contained fanfiction. Each of approximately 35 pages was typed, run through the mimeograph, collated, stapled, put into envelopes, labeled, sorted by zip code and carried to the post office. It was a labor of love sent to about 250 people.
Today my fourteen year old daughter writes fanfiction based on a favorite book series. She enters it on the computer, touches a button and the world can read it.

It may be easier to find today, but fanfiction is still amateur writing. It's a starting point, a way to practice. I doubt that publishers are scanning fanfiction sites for new authors. They all have legal departments to explain plagiarism.

I mentioned the long departed Star Trek fanzine because one of the members is now a professional writer of TV scripts, original fiction and Star Trek tie-ins. He also has a blog, which names the fanzine at the end of a very long bibliography.