The Telling Of The Tale

Here is the current rundown of the different stories I am working on:

1. Black Orchid Consortium
2. Life In The Fast Lane
3. Nothing More Than Feelings
4. Pulse
5. Somewhere In Between
6. Storms In The Black
7. The Witching Hour
8. When Dealing With The Past Use Rope
9. Dollhouse – Charlie

Some of these stories will be familiar, some of them I may have mentioned only in passing. All of them are being written over at Fractured Imagination. Yes, it is a site similiar to E! – smaller and more…intimate. No, not all of the stories are erotic in nature. Sure there are some steamy scenes, but it’s not the bulk of their content.  And yes, all of the stories are collaborative works of fiction.

Other than the obvious one in the list, could you tell which ones are fan-fiction?

There has always been some contention as to what actually constitutes fan fiction.  My views on what constitutes fan-fiction are not necessarily the same as yours. My technical definition of fan-fiction is the writing of a story that contains characters not of my own creation (or that of my writing partners) as a main character.  Dictionary.com supports this by defining fan-fiction as:

1. fiction written by fans of a TV series, movie, etc., using existing characters and situations to develop new plots.

Just by going with that definition I haven’t been writing any fan-fiction at all. But if I we take  a look at the Wikipedia definition (yeah, yeah I know) it states that:

Fan fiction (alternately referred to as fanfiction, fanfic, FF, or fic) is a broadly-defined term used to describe stories about characters or settings written by fans of the original work, rather than by the original creator.

Given that definition there are 6 total stories on the list that could be considered fan-fiction simply because of their setting.  I’ve been writing fan-fiction for rpg worlds (Exalted, World Of Darkness), TV shows (Firefly, Dollhouse), and book series (Dark-hunter). And while the settings are not my own the plots and the characters are.

More often then not, these stories end up as alternative universes and help me flesh-out ideas that I do turn into original stories.  Either way, a story is told and it’s the telling of the tale that really matters.

[For thems that are curious - 2,3,5,6,8 and 9 are the fan-fic pieces.]