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mandragoraI've written before how much I enjoy Michelle West's work. And if you haven't read any of her books, what are you waiting for? They're wonderful. She also writes as Michelle Sagara BTW, although these are earlier works and less mature as a result than her later novels. They're well worth reading, though, IMO.
My impression of Michelle as a person is nothing but positive, as shown by her sympathetic response to the Anne Rice debacle. She's now posted her views on fanfiction here.
She's obviously sympathetic to the fannish impulse and if I felt the calling to write fanfiction about her novels I'm pleased that she'd have no problem in my doing so. In fact, though, I find her stories so densely layered and satisfying in themselves that the fanfiction impulse doesn't move me when reading them as I'm content to wait and see what she comes up with next, secure in the knowledge that anything I come up with won't be as good as anything Michelle writes. I just wish she could write faster so that the next instalment was now ready to be published. Sigh.
My impression of Michelle as a person is nothing but positive, as shown by her sympathetic response to the Anne Rice debacle. She's now posted her views on fanfiction here.
She's obviously sympathetic to the fannish impulse and if I felt the calling to write fanfiction about her novels I'm pleased that she'd have no problem in my doing so. In fact, though, I find her stories so densely layered and satisfying in themselves that the fanfiction impulse doesn't move me when reading them as I'm content to wait and see what she comes up with next, secure in the knowledge that anything I come up with won't be as good as anything Michelle writes. I just wish she could write faster so that the next instalment was now ready to be published. Sigh.
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Date: 21 October 2004 13:05 (UTC)No, those are the Lymond Chronicles by Dorothy Dunnett. I'm re-reading the six novels in the sequence at the moment and coincidentally have just started the book with the chess game. These novels are, like Michelle's, so dense and layered that I notice things I didn't pick up on earlier readings each time I read them.
I share your views to a large part about literary fanfiction, as opposed to TV series or films, which are not the creation of one person. That said, I don't have any problems with Harry Potter fanfiction but I'm wondering if that is because JKR draws so much on archetypes that her stories don't feel sufficiently 'original' for me to think of them as a unique creation. Plus, there are lots of gaps in them that the fanfiction writers probably itch to fill. I don't feel the urge to write HP myself but can understand why other people do.
I think why so many people write HP fanfiction is because of those gaps, whereas Michelle's novels and those of Dorothy Dunett, for example, are so complete in themselves that fanfiction feels to me to be rather superfluous.