Fan Fic

I came across an interesting link from Flavorwire (which if you don’t read regularly is chock-full of info about all things entertainment) about famous authors on fan fiction. Of the nine authors profiled, reactions ranged from indifferent (J K Rowling and Stephanie Meyer) to out and out hatred (Anne Rice, George R R Martin, and to varying degrees everyone else on the list).

Of course, all nine of these are well known. Most have had films/TV shows made of their works and have made a butt load of money off them. You’d think they’d be less adverse to fan fics, maybe have no trouble allowing other writers work with their characters as long as they didn’t try to exploit them for their own gain.

Not that I don’t understand their point. Fan fic has always bugged me because when I like a story, I don’t go using the characters and worlds. I make up my own. But if others want to do it, it’s none of my concern. I’d like to think I’d be flattered if someone fan ficced something I wrote. Although I think you have to be published for that to happen…

I’d like to see what the reactions would be of writers whose names aren’t common knowledge, or pretty much any writer who hasn’t had a movie made of their work. I wonder if they’d be more or less likely to object.

In general, what’s your opinion on fan fiction? What if it was based on your work? Are any published authors reading this who could weigh in?

An Actual Author Interview!

Myne Whitman was kind enough to let me interview her, my very first try at it! For those who aren't aware, she's just released a new book, A LOVE REKINDLED and as I was able to get a sneak peek at it, I can attest that it's pretty dang good!

Without further ado:

Me: First, the most basic of questions: where did the idea for your book come from? Was there a particular moment of inspiration?

Myne: I witnessed some ethnic conflict in Nigeria while I lived there, and had often wondered how this might affect a budding romantic relationship. I’ve wanted to explore heartbreak, and the feeling of betrayal too. So this was an opportunity to combine both. The major arch over my stories though, is to follow the Hero/heroine through a loving relationship through which they can discover themselves and become better people at the end.

Me: What’s your writing process like? Are you a plotter? A pantser? Something in between?

Myne: I am a bit of both. At the beginning of a story, I like to plot out the direction of the story, what happens at particular times. After that it’s by the seat of my pants.

Me: I’ve always found that the first draft is the easiest to write. What about you? What’s your editing process like?

Myne: The first draft is definitely the easiest for me too. It comes in torrents and I just have to get it out. I wish it were acceptable to publish first drafts, lol. Seriously though, that is my most honest work. The editing is more tedious, and some of the cutting process can be painful when I have to remove parts I considered so important to the story. But it has to be done. In fact, while I can finish a first draft in a couple of months, it takes another six months or more to finish the editing.

Me: Is romance the only genre you write?

Myne: For now and for my novels, yes. I’m also trying to get into writing short stories which can be in any genre, or mainstream literary.

Me: What’s your worst habit as a writer? How do you combat it?

Myne: I think it has to be procrastination. Once I get a block, I usually take time off. The bad habit is that even when the story starts coming back, I become too lazy to jump back into it with the same energy. What I do is to keep small notes and write down thoughts so that when I do start writing, nothing is forgotten, and it hopefully goes faster.

Me: Tell me, how different was your final draft from your first? How long did it take until it was “ready”?

Myne: The final draft is a lot different. I had to add a new character to tighten the story, and also introduced a couple of plot points. These entailed numerous new scenes, and a reorganization of the whole book. It then took 8 months to polish the manuscript till I was happy enough to let it go. To be completely honest, as a creator, I find that left to me I could continue editing my works. But after the editor was happy with it, and I was only making changes at word levels, I knew it was time.

Me: What was it like publishing your work for the first time? How did it affect your life?

Myne: I think having a blog was the first step, especially because I shared excerpts of the WIP as a series. This led me naturally to consider self-publishing and it has been great so far. I always feel exciting receiving the proof copy of my books, and then I have to read it cover to cover. I have become a better writer, met some great friends, and developed a very helpful network that I never imagined.

Me: Unfair question time: who are your favorite authors?

Myne: This is very unfair. I have read so many books and love so many authors. Some of them are Sidney Sheldon, Nora Roberts, Jodi Picoult, Khalid Husseni, Chimamanda Adichie, Francine Rivers, Frank Peretti, Barbara Kingslover, among others.

Me: Who has influenced you as a writer (not necessarily any writers/authors, but the also the people close to you)?

Myne: This goes to my husband, and the love of my life. He has given me the freedom to pursue this passion of mine, and also supports me in the writing too. He is a writer, and is my first beta reader. I also run plot ideas by him and he critiques my stories. I look forward to when we can write a book together.

Me: When you’re not writing or reading, what’s your favorite thing to do?

Myne: I watch a lot of TV and movies. I also enjoy taking walks.

Me: When things are bleak, what keeps you writing?

Myne: The stories, and the characters. They also cheer me up as I write.

Me: Any advice for those of us who are still unpublished?

Myne: I say keep writing, and keep polishing what you write. Try to join a critique group and don’t be reticent to send out your work to beta readers, or agents. There are now so many opportunities for writers to get published, make sure to research them and find the one that works for you. I wish everyone the best.

Thanks again for the interview, Myne! It was a lot of fun to look at someone else's writing process. Enjoy A LOVE REKINDLED, available now!

One Hundred And One

A few days ago, there was a list going around about one hundred classic books. It asked you to copy and paste the list into your own blog and then bold the ones you’ve read and italicize the ones you read part of but, for whatever reason did not finish. The list was pretty good, but there were a few doubles, i.e. Hamlet and the Complete Works of Shakespeare (which there are a lot of; I don’t know how anyone could read all of them), and some works I thought were slighted since they are, if this makes sense, recent classics. 

In any case, I’ve decided to post my own list, this one of 101 writers you should read before you die. If anyone has any writers or works by them to add, leave it in the comments, because I know I missed some great ones.

1.      Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse Five, Harrison Bergeron 

2.      Laurie Halse Anderson: Speak 

3.      Toni Morrison: The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Beloved 

4.      Zora Neale Hurston: Their Eyes Were Watching God 

5.      William Shakespeare, whose written a number of sonnets as well as plays like Hamlet, Romeo & Juliet, Othello, and a Midsummer Night’s Dream 

6.      Suzanne Collins: The Hunger Games (series) 

7.      J.K. Rowling: Harry Potter (series) 

8.      C.S. Lewis: The Chronicles of Narnia (series) 

9.      Richard Adams: Watership Down 

10.  Mark Z. Danielewski: House of Leaves 

11.  Stephen King: It, Misery, The Stand, Christine and many, many more 

12.  Ira Levin: Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives, A Kiss Before Dying, Sliver 

13.  H.P. Lovecraft: The Call of Cthulhu, At the Mountains of Madness, The Whisperer in Darkness 

14.  Thomas Harris: The Silence of the Lambs, Red Dragon   

15.  Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Emma 

16.  Charles Dickens: A Christmas Carol, Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, A Tale of Two Cities 

17.  Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre 

18.  Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights 

19.  Emily Dickinson, author of 1775 poems 

20.  William Golding: Lord of the Flies 

21.  George Orwell: 1984, Animal Farm 

22.  JRR Tolkien: Lord of the Rings (series), The Hobbit 

23.  John Irving: A Prayer for Owen Meany 

24.  Daphne Du Maurier: Rebecca, The Birds 

25.  Audrey Niffenegger: The Time Traveler’s Wife 

26.  F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button 

27.  Langston Hughes: The Negro Speaks of Rivers, My People, Not Without Laughter 

28.  Fyodor Dostoyevski: Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov 

29.  John Steinbeck: East of Eden, The Grapes of Wrath, Of Mice and Men 

30.  Lewis Carroll: Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass 

31.  L. Frank Baum: The Wizard of Oz (and its sequels) 

32.  Khaled Hosseini: The Kite Runner 

33.  Arthur Golden: Memoirs of a Geisha 

34.  Gabriel Garcia Marquez: One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera, A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings 

35.  Rudyard Kipling: The Jungle Book, The Man Who Would Be King 

36.  Laura Ingalls Wilder: Little House in the Big Woods, Little Town on the Prairie 

37.  Margaret Atwood: The Handmaiden’s Tail 

38.  Frank Herbert: Dune 

39.  Leo Tolstoy: War and Peace, Anna Karenina 

40.  Henrik Ibsen: A Doll’s House 

41.  Kenneth Grahame: The Wind in the Willows 

42.  J.D. Salinger: Catcher in the Rye 

43.  Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita 

44.  Alice Sebold: The Lovely Bones, Lucky 

45.  Alexandre Dumas: The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers 

46.  Louis L’Amour: Silver Canyon, The Quick and the Dead, How the West was Won 

47.  Jean Shepherd: In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash 

48.  Cormac McCarthy: The Road 

49.  A.A. Milne: Winnie the Pooh 

50.  Louise Fitzhugh: Harriet the Spy 

51.  John Le Carre: The Constant Gardener 

52.  Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer 

53.  Herman Melville: Moby Dick 

54.  Bram Stroker: Dracula 

55.  Salman Rushdie: The Satanic Verses, Midnight’s Children 

56.  James Joyce: Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, Dubliners 

57.  Alan Sillitoe: The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner 

58.  William Peter Blatty: The Exorcist 

59.  Truman Capote: Breakfast at Tiffany’s, In Cold Blood 

60.  Harper Lee: To Kill A Mockingbird 

61.  William Blake: Songs of Innocence, The Tiger, To Spring, A Poison Tree 

62.  Alice Walker: The Color Purple 

63.  Aldous Huxley: Brave New World 

64.  E.B. White: Charlotte’s Web 

65.  Franz Kafka: Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, A Hunger Artist, A Country Doctor 

66.  Gustave Flaubert: Madam Bovary 

67.  Hermann Hesse: Siddartha 

68.  Stieg Larsson: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl who Played with Fire, The Girl who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest 

69.  Roald Dahl: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Witches, Matilda 

70.  Victor Hugo: Les Miserables, The Hunchback of Notre Dame 

71.  Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness 

72.  Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (series) 

73.  Hans Christian Andersen: The Little Mermaid, The Ugly Duckling 

74.  Robert McCloskey: Make Way for Ducklings 

75.  Mitch Albom: Tuesdays with Morrie, The Five People You Meet in Heaven 

76.  Joseph Heller: Catch 22 

77.  William Gibson: The Miracle Worker 

78.  Geoffrey Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales 

79.  Henry James: The Turn of the Screw 

80.  Evelyn Waugh: Brideshead Revisited 

81.  Graham Green: The Third Man, The Fallen Idol 

82.  Silvia Plath: The Colossus and Other Poems, Ariel 

83.  Colleen McCullough: The Thorn Birds 

84.  Ian Flemming: James Bond (series) 

85.  Arthur C. Clark: 2001: A Space Odyssey 

86.  Ernest Hemmingway: The Pearl, The Old Man and the Sea, The Killers, A Clean, Well Lit Place 

87.  William Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom!, A Rose for Emily, 

88.  Tennessee Williams: The Glass Menagerie, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, A Streetcar Named Desire 

89.  Fannie Flag: Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistlestop Café, Daisy Fay and the Miracle Man 

90.  John Cheever: The Falconer, The Swimmer 

91.  Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter, Young Goodman Brown, Feathertop, 

92.  Arthur Conan Doyle: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes 

93.  James Dickey: Deliverance 

94.  Mary Shelley: Frankenstein 

95.  Percy Shelley: Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, To A Skylark 

96.  Washington Irving: The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Rip Van Winkle 

97.  Shirley Jackson: The Lottery, The Haunting of Hill House 

98.  Isaac Asimov: The Bicentennial Man, The End of Eternity 

99.  Edgar Allen Poe: The Raven, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Cask of Amontillado 

100. Jack London: To Build A Fire, Call of the Wild

101. Robert Louis Stevenson: Treasure Island, The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde