Current mood:	curious
Current music:	Sunshine of Your Love - Cream

more, more, more
What's with the not entertaining me by updating copiously this morning? Huh?

::pokes friends list::

Don't make me get out the scary poky stick!

I'm desperately trying to finish Nothing Like the Sun (I'm sure you're sick of hearing about it, so imagine how sick I am of trying to finish it, even though I love it to bits, when it's not making me tear my hair out) while also packaging and sending out annual reports to trustees. Ooh, big fun!

So, last week, Halrloprillalar discussed the finer points of drabble writing, and the subject of sequels came up - as in, in response to a drabble, someone wrote, "Hey, I'd like to see more of this story. What happens next?"

And how, as writers, most of us tend to think, "Well, if there was more story there, I'd have written a longer story and not a drabble."

And honestly, in the two and a half years I've been writing fanfic and paying attention to other writers' thoughts on the subject, one thing seems to be clear - Many fan writers dislike it when their readers demand sequels.

Some writers acquiesce, and if "the muse" or inspiration or whatever is with them, the sequel stands up to the original. If not, well... we've all seen (or avoided like the plague) Speed 2 and its ilk, yes?

I mean, speaking for myself, if something someone says in an email sparks another idea in my mind, then yeah, I may write a sequel. Or if I knew the story I wanted to tell was incomplete, but I wanted to tell it in self-contained installments rather than as one long WIP, or the second half of the story didn't seem to fit with the first, so splitting it made sense (and then the second half, if you're me, has been left to wither on the shelf, because I'm a bear of very little attention span...), I'll write a sequel. A whole series of 'em, on occasion.

But usually, when I say "The End" I mean, "The End", and so do many fan writers of my acquaintance (I wouldn't presume to know the minds of published writers, but some of the sequels I've read lead me to believe that they're under more pressure to produce more of the same from their publishers, as people like the same old, same old - it's comfortable and it sells).

And getting emails saying, "But what happens next?" or "When are you writing the sequel?" in response to stories that to you (generic writer) seem complete and whole can be really fricking annoying. (Whether because you want to write a sequel and can't think of what actually happens next or whether you're really and truly done and want to move on. Both have happened to me.)

And yet, as writers of fanfiction, isn't that exactly what we're doing?

For example:

Firefly was cancelled. There will never be more episodes of it (at least in serialized television format). But we want to know what happens next. Who is Book? Who are the blue hand guys? Will Simon and Kaylee ever get together? Will Jayne get spaced the next time he crosses Mal? etc. etc.

What do we do?

Well, some people write to the network(s) and beg for the show to be picked up. Most people in this fannish community then turn around and write fanfic.

::thinks::

Okay, Firefly is a bad example, 'cause it was cut down in medias res.

Better example:

Lord of the Rings. It's finished, bubeleh. Sure, there's another movie coming out, and some things might be different than in the books, but the footprint of the story? The major plot points? The *ending*?

All she wrote. (or, in this case, he wrote.)

Boromir's not coming back. Eowyn isn't going to win Aragorn's love, Merry and Pippin aren't going to settle down in wedded bliss with each other, and Theoden isn't going to survive the Pelennor. Etc. Etc.

And yet, not only do we, as fan writers, rewrite the stories (What if Frodo kept the Ring? What if Galadriel took it when offered? What if Aragorn and Eowyn had a brief illicit affair that resulted in a baby?), we add on stuff that's not included (What did Sam do all those years as Mayor of Hobbiton? What were Legolas and Gimli up to in Ithilien? Was Faramir and Eowyn's marriage happy? How did Eldarion feel having to wait so long to become King? How did Eomer feel about being king? Who the hell is Lothiriel and how did she and Eomer meet and fall in love?)..

We're doing to the source texts, in essence, what other fans want us to do to our own writing.

And we get shirty about it sometimes when asked to do it to our own stories.

I just find that really interesting, how fannish entitlement extends to expanding on someone else's caged baby universe(tm Warren Ellis, whom I dislike intensely) and how, as readers of fanfic, we may be the ones *sending* the email, "Ooh, I'd really like to see what happens next? Are you gonna write a sequel?" but in the role of *writer*, we may be irritated by such requests ("Don't you know 'The End' means The End?")

I know I have this split in myself, and I'm wondering if anyone else who is both a producer and a consumer of fanfic, has noticed this.

And if you have (either before or just now when I mentioned it, whichever), what do you think about it?

C'mon be honest.

And people who just read, what do *you* think of it? Are you irritated when a writer says, "Look, I told the story I wanted to tell and that's it. There *isn't* anything else. They all die!" (except, you know, somewhat more cordially).