It's funny, you know, being a writer (or even a girl with an extremely over-active imagination) that I've never written a fan-fic. Ever. Not even in my more youthful and misguided days. That might have something to do with the fact that I never read much fantasy as a kid. Well, I read the first three books of the Narnia Chronicles, but that was kind of it until my friend Jane introduced me to Mercades Lackey at camp when I was 14 or 15. OK, so I did try to write a fan-fic about Elspeth�s half sister (who is a baby in the Valdamar Chronicles) when she�s all grown up. But I got really sick of conforming to all the �rules� of Valadmar as another world after a while, and gave up about 10 pages into the endeavor.*
No, before fantasy, I read a lot of 19th century fiction, like Mark Twain and Louisa May Alcott. Some Bronte sisters, some Jane Austen. That sort of thing. And as a result, my �original� stories were often about spunky girls whose fathers and sweethearts had gone off to fight in the Civil War, so they snuck away to join Sherman�s army, or uncovered Confederate plots to decimate the Union, something of that nature. Or else my heroines were long-haired beauties of the British Empire, wasting away in Indian colonies (of which their fathers were governors) where there were no boys to marry them; or stuck back in cold, dreary England, going for long ride across the moors and behaving pensively. OK, obviously they weren�t very original, but at least I was *trying* to create plotlines of my own.
Until today. While perusing a Lord of the Rings site, I found a link to this list of things not to do in a fan-fic . Which, incidentally enough, makes me want to write a fan-fic of my own, conforming to some of the author�s asides. Maybe something entitled �The Bride of Sauron,� featuring deluxe-edition Ringwraith pAndi. Coming soon to a diary near you . . .
* DID YOU KNOW: That a couple of place names in Valdamar are just ripped off from lesser-known place names in Middle Earth? Uh-huh, true. Like Lake Evendim. And the Forest of Sorrows is a total rip-off of the Old Forest or even the woods where the Ents live. But you have to hand it to her, because Mercades Lackey is clever. Evendim is hardly mentioned in Tolkien (I�ve only found one line pertaining to it in the whole trilogy). But it is a major fixture in the Valdamar. And I�ve known a lot of people who were both Mercades Lackey and J.R.R. Tolkien fans who�ve never picked up on that, just because Evendim is so obscure in Middle Earth. Nobody even goes there, someone just mentions it at one point. Very clever, very sneaky . . .
