How Do I Know What I Think Until I See What I Say?

Over on Smart Bitches, Trashy Books (which if you read romances you should totally be reading--heck, I don't even read romances, and I still love it), they had a post this week about fan fiction, which mentions Annie Proulx's objections to people foisting their Brokeback Mountain fan fiction on her. (The Wall Street Journal article is here .) As a fan fiction author and, potentially, a "real" author, I've been thinking about this for a couple of days. What if I get published and then people start writing fan fiction about my book? What will I do? How will I feel? How will I react? What I won't do is give an interview where I talk about how offended I am about the fan fiction. That would be a wee bit hypocritical of me, I think. But, on the other hand, I have huge sympathy for Ms. Proulx who, after all, probably didn't have a huge fan fiction exposure before the movie version of Brokeback Mountain. I mean, were there people out there doing fanfic ...