So...

[agilebrit]

The Town Drunk is accepting submissions. I have a fanfic I can rework to fit within their guidelines ("Black Market Beagles," for anyone who remembers that). I've been planning on reworking this story into an original work for some time, and now I actually have a reason to do so.

And the Hubby is busting my chops for thinking about doing this. He says it's "cheating." His reasoning is that I've used other people's work to create my fic--and therefore it's not okay to disguise this work as my OWN original by changing details to make the characters appear to be mine for money. Even if I'm changing major details like speech patterns and the gender of the characters, he seems to think that it's somehow not kosher, because the whole basis for the story was stolen from other sources.

Of course, my defense is that I'm going to change the characters around enough that (hopefully) no one will recognize them as coming out of Firefly (Hubby comment: Kind of like painting a car a different color and sticking a spoiler on the back so no one will recognize it as the one you stole!), and that the actual story itself is mine. I've heard of fanfic authors doing this very thing with some success.

What say ye, flist? Am I on the horns of an ethical dilemma, or is the Hubby blowing smoke?

Comments

[nodrogg.livejournal.com]

Smoke is blowing. It's your plot, isn't it? All you did originally was plug pre-established characters into a story of your own devising. Now you're replacing those with characters also crafted by you. What now isn't your own?

taking your husband's side

[kathleendoris.livejournal.com]

it seems sort of like plagarism. the first version of the story was using someone else's characters and someone else's universe and just changing the speech pattern and gender doesn't seem make it non-fan fiction. don't people make stories about orignial characters set in a pre-established universe all the time? so your story is your character, and your plot is your plot but you didn't put in the work to figure out how the rules of the universe, joss whedon did. so not calling it fan fiction is taking credit for all the work he did figuring out the details of the universe surronding the charactes he created.

also, the changes you make to the characters may be very sophisticated but they may also be superficial. the characters you write in version 2 may share the same motivations, profession and personality of characters created by joss whedon which make them somewhat unoriginal.

all of this said: if you do it, i doubt anyone will know (excpet everyone who reads you lj).