DarcyandLizzy.com

Fanfiction.net

I am sorry to say that this might be the last story that I post on Fanfiction.net.

I’m publishing Dreams and Expectations soon.  Someone on FFN copied part of the story and incorporated it into their own.  Now, if the person had CREDITED my work, I would have been okay with this – what better form of compliment is there than someone being inspired to write by my work – but they have not credited me and instead have tried to pass it off as their own idea.  I asked this person to do so – privately so that if this was done by accident, the person was not humiliated (it is very obvious!) but this person decided to try to humiliate me instead by going public and still refusing to admit that she was inspired by my story.

I’m not worried about lasting problems – I will leave the first draft of DaE up to prove the date that I finished posting so that everyone knows who came up with the story first, but I have to say that I am quite discouraged.

Since this person is posting her story now and people are enjoying it and telling her to publish the story, I am a bit concerned that someone is going to accuse ME of plagiarizing her work once the book comes out!

I am thinking of taking down the bulk of the above draft version of All Hallow’s Eve soon after it is finished, and I’m also thinking of taking down A Promise to Remember (the first draft of Promises) – or leaving up only a couple of chapters of each with a note that Promises can be found on Amazon.

Honestly, I wanted to leave my stories up on the board, but I have to protect myself from people copying them without giving me credit.

I have been asked many times if my second book, Dreams and Expectations, will be a continuation of Promises.  The short answer is, no, it is not a sequel.

Since the next question usually seems to be, “But then why will you be using the same character names?” I’ll answer that as well. “I write fan fiction.”

This is usually followed up with, “What is fan fiction and why do you write it?”

You’re about to get the long answer.

Have you ever become so involved with a television show, movie, or book that you wondered how the story would have worked out if a certain event had happened later in the story, or sooner, or hadn’t happened at all?

How would Star Trek’s Mr. Spock have changed if his Vulcan father had died when he was very young and his mother had returned to Earth, bringing Spock with her?  What would Monica from Friends have been like if she hadn’t been teased as a child about being overweight, making her obsessive about her food intake, and eventually everything else?  What would have happened to Bruce Wayne of Batman if his parents hadn’t brought him along the night they had been killed?

Fan fiction is one person’s guess as to how the story would have progressed had a “what if” situation actually happened, creating an original story but using characters and locations that someone else created.  In other words, the fan fiction author takes their favorite characters, changes the details of their lives in some way and writes about how that change might have played out.  It could be one small detail (perhaps Bruce Wayne was there, but was knocked unconscious before his parents were killed, or he just simply didn’t hear what the killer had said) or it could be a huge change (after becoming Batman, Bruce Wayne loses his fortune and struggles to continue his Batman persona, or Bruce Wayne lives in the 1920’s instead of modern times.)

Some fan fiction authors take it even further, trying to answer more complicated questions such as what occurred in Detective Monk’s life to cause him to have so many fears, or what happened to Edward Cullen of Twilight during the time that he was away from Bella?

What I do is take Jane Austen’s characters from Pride and Prejudice and place them in a different situation than they were in the original novel.  In each of my fan fiction novels, they will also be placed into a different situation than in my other novels. My stories usually involve the more complicated “what if” questions.

In Promises, Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy’s fathers have been friends since childhood, the main characters meet as children and fall in love very early in the story, but some things happen to separate them.  Obstacles are thrown in their way by others and by their own stubborn pride.  We’ll find out if their love can survive through it all during the time frame of the original novel.

In Dreams and Expectations, we find the same couple.  They meet at the same time as in Jane Austen’s novel—at the Meryton assembly ball—but Darcy has already fallen “in love at first sight” with Elizabeth when he saw her two weeks before the ball, and had been dreaming about her ever since.  Before long, familial expectations, a mystery, a villainous plot, and a kidnapping will get in the way of this favorite couple’s happy ever after.

The story that I am writing at the moment, All Hallow’s Eve, has Elizabeth as the leader of a secret, magical cult-society that exists at the same time as the original novel.  She is responsible for performing a ritual that allows the good souls who have passed on into the Otherworld to visit Earth on All Hallow’s Eve.  Evil is about to attack, and those from the Otherworld have assigned Darcy to protect her.

I am also working on some stories that place these characters in modern times.  One story has Elizabeth’s cell phone receiving photos that predict the future as a result of an ancient gypsy blessing that an ancestor received in 1809, when she saved the life of a gypsy king’s wife.

“Couldn’t you change the names of the characters and locations?” you might ask, as others have before you.

Yes, I certainly could, and maybe someday I will move on to original characters, but I love Pride and Prejudice and Darcy and Lizzy too much to do that right now.  If it bothers you, you have my permission to pretend that it is just a quirk of mine, or merely a coincidence, that all of my main characters have the same names in each story!

I should mention that I’m still not sure when Dreams and Expectations will be released.  My husband Matthew Sotis is busy painting the cover art and my editors, Gayle Mills (author of the short story The Tryst) and Robin Helm (author of the Guardian Trilogy), are about half-way through editing the text.

I hope that you all enjoyed your holidays and have a safe and happy new year!

– Wendi