Control: Fan Fiction

I, Dalton Lewis, am here to report that my fan fiction does well. People read it. It’s weird, right? I wrote something that has an audience. Several hundred people have read my story Warhammer 40k in the Year 2020: One. Seventy-five people have read the sequel, Free Will and Uncontrolled Growth. Those are strong numbers for me. Thank you to all the people who read them.

Some authors hate fan fiction. Anne Rice and George R. R. Martin apparently don’t want fan fiction stories based on their characters. I say — bullshit. If a writer at home wants to use a celebrity’s characters then he or she — often she — has every right to do so. We’re not making money off of this. Why? Why don’t people want us to expand their universes and characters?

I get it — this is someone’s universe. They don’t like some of the tropes of fan fiction stories. There are Peggy Sues, stories in which someone redoes the story with knowledge of what is going to happen. There’s slash fiction, in which a romantic relationship between characters is explored, often a gay relationship. This helped people express their sexuality in a time when many of their characters appeared straight on the television and movies.

Darkfic and hurt/comfort stories are common. People want to get darker than traditional movies and television shows will allow. What if a character was killed? What if a horror situation happened to the Gilmore Girls? What if Batgirl was in an adult situation in which the Gotham City villains were really, really nasty? These things occur to people and need to be addressed.

These develop into porn stories. Porn fan fiction is a classic aspect of the genre. People want to see characters have wild, hardcore sex, and this is how they explore that. Fifty Shades of Grey started as a fan fic between Edward and Bella. These stories explore what people want to read but aren’t allowed to read by conventional writers and conventional publishing houses.

What do I write? Well, I write fan fiction based on the Warhammer 40k universe and two of its characters, Abaddon and Celestine. Abaddon is a Warmaster of the Chaos Space Marines, in charge when they gather and attack the Imperium. He worships daemons and wants to be more powerful. I play him as a good person fighting to protect daemons and prevent the Emperor from taking over everything in existence. I know; that’s not really canon, it’s fanon. I don’t care — that’s my take on the character.

Celestine, meanwhile, is a proud and strong heroine defending the Imperium of Man from its enemies. She is in love with Grayfax, a beautiful young female Inquisitor who in my fiction is tasked with the decision whether or not to destroy enemy planets. I want a complicated relationship between them in which much tragedy strikes as a contrast to the wonderful love scenes happening between them.

That’s fan fiction. I sit at home, writing fan fiction and blogging every day, and I only make three dollars when someone buys my novels or novellas. It’s hard, knowing that this isn’t paying for itself, much less paying for my life. Still, I love to write, and I will continue to do so — even in the face of overwhelming failure. I don’t care if I don’t make money — if seventy-five people will read my most recent fan fiction, and they did, then I am fine continuing to write stories.

Thanks, and take care, friends.