Hee! I would love to have my own little fandom! That would be SO AWESOME! I've actually gotten some fanart and one piece of fanfic for my webcomic, and it made me so ecstatically happy.
Though it does leave the difficulty of how to interact with the creative side of one's own fandom. Do you openly acknowledge your own fanfic, squee about it and link to it? Or squee in private, babble cheerfully at friends via email, and officially pretend it doesn't exist? Especially with an ongoing series - what if someone actually *does* anticipate your plot points in advance and write about it? I certainly don't have a moral problem with it and I'm not actually afraid of being sued, but I've noticed that there's something a little disheartening about working hard on a fanfic and then running across one that uses the exact same idea. If nothing else, it's hard to avoid being influenced by it!
Actually, that is one of the things I really love about writing fanfic for someone else's creations - you don't have to make that choice! You can openly acknowledge in your headers "this is a lot like Jane Doe's current WIP, but I was working on this one first and it's not related" or "The idea of Mary and Flo having a genius baby is borrowed with gratitude from Jane Doe's epic Curtainfic XII". You can babble happily about how awesome someone else's version of John Sheppard is. I worry about the difficulty of trying to navigate fandom with a non-fannish Seekrit Identity. I know that growing numbers of people do it (I'm actually amazed at just how many of the new, up-and-coming generation of spec-fic writers are also maintaining an active fanfic-writing presence - I know of about a dozen of them, and those are just the ones I know about!). But it seems like it would be very hard, especially if you happen to hit the fannish zeitgeist and spawn a decent-sized fandom of your own (like the Temeraire books seem to have).
Incidentally, I forgot to say this in my earlier comment, but I do think this is a very insightful post, and the aspect that you point out about fanfic is really one of the best arguments on the pro-fanfic side, IMHO. It's not less than original fic, but it's not exactly the same either. Trying to choose between them is like choosing between science fiction and mystery -- they're not the same, but one of them isn't less.
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Though it does leave the difficulty of how to interact with the creative side of one's own fandom. Do you openly acknowledge your own fanfic, squee about it and link to it? Or squee in private, babble cheerfully at friends via email, and officially pretend it doesn't exist? Especially with an ongoing series - what if someone actually *does* anticipate your plot points in advance and write about it? I certainly don't have a moral problem with it and I'm not actually afraid of being sued, but I've noticed that there's something a little disheartening about working hard on a fanfic and then running across one that uses the exact same idea. If nothing else, it's hard to avoid being influenced by it!
Actually, that is one of the things I really love about writing fanfic for someone else's creations - you don't have to make that choice! You can openly acknowledge in your headers "this is a lot like Jane Doe's current WIP, but I was working on this one first and it's not related" or "The idea of Mary and Flo having a genius baby is borrowed with gratitude from Jane Doe's epic Curtainfic XII". You can babble happily about how awesome someone else's version of John Sheppard is. I worry about the difficulty of trying to navigate fandom with a non-fannish Seekrit Identity. I know that growing numbers of people do it (I'm actually amazed at just how many of the new, up-and-coming generation of spec-fic writers are also maintaining an active fanfic-writing presence - I know of about a dozen of them, and those are just the ones I know about!). But it seems like it would be very hard, especially if you happen to hit the fannish zeitgeist and spawn a decent-sized fandom of your own (like the Temeraire books seem to have).
Incidentally, I forgot to say this in my earlier comment, but I do think this is a very insightful post, and the aspect that you point out about fanfic is really one of the best arguments on the pro-fanfic side, IMHO. It's not less than original fic, but it's not exactly the same either. Trying to choose between them is like choosing between science fiction and mystery -- they're not the same, but one of them isn't less.