shamelessly pleading for fiction recs

[truepenny]

Because I have so few books to read. *g*

Actually, because I'm setting myself up to do some difficult things in The Project, and I'd like to see how others have done them. I believe firmly in learning from examples, which is why I've been gnawing on A Civil Campaign like a dog with a bone for the past, oh, month. So I'm looking for stories--any length, but, please, original fiction because of my ethical Issues--y'all would particularly recommend (either as good models or Horrible Examples) which have either or both of the following:

1. a blind protagonist/narrator

2. explicit m/m or f/f sex (R to NC-17) written by actual practitioners of same, because I don't want to fall into the het woman trap of writing the sex scenes like it all assimilates to my experience. Vanilla, BDSM, various flavors of kink, it's all good. N.b., I am NOT looking for erotica; I'm looking specifically for stories in which the sex, while steamy, is part of the plot, rather than the raison d'etre. Actually, come to think of it, if you know any het fictions which use their steamy sex scenes for more than just steamy sex, stick them in, too.

And because--despite my brain the size of a planet--I am sadly lacking in intellectual staying power, the more sfnal the story the better.

*looks at post*
This will be interesting.

Comments

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

No, it's okay. I didn't want to get into it more because of respect for rliz's inbox than personal reluctance--although I'm afraid my thoughts (and I use the word loosely) are ill-defined and incoherent.

My favorite exemplar in this arena is one a friend uses: Cervantes and Don Quixote. When someone infringed copyright (she says anachronistically) on Part One of DQ, Cervantes responded by writing Part Two. Which gave the world Part Two of Don Quixote instead of yet another lawsuit and incidentally made the copyright-infringing moron look like the loser that he was. I think copyright, the way it's used now, is largely a hobble on the culture's collective creativity (as, for example, the current spat over Peter Pan). Another example from the past is, of course, Shakespeare, who stole plots from everywhere he could. He'd be in hot water over some of them today (especially if Plutarch were alive to howl PLAGIARISM in every forum in town), but that doesn't actually harm either his plays or their sources.

My reservations are twofold. One is my personal qualms, as mentioned above. I can be all in favor of public domain in the abstract, but there's still a selfish little goblin in the back of my head that screeches MINE! and clutches masses of manuscript close to its skinny, heaving bosom at the mere idea of someone else borrowing my characters.

The other, even dicier, is that issue of permission, and the ways in which fanfiction, with or without permission, can turn around and bite the original author on the butt. papersky adduced the example of, er, Tanith Lee? Somebody, anyway, who lost a movie deal because the producers saw fanfiction (for which permission had been expressly denied) and got antsy about intellectual property rights (or whatever the correct legal term is). And Terry Pratchett, totally aside from fanfiction, has had (or had in the past--I'm not up-to-date) to stop reading newsgroups devoted to him because of the whole you-stole-my-idea! thing (which really grates my cheese). Anything that can interfere with the original authors' rights and abilities to publish whatever they want with their own damn characters/worlds/ideas is WRONG. Wrong wrong wrong.

And there's the whole current flap about NC-17 HP fiction. Which is confusing and distressing because (1) it's a hypocritical piece of PC-ness anyway with which I COMPLETELY disagree from a pure First Amendment standpoint, (2) it's impossible to tell (from the distance at which I stand) whether Rowling herself cares one way or the other, and (3) the other half of my brain still says, they're her creations. SHE gets to say what happens to them. No matter how talented, dedicated, and pure of heart the fanfiction writers are, they're still playing with her toys in her sandbox, and she has the right to ask them to leave if she thinks they aren't playing nicely. Or if she doesn't want them to play at all.

And I don't know what would happen if an author made a official disclaimer (instead of the sort of informal, interview-response, Oh, I don't mind really, that is mostly what happens) saying people could write any fanfiction they damn well pleased. I don't know if the legal apparatus could handle it. It's disturbing and makes my head hurt and gives me a vague itchy feeling of hypocrisy no matter which side I come down on. Bleah.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

It was MZB, not Tanith Lee. Part of *my* sordid history with fan fiction is that the first story I ever sold was to one of the Darkover anthologies. The really funny thing about it is that at that point I was so focused on professional publication that I found the whole history of Darkover fanzines, as I heard of them in the ads in the back of MZB's books, to be very odd: why were people writing things they knew couldn't get professionally published? I never would have written that particular story if I hadn't known there was a market for it.

I tend to think of fan media more as a marketing aid to the producers of the source product than as a deterrant to it, but I understand why producers might not think so, in a world where they aren't even supposed to read spec scripts based on their own show because of infringement issues.

Then again, it cheers me to a silly extent when I find out the producers of a cancelled show were pleased by fanfic, and actually appreciated one writer *as a writer* and not just someone paying compliments to their show.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Christ, it's almost ten years later and I STILL twitch at the mention of MZB, sender (as metonym for the eponymous magazine) of the most hateful, vicious, destructive, and downright mean form rejection letter I have ever seen in my life.

(I still have it, I think, in the folder I keep of rejection letters, but I'm afraid if I looked at it, I'd just start crying again.)

Back on topic (yeah, I know, my LJ, my rules, the topic's anything I damn well please), I suspect you're right, that fan productions increase both number and commitment of fans. I don't think it's a pernicious phenomenon; I understand why people write it, and I do think it's cool that creativity can spread out like that from a single nexus in so many different directions.

Like I said, mine is a personal, visceral, irrational reaction (also monumentally egotistical, in assuming that anyone would ever even WANT to write fanfiction of my stuff, but we'll let that slide), and I don't mean to suggest in any way that I have some kind of moral high ground on the subject (in case any of this has looked like I think I do). Frankly, I'm not sure where the moral high ground is.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

No, it was Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and one of her vampire books. She lost a film deal, and money in the hundreds of dollars scale.

The MZB case is murkier -- apparently Jean Lamb had written a fanfic, and sent it in as a submission, and MZB was currently writing a novel with some of the same elements, and she wrote to Lamb and said that she couldn't publish it because of this but she liked what Lamb had done with Y and could she MZB use Lamb's use of Y in her novel, thanking Lamb in her thanks. Lamb threatened to sue if MZB produced anything with any element of her story without payment and acknowledgement of her as co-author. Case went to court, or maybe was settled out of court but lawyers were involved heavily, MZB did not write her novel.

Jean Lamb is alive, MZB isn't, there are rights and wrongs on both sides, if anyone writes fanfic in anything of mine I will eviscerate them.