Coming to my Great Realization this past week I thought about how to achieve my goal of getting my An Involuntary King characters out into the world with lives of their own. The original idea, way back in 1964, was for my friend Laura and me to keep writing the stories, and my idea was to get others involved. I was partially successful. Linda Laaksonen supplied a wife for Shannon O'Neill and some other characters from a Scottish village called Connery. Suellen, who was almost my step-sister, initially created Sir Michael, who in my hands became the tragic lover of Samir al Tamid, a Saracen adn first partner of MacDhui. So the concept was there to share the characters and the stories with other creative people. And recently a woman on my Let's Read Historical Novels group told me she wished she had been there when I was trying to rope people into my storytelling. The stage looked to be being set.
Other authors have said they are reluctant to hand characters over to other people to make decisions.. but in my case, even the writing of the novel I consulted the famous Laura about actions of Josephine and Elerde. I figure, too, that someone else is unlikely to make as much of a mess as I myself did... having Lawrence have a mistress, or Laura did, having Josephine fall in love with a certain Sir Robert de Riffet. (The king banishes himself for a year for poisoning the guy.) We each wrote a couple melodramatic death scenes as well. That never changed the dcirtual reality of the characters for me before. Why would it now?
To take this a step further, the collaborative writing group Ghostletters offered an opportunity for siome uniwue crossover. Shannon spent some time on Encelatus, a moon of Saturn, with a young friend written by another person. She borrowed my character Ishaq to have him wandering the streets of the lunar colony. Shannon and Rory gave a concert for a group of vampires living in France. And Shannon again had a lost weekend with an immortal Scotswoman named Jireen. This all happened while I was writing the novel.
So it turns out Jack Graham, the wonderful fellow who worked with me on the battle scenes in my novel, has a hankering to reform Elerde, the "tragi-nasty" would-be lover of the queen in my book, and is putting together a story about him where he reaches the brink of despair and is saved and finds love.
I said to Jack, "If you did that, it would be a fulfillment of a dream fro me.. for my characters to so engage someone s/he decides to write about them. I set out to find the best way to make this possible, gaining myself some praise from one of the moderators of the site fanfiction.net, who commented that it was refreshing to meet an author who encouraged people to write about her characters. There is a category there now for An Involuntary King, though it will not actually appear publicly until a story is uploaded.
Not hubris.. or even conceit.. there are a few people who really want to do this. Finally!
Now I am just waiting for the slash fiction to start.. who will it be? Lawrence and Rory? ;)
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