author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Well, sometimes fan fiction is bad for the brain, or at least is accompanied by a lack of a brain, as is evidenced by the case of Lori Jareo. Lori wrote a Star Wars fanfic, cranked it through a POD-machine, and then put it up for sale on Amazon. Despite trying to make a buck off of it in Bezos's backyard, she thinks she'll dodge the impending copyright/trademark violation cease-and-desist with the claim that she only did it for friends and family and that no one knows it exists. John "Whatever" Scalzi begs to differ.

But I digress. In its place, fan fiction can be good for the soul. It can be a playground in which the blocked writer lets the creative self play and play out from under the thumb of the editor-ego. And that's what I've been up to this week.

My dabblings in that arena have been few and, aside from one story that was turned in as an assignment in high-school English (a retelling of the Rapunzel fairy tale set in the world of Rush's 2112), largely unread. But every once in awhile I get this Idea. It tends to be the sort of Idea that sticks around for awhile.

Here's one of 'em.

I just got done feeding my annual craving to reread Michael Ende's The Neverending Story. If you've only ever seen the movie (and if, Gods forfend, you've suffered through the abomination that is the second movie), then you owe it to yourself right now to go get this book and read it. But if you've seen the movie, you'll remember how this disembodied narrator voice comes out of nowhere in the last minute of the movie and says something like, "Bastian made many more wishes and had many, many adventures. But that's another story." In the book, the narrative does that all the time. Some chapter will come to an end, and a secondary character will wave goodbye, and the narrative will hint at what will become of the character but then break off with, "But that's the beginning of another story that will be told at another time."

Ever since I first read this book, I've wanted to write a cycle of short stories, each one inspired by one of these "another story" teases. So this week I started playing around with one of the first prompts. It involves Cairon, the black zebra-striped centaur physician who assigns Atreyu his quest, whose "destiny was to lead him over very different and unexpected pathways" after he successfully delivers his message and nearly dies of the effort.

I have no illusions that the results will be publishable, not without seeking all the right permissions and of course rewriting and revising and rewriting again. But it's fun to dabble. It's a good thing to work on when I've just finished one project and can't seem to get started on another. And who knows? Maybe it will have a destiny upon unexpected pathways itself, ones beyond gathering cyber-dust at the bottom of my writing archive zip disk.

(And come to think of it, the Rapunzel story might in fact become publishable if the fanfic element remains oblique enough. Someone's looking for retold fairy tales.)