Summer 2007 Read Free Page B

does.
    Fanfiction is by definition not canon.
    That is, in fact, the point of it: there’s no profit to
the fan writer in being mistaken for canon. It is a response. I have never read
a piece of fanfiction that could be, or intended to be, mistaken for the canon
material. There are close pastiches–as found in material derivative of
Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes–but the more-or-less unsuccessful
attempt of a derivative writer to be mistaken for more of the original is
limited to the pro-fiction arena. (How long have V.C. Andrews and Carolyn Keene
been authoring through intermediaries, now?)
    To misquote Anaïs Nin, my
book is not made of soap. It will not wear out.

Column: Lansdale Unchained #1 by Joe R. Lansdale
    JUST DO IT
    Or
    ENJOYING THE WRITTEN WORD WITHOUT BEING OWNED BY IT (but
always have a savings account and a piggy bank, or in my case, I have a bear
and a dinosaur and a Batman bank, and a few mutual funds.)
    This is the first article of a column I’m calling
LANSDALE UNCHAINED. I intend to write about pop culture: writing and art and
comics and movies and anything related. Sometimes the relations may be tenuous,
but I’ll do the best I can.
    Let me tell you a secret. Everyone enjoys recognition, a
little fame. Let me tell you another secret. If you like it too much it’ll eat
your guts out. In creative endeavors, like writing, it’s the curse, baby.
    You start out writing because you enjoy reading and then
you write to please a certain in-crowd, usually other authors, or for some,
critics and reviewers, and then pretty soon you find an audience, and that my
friends is both good and deadly.
    We all like to have an audience. You don’t have someone
reading you, then you don’t get to sell your nifty writing, and if you don’t
sell it, it doesn’t matter if you’ve written a lot or not at all, because a
creative endeavor for most people is sharing. No sharing. No writing. When it’s
in your desk drawer, it might give you a hard on when you go over it, or make
your nipples stiff (depending on gender), but it’s not satisfying if there are
no readers. Reading aloud to the dog doesn’t count.
    There’s something inside the creative mind that thinks
it has something someone would want to read, see, or hear. It takes some ego to
believe that. Even the quietest, most withdrawn of authors, like to believe
they have some worth, if only in that one area. Writing.
    But if you find an audience, you began to give your
audience what you think they want. Some people can do this very well. They can
become rich and famous. They can have so much money that when they fart they
blow out spare change, but good as this may be, it can ring a bit hollow if
your creativity is within one constant artery, because eventually, that artery
gets filled up with plaque of the non-artistic kind, and you’re just pumping it
out, but it’s not a clean pump, because all that plaque you know, it’ll make
you grab your chest from time to time, and eventually, it just might kill you,
creatively anyway. Now, just knocking it out, find that audience and giving
them exactly what they want at the expense of all else is not a bad thing if
your job is as a prostitute where a certain rhythm of movement, or at least a
willingness to take a fucking will get you by, but as an author, well, brethren
and sisteren, (yeah, I made that one up) ’tain’t so good.
    Sometimes the publishers can be a problem. They may want
to restrain you. Sometimes that can’t be helped. If your publisher doesn’t want
you to say pussy or fuck or shit or prick or have pronouncements against the
powers that be, if you think religion sucks the big ole donkey dick but they
fear their readers like sucking the donkey dick, and they want your work to be
about kitties and puppies and to be non-offensive, and you aren’t that kind of
writer, well, you can be, to put it mildly, disappointed.
    Doesn’t mean you can’t modify if you have to, but it
does mean