OK, my position on fan-fic is pretty clear: I think it’s immoral, I know it’s illegal, and it makes me want to barf whenever I’ve inadvertently encountered some of it involving my characters.
Which is a dumb fucking thing for any author, especially an author who gets a lot of play in the fan-fic community as Gabaldon does, to say. According to another fan-fic friendly blog, Gabaldon made some other weird claims about fan-fic, too:
While not all fan-fic is pornographic by any means, enough of it _is_ that it constitutes an aesthetic argument against the whole notion.
The punchline to that particular complaint is that Gabaldon writes pretty porny books herself. But the best part is the reason that Gabaldon started this fan fiction rant in the first place:
Recently, a couple of people have drawn my attention to a person who’s been posting on various boards about fund-raising for an uninsured friend named Stacie who has breast cancer. Her (the poster’s) idea for fund-raising is to auction off a custom-written piece of fan-fic, involving Jamie Fraser and Emmett someone (who I _think_ is from Twilight; I sort of hope it’s not the willowy young “bottom” from the TV show “Queer as Folk”…). She hastens to note that it won’t be slash, but will otherwise take the bidder’s tastes into account—and of course, all proceeds will go to Stacie’s hospital expense fund.She did not, naturally, ask ¬_me_ about this.
Many of the commenters on Gabaldon's post say she should sue the cancer-fighters to within an inch of their lives. Diana Gabaldon is a classy, classy New York Times bestselling author.
