I’m on a reading roll this summer, as I’ve found a number of good books. The latest wasn’t a big surprise, as I’ve read the rest of the series, but I think this one is my favorite so far. I read the latest book in Sarah Beth Durst’s Spellshop universe, Sea of Charms, and it was absolutely delightful.

This one overlaps a lot with the previous book, The Enchanted Greenhouse, showing some of the same events, but from a different perspective, which gives them a different context. The heroine of this book is the sailboat captain who brought supplies, people, and messages to and from the island in that book. In this one, we see what went into getting those things to the island and what else was happening along the way. But I don’t think you need to have read the other book first. I think you could read either one in any order, and each will give you context to the other. It’s an interesting way of handling a series (that I now kind of want to play with).

Marin’s happy being mostly alone with her boat on the sea, along with her friend the sea monster, but in the chaotic aftermath of a revolution, she finds herself taking on a composer/musician she’s met in the capital city. She didn’t really want a crew, but he wants to see more of the world and the city isn’t safe for him. She agrees to take him if he’ll come with her to her family’s local festival as insulation against her ex, who’s now out to ruin her family. Meanwhile, her family owes a huge debt from getting her boat built, and she doesn’t have a lot of time to pay it off, so she has to take as many jobs as possible, which means taking some risks.

This book proves that a fantasy can have adventure in it and still have that cozy vibe. It seems like a lot of cozy fantasies, including mine, are focused on communities in one place—a neighborhood, a shop, a village—but this gets into a broader sense of community in the people one person might know in various places she visits. You still get that warmth and comfort even as we’re sailing the high seas and dealing with things like magical storms and dragons. The other thing that’s interesting about this book is that it shows that you can have a “found family” and still have a family of birth. Marin finds herself part of a new “family” in the crew that grows around her as she gradually lets others in, but she still has her parents at a home she returns to regularly. A lot of found family tends to involve people who’ve lost or been cast out of their birth families, so it’s nice to see this spin on that, adding to the family instead of replacing them.

Even though the book actually takes place during the fall and winter, it feels like a summer book to me, probably because of the sea and swimming, so it’s a good cozy fantasy for sitting on the porch or deck with a glass of iced tea or lemonade. I guess it would also work with hot tea on a cool, rainy day, but I was reading it in August.

I’m also encouraged by the fact that you can mix cozy and adventure because the book I’ve been working on is sort of an adventure story but the cozy vibes keep sneaking in and I wasn’t sure they mixed well.

One genre I really miss is the Regency romance. Not the Regency-set historical romance, like the Bridgerton books, but the old “category” Regencies that were modeled on Georgette Heyer’s books, which were modeled on Jane Austen. They were short books in a similar kind of tone and content to Austen and Heyer, so very chaste, witty dialogue, clever heroines, and maybe something to say about society and the plight of women in it. They were category-like lines, so a certain number of books fitting certain guidelines were published every month, and you could even subscribe to a line to get all the books every month. The subscription model died off with the growth of Amazon — why subscribe to get all the books delivered to you, some of which you might not like, when you can pick and choose exactly the books you want to get delivered to you? And this kind of book became less popular as the steamier historicals moved into the Regency period. I think they also sort of killed themselves because they started changing the books to be steamier, but still not truly steamy, as the Regency-set steamy historicals became popular, which meant that the people who liked them for what they were no longer liked them but they weren’t steamy enough to appeal to the people who’d never been interested in them because they were too mild.

I started reading these in junior high, and I particularly loved that a lot of them had unconventional heroines, the kind who were still unmarried at a later age (like actually in their 20s) because they were intellectual “bluestockings” or wild tomboys who didn’t fit into society. I guess maybe there was a hint of “not like other girls” there, but I suspect it was more a way of having less icky age gaps than you really might have had in that period and finding reasons for that. Of course she’s not yet married at 21, she’s terribly bookish and tends to bore anyone who dances with her with her opinions. Or she’s a better rider than the men, which intimidates them.

I recently found a book at the library that gave me all the old Regency romance vibes, but with some modern twists, Fast and Fastidious by R.M. Caldwell. Our heroine is very much coded as neurospicy, though not labeled as such in the book because they wouldn’t have known about autism. She doesn’t understand the unwritten social rules, so she writes them down and codifies them for herself, then rigidly follows them so she won’t risk getting it wrong. The one area where she breaks from society’s norms is in her interest in carriages. She knows all the specs and how they’re put together, and when she learns of the midnight races, in which competitors meet at midnight during the full moon to race carriages, she can’t resist. But when a new person moves into a neighboring estate and shows up as a competitor at the race just when there’s a string of carriage robberies, she can’t help but be suspicious and decides to get to the bottom of it.

We have drawing room and ballroom intrigue and lots of witty Regency banter, and all the things that make this kind of book so much fun, along with secret identities and espionage. Throwing a heroine who struggles to understand rules that don’t make sense into the rules-driven Regency period is an interesting twist to the genre. These are such fun characters and a fun story, with a romance that works for me (I can see why they’d like each other and can imagine their relationship working) and it reminded me of some of my favorite books when I was reading a lot of Regencies. I hope this author writes more books (nothing else is listed on Amazon) because this was just what I was in the mood for.

Last week, I read another book that I got from that box of free books on the sidewalk, The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley. I think maybe someone here recommended it a while ago. At least, the title jumped out at me when I was digging through the box, so it was one of my selections.

I love time travel stories, but not the usual “person from our time goes back in time and has adventures/falls in love” type stories. I like some twists to it, like multiple or parallel timelines, non-linear storytelling, worries about changing the timeline, etc. The book is an interesting twist in that it’s about people from the past who’ve traveled to the “present” (which is the near future). It’s sort of an inverse of the Connie Willis time travel books, in which historians travel in time to study the past. Here, they bring people from the past who were known to have died forward in time just before they died (so they won’t affect the timeline) and study how time travel affects them.

Our heroine/narrator (who remains nameless throughout the book) works as a “bridge” for the Ministry of Time, the organization doing this work. Her job is to help the time travelers transition to their new lives while keeping an eye on them and reporting on how they’re doing. She’s assigned to a polar explorer who went missing in 1847 on an expedition. She’s to live with him for a year to help him adjust. There are other bridges who have different people in their care, including a young woman from the 1600s and a man from World War I.

The author does a wonderful job of capturing the voices and worldviews of these people and what they would think of a modern world. The woman from the 1600s embraces modern life for the freedoms she didn’t have in her time, comes to love movies and becomes a Swiftie. The man from WWI has some trouble adjusting, as he finds it hard to deal with the fact that there were more wars after that devastation. The Victorian polar explorer pretty much refuses to adapt, aside from being keen on motorcycles, and maintains his stiff upper lip and his manners.

This is a slow burn of a book. The first half is mostly a comedy of manners as we deal with all these historical fish out of water, but then it takes a turn into spy thriller, as things start happening to the time travelers and a threat becomes increasingly apparent. Our heroine starts to worry that the threat is coming from within, but she doesn’t know who she can trust — and then the time travelers aren’t sure they can trust her. Meanwhile, she and her assigned time traveler have grown far closer than they were supposed to, though they have very different ideas of what constitutes “courting.” That relationship is also a slow burn, though when it does happen, it gets pretty graphic, so fair warning. I was a little uncomfortable with those bits, since this person is a real historical figure and it’s kind of weird to get that explicit about a real person that way.

Aside from the time travel hijinks and spy thriller escapades, there’s some musing on what it is to be a displaced person who can never fit in. The narrator is biracial, the daughter of a refugee, and she’s well aware that her Victorian comes from a British empire where she wouldn’t have been considered fully human. At the same time, that helps her empathize with his situation of not quite fitting in.

Aside from my discomfort with graphic scenes involving a real person, I really enjoyed the book. It’s quite funny in places and then gets really emotional and tense. I’d recommend it for fans of the Connie Willis time travel books or other time travelers exploring history stories, like the TV series Timeless.

I love “what if?” stories that explore how things might have gone if someone made a different decision at a turning point or if a twist of fate had gone another way. The movie Sliding Doors is one of my favorites, and I wrote something in that vein as a Christmas novella.

In that box of books set out on the sidewalk earlier this year, I found a review copy for a book that falls into that category, Begin Again by Helly Acton. Our heroine Frankie is turning 36 and unhappy with her life, feeling like she made some wrong decisions along the way. She’s still single, in a job that she’s come to hate, living in a tiny apartment, and having disastrous dates while her friends are married, buying property, having kids, and having dream jobs. On the night of her birthday, on the way home from another disaster date, she slips, falls, hits her head, and wakes up in a strange place that seems to be part train station, part office park.

There she’s informed that she died when she hit her head, but she’s being given a second chance. She can move on or go back, and she can choose which life she wants to go back to. She gets to live 24 hours in each of the lives she’d have now if she’d made a different decision at a pivotal moment in her past — if she’d taken that job abroad, if she’d accepted that marriage proposal, if she’d gone back to that ex, if she hadn’t chickened out on that job interview. Or she could go back to the life she had. It’s not an easy decision because each life has its pluses and minuses, and her old life has things she doesn’t want to give up even if she wasn’t happy with all of it.

I know the term is out of favor these days, but this book was pure chick lit, right out of 2002. We had our London singleton career girl, her job in the media, and her group of quirky friends. They tend to refer to books like this as “rom coms” now, but the romance content was pretty minimal. It was mostly about the heroine and her growth as a person. I really miss books like this, and I enjoyed this one, particularly with the twist of exploring a variety of possible lives. It would make a good movie since the lives are so different and Frankie’s just dumped into them without any kind of download for her to know what happened in the meantime since she made that pivotal choice. She doesn’t know how her relationships stand, where things are in the house where she lives, or what she does for a living, and she has to bluff her way through and figure things out on the fly. It would be a fun role for an actress. I guess it’s similar to the TV series Being Erica.

It’s funny, I generally find “light” reading like this more thought-provoking than literary fiction, maybe because it comes closer to relating to my life, so it makes me think. Woven in among the comedy hijinks is the idea of figuring out what you really want and what’s most important to you, as well as the idea that whatever life you end up in, you can’t change the past but you can change the future.

It looks like this one is a couple of years old (but this time I wasn’t the one sitting on a review copy until well after the book was published. I didn’t get it until a couple of years after it was published) and never heard about it, so I don’t know how it did. My smallish town library system has a couple of copies, which suggests it got some pickup, but it has no other books by this author.

I’ve been pondering what my pivotal decisions would be. Possibly admitting to myself that I actually hated my major in college and letting myself explore other options instead of forcing myself to stick with it. Then there was a job I hoped to get in another part of the country, gave up on and took another job (and got a new apartment), only to have the first job contact me about an opening. Maybe the decision to submit Enchanted, Inc. as chick lit rather than as fantasy (since it came out right as chick lit was dying off and urban fantasy was on the rise). I don’t really have any relationship ones since I never turned down a marriage proposal, I have no “man who got away,” and when I’ve run into men I used to have crushes on and see them now, I feel like I dodged a bullet.

Like I said, it’s a fun, fluffy book, but it really made me think.

I’m a big fan of portal fantasy, in which a person from our world visits a fantasy/magical world, and I recently read a really fun take on the subgenre.

First, I apparently have to give a disclaimer, since I got a review copy of the book. But I didn’t get it from the publisher. A few weeks ago, I was walking home from church, and not far from my house I came across a couple of boxes set out on the sidewalk with a sign saying “Free.” The boxes were full of books, mostly fantasy review copies, and this book was in there. I did manage to restrain myself and only got about four books, in part because I was walking and had to carry them the rest of the way, which involves a hill, and in part because I didn’t want to be greedy. The fun thing about this is that it seems that the boxes hadn’t been out long, as they were still full. There had been a brunch after church, and then they asked for help with the dishes, so I stayed to help. That meant I was more than an hour later than normal, and the boxes wouldn’t have been out yet if I hadn’t stayed to help, so I guess I was rewarded for having helped with the dishes.

The book in question is This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me by Ilona Andrews. A woman from our world wakes up in the world of one of her favorite fantasy series (think Game of Thrones — it’s grimdark fantasy and the series remains unfinished), with no idea how she got there. But she’s not just in the world of the books. She appears to be in the story of the books, near the beginning of the first book. She has absolutely nothing to start with, but she has a huge advantage in this world. She knows what will happen, when, and where, and she knows the innermost thoughts, history, and deepest secrets for a number of the major players in the kingdom. She sets out to capitalize on this knowledge to move up in the world and get some kind of security, but as she gets to know the people there, she can’t bear the thought of letting all the bad things she knows are coming happen to these people, so she puts her knowledge to use to try to intervene. But the more she changes, the less accurate her knowledge will be. And there are characters whose head she never got into in the books because they weren’t POV characters, so there are secrets she isn’t in on.

This is a book for everyone who’s read or watched something and wanted to shout at the characters to do or not do something, as our heroine has the chance to jump into that world and do so. I had a ton of fun reading this book, though it got intense enough at times that I had to put the book down for a moment, or I couldn’t read it right before bedtime. The characters are interesting and endearing, and though the fantasy world is clearly inspired by things like Game of Thrones, it ends up being unique — it’s close enough that we can understand the heroine’s relationship to the story and get a sense of the situation she’s in, but as the story progresses it shapes up to be its own thing. It’s very satisfying to have someone go into that kind of world and point out how messed up it is and how it needs to be fixed. And given that the heroine has long brown hair, is an Army brat, and lives in Austin (and I get the impression she went to the University of Texas), it’s very easy for me to identify with her.

There is an epilogue that’s a huge cliffhanger, so if that bothers you, stop reading before the epilogue until the next book is ready for publication. Given the level of hype this book is getting, I think a sequel is pretty much a given. I’d been hearing about it even before I found an advance copy on the sidewalk.

And, for once, I managed to read an advance copy before the book came out, though I didn’t finish it until a few days after the publication date. I had an advance copy of A Game of Thrones months before publication, and it took me nearly a decade to actually read it (I started it before the publication date but noped out after a couple of chapters).

Now to read the rest of the books I picked up. There were several that I’d heard of and was planning to read, so it was a real joy to just find them. I should probably try to meet whoever lives in that house because we seem to have similar reading taste, though I’m afraid this person may be moving because there’s been other stuff like bookcases set out with “Free” signs. At least, I think it’s the same house. That stretch of houses is the Victorian version of a suburban development, with several in a row that are more or less the same, and I’m not sure which was the house with the books.

I recently went down an odd little reading/viewing trail. Before Christmas, I discovered that The Magicians was on the CW app. I never saw the last two seasons because that was when I lost cable, but I didn’t remember what happened in the earlier seasons, so I started rewatching from the beginning (and then, wouldn’t you know, they dropped it from the app right after I got to the parts I hadn’t seen, so I still haven’t seen the final season).

That series is basically Hogwarts meets Narnia, so when I finished the book I was reading on Christmas day, I pulled The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe off the shelf to reread it. And then when I finished rereading the series (mostly, since I generally avoid The Last Battle), I figured I’d reread the book of The Magicians.

I read the first book when it was relatively new and had no interest in continuing the series. It was only after the TV show came on that I read the whole trilogy between seasons, and now rereading the first book right after having reread the Narnia books reminded me of why that book didn’t grab me. Mostly, it’s not original enough to be very interesting.

I think the concept of mashing up the Hogwarts-style magical school and the magical land concept of Narnia has a lot of fun potential. The book’s story is basically about a nerdy guy who was obsessed with a Narnia-like fantasy series who thinks he’s going to a university interview and ends up getting into a magical school. Then after he’s graduated from school and bored with being back in the “real” world, one of his friends finds out that the magical land from those books is real, and they can go there, but it’s nothing like they expected.

The problem I had with the way the book was executed was that the school may be an American university, but it’s basically Hogwarts on the Hudson. It functions pretty much like a British boarding school, a la Hogwarts (particularly as it’s depicted in the movies). In the book, the students wear uniforms. They’re sorted into Disciplines, which are kind of like majors based on aptitude, but they’re chosen for the students rather than them getting to choose them, so it might as well be a Sorting Hat. The students from each Discipline hang out together in the Discipline’s cottage, so basically a Common Room. There’s a wacky magical sport with complicated rules. The main difference from Hogwarts is that it’s a university (they age it up more in the TV show to a grad school), so we get a lot more drinking, drugs, and sex.

Meanwhile, the magical land of Fillory is basically Narnia. The author didn’t even try to hide this, since a lot of it is about the main character’s relationship with the “Fillory” books, and we’re supposed to relate it to our relationship with the Narnia books to understand his attachment to this world. Like Narnia, Fillory is largely populated by sentient talking animals. There are also all the magical creatures based on Greek mythology, like centaurs, fauns, naiads, dryads, etc. You can get to Fillory through a gateway world with various fountains, each of which leads to a different world, which is right out of The Magician’s Nephew, which had the pools that lead to different worlds. In the Fillory books, there are four siblings who travel there, and there are four kings and queens who have to be from earth, just like in the Narnia books.

I found this frustrating on multiple levels. For one thing, it felt like shallow worldbuilding that started by taking the inspiration and just barely changing it to suit the story. It would have been far more interesting to be inspired by the idea of a magical school and then starting with the idea of an American university and making it magical. Have magical fraternities and sororities that you have to rush. Have students who were recruited mostly to play magical sports that are the basis of serious interscholastic rivalries. Have Homecoming weekends with the alumni coming back.

As for the magical world, I think we can grasp the idea of being attached to the world of a portal fantasy, dreaming of going there, and being shocked to learn that you can, whether or not that world looks exactly like Narnia. The really enraging thing there to me was that after basically ripping off Narnia and expecting us to see Fillory as a non-copyright infringing version of Narnia, the author had the author of the Fillory books be a child molester. If C.S. Lewis were still alive, he might have grounds for a lawsuit because it was so obvious what was meant by Fillory, which meant the author in the book was basically him, and then he was defamed.

There’s also some weird structure to the book, with the first half being their time at school, which was mostly classes, studying, and hanging out, with no real plot, then there’s a whole section where they’re just bored and drunk, and then they finally get to Fillory. I liked the TV series a lot better. The TV series was like the writers had bought a model kit but used the pieces to make something entirely different. You can occasionally recognize a piece from the picture on the model kit box, but it’s in a different place and serving a different purpose. They moved up the action and wove it into the school stuff. The book has them graduate halfway through the book, and then they have their adventures, while the TV series has them discover Fillory and start having adventures while they’re still students, so it weaves together the magical school plot and the magical land plot.

I will confess that the initial germ of the idea that became Enchanted, Inc. was “Bridget Jones meets Harry Potter,” but I never really went back to those things in building my world or my characters. It was more of a concept, adding magic to a chick lit type story, or else moving the secret magical world existing within our world into adulthood, with a magical corporation instead of a school. From there, though, I was drawing on my work in corporate America for ideas, and I was looking at chick lit and rom-coms as a whole rather than actually taking anything specifically from Bridget Jones. That was more of a pitch line to describe the vibes, not the real basis of the book.

On Christmas, when I finished the holiday-themed book I was reading and didn’t have another library book handy, I pulled The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe off the shelf. The movie kept showing up in the “Holiday” collection on Disney+, so I thought it would work as a seasonal book (mostly I think the Christmas association comes down to the brief appearance by Father Christmas). From there, I ended up going through the rest of the series. I hadn’t re-read these in at least 20 years, so it’s been a fun nostalgia trip.

I just finished with The Silver Chair, which was my entry into the series, in a way. I’d actually read The Horse and His Boy a few years before during my horse phase, when I went through the library systematically checking out every book with “horse” in the title or a horse on the cover, but since that’s the one book entirely from the perspective of someone from that world so that there’s no portal travel, it reads like just another talking horse book if you don’t have the context, and I didn’t read any other books in the series then (they didn’t have “horse” in the title and I moved on to the next horse book). But I got a copy of The Silver Chair when I was 11 and became utterly obsessed with Narnia.

Looking at it now, I can see why it particularly got to me in a way that I don’t think would have worked if I’d read the first book first. I like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, but I don’t think it would have grabbed me. The Silver Chair is one of those books that feels like it was written just for me in a way the AI bros wish their machines could do for them if they could just come up with the right prompt. And yet, the book was written long before I was born and the author died before I was born.

At that age, I was most interested in books that had a girl I could relate to as the main character, someone similar to me in some way and around the same age. They never actually give Jill’s age, but she seemed to be around 11 to me, not fully a child but not yet a teenager. I found it easy to identify with Jill, who ended up being buddies with a guy (I was the kind of girl who easily made friends with boys without being a tomboy). I was fascinated with the idea of British schools where they wore uniforms because the older sister of my best friend at the time went to boarding school in England (we were living in Germany), and she’d come home on breaks wearing her school blazer (which was pretty pretentious, now that I think about it, but at the time I thought it was cool). I thought it would be great to get to wear uniforms to school. In fact, I signed up for Girl Scouts that year mostly because I liked the idea of wearing a uniform to school at least one day a week. But I also loved the idea of dressing up like a princess, so a book in which a girl around my age started the book in a school uniform and ended up in a princess-like dress while hanging out with a boy was sure to catch my interest.

Then there’s the story. It’s a quest in a way that none of the other Narnia books are. They have a clear story goal and go on a journey to get to it, with adventures along the way. I love a quest/journey story. The fun thing about this one is that it’s a girl who’s sent on a quest to rescue a prince, flipping the usual fairytale dynamics. So, we’ve got a girl from out world who gets to journey to a land right out of a Disney movie and rescue a prince from an evil witch. That’s like all my favorite things thrown together.

From there I went on to read the rest of the series, and that was when I realized I’d actually read The Horse and His Boy, only this time I understood the significance of those visiting kings and queens in that book. The Silver Chair is still my favorite, though. I wish they’d gotten around to making that movie when they made the others. The budding romantic in me had always imagined that Jill and Eustace would end up together, and since the actor who played Eustace would have been a teen by the time they made the movie at the rate they were going, they could have played with some subtle subtext there. He was so good in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, so I really wanted to see how he’d do in The Silver Chair. I guess we’ll have to see how the Netflix version goes, though I’d have to get Netflix to see it. The BBC version wasn’t too bad. The special effects were absolutely awful, but Tom Baker as Puddleglum was brilliant.

In a case of what might have been, not long after the horse phase came the witch phase, in which I read all the books with “witch” in the title (all the girls in my neighborhood were obsessed with reruns of the series Bewitched), but I got sidetracked when I hit the Nancy Drew book The Witch Tree Symbol (which turned out to be about the Pennsylvania Dutch and not about witches at all) and went on a mystery kick, abandoning the witches. That would have been about one library shelf before The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Would I have fallen into Narnia then, or would I have been disappointed because it was the wrong kind of witch?

I’ve also been rewatching the movies as I’ve gone through the books. Tonight I’m up for The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

One of the latest issues coming up in the book world is fan fiction being sold and promoted as such by major publishers. Fan fiction is stories fans write using characters from existing works or set in those worlds, and authors writing fan fiction isn’t at all new. Many authors get their start in writing with fan fiction, whether actually writing it or just making up stories or playing out scenarios in their heads. The impulse to write often comes from reading or watching something and wanting either to fix it or to explore that world further. That leads to learning how to write and plot, which leads to writing their own stories. Sometimes a story that starts as fan fiction may get developed to the point it’s no longer actually fan fiction but is about original characters in an original world, or the author may be inspired by a character from another world and base an original character somewhat on that character, but with the author’s own spin. You’d only know the origins of the story if the author told about it or if you knew both the author’s interests and the fictional world that inspired them very well.

My first deliberate attempt at writing was something that spun off from mental fanfic. I’ve always entertained myself by making up stories in my head, often based on whatever TV show, book, or movie I was obsessed with at the time. Since there was only one girl in Star Wars, the girls in the neighborhood fought over who got to be Leia when we played Star Wars, and those who didn’t win had to make up their own characters. I had a lot of mental stories about my character, and along the way the stories focused so much on her and less on the Star Wars universe that they became original stories, and I then realized that if I wrote down these stories, I would have a book. I never actually finished that book because I was good at coming up with characters and situations but didn’t yet know how to plot a book, so I had a fun chapter one and nothing much more. I’m sure there are a lot of other authors who’ve done similar things. I know of a few works that started as something connected to another fictional universe, but I don’t know how open those authors are about it (some of it came up in personal conversations), so I’m not going to name names here.

What’s different is that now not only are the authors being open about the origin of their works that started as fan fiction, but the publishers are promoting these books as being essentially fan fiction, actually naming the characters and series they’re based on. That already happened with Fifty Shades of Grey starting as Twilight alternate universe fan fiction (putting the characters into different lives), but I don’t think the publisher actually pushed that connection. It was an open secret, but the publisher wasn’t promoting it with “It’s Twilight, but what if Edward was a kinky billionaire and Bella was a grad student.” Now there have been a number of books that started as fan fiction that changed the character names and details of the world and are now being published as original books, with the publisher actually promoting the fact that they’re really about those other characters, targeting fans of the original series.

I’m not going to get into the legality or ethics of that. My concern is that it’s extending the growth of the “franchise” mania to books. It’s already getting to the point that it’s nearly impossible these days to get a movie made that isn’t part of some franchise. It’s either a sequel or a remake of something that’s already been a hit or it’s based on something else, like a comic book, novel, or videogame. Books, at least, had to be original. There were tie-in novels, of course, but you don’t break in with those. Those are things that established authors get chosen to write. But are we getting to the point where your book has to be connected (although unofficially) to some established franchise in order to get it published? It used to be that if you submitted a book to a publisher and said that it was really about Han and Leia from Star Wars, even if they have different names and the names of the places are different, it would be an automatic rejection. Now that seems to be what they’re looking for, something they can market as being for fans of those other series.

I haven’t read any of the books in question, but the reviews I’ve seen mention that they don’t make a lot of sense out of context unless you’re reading them with fan fiction in mind because they’re so based on that other world that you have to know the original characters and their backstories from that original world for the story to make any sense. If you don’t know it’s fan fiction and aren’t familiar with the source material, the stories don’t work.

I haven’t tried to publish traditionally in a long time, but I hate the idea that in order to sell a book, I’ll have to write the story in which Jyn Erso and Cassian Andor actually survive the battle and run off together to fight in the Rebellion, but just changing their names and fudging the details enough to not be a trademark violation.

Actually, I’d love to write that story, and I might weave something similar to the concept into my own original world, but if I do it right, no one will know that’s where I got the idea. By the time I’ve developed the characters and their world, with a history for the conflict they’re fighting in and a fleshed-out setting, there will only be the tiniest seed of the original idea left. I just don’t want to get to the point where you can’t sell a book without it being fan fiction with the serial numbers filed off enough to appease the lawyers, while still being obvious enough that the publisher can market it to those fans. Even if we can’t get original movies or TV, we should be able to get books that aren’t part of a franchise.