As I’ve amply proven in the past, I am a fan of fan fiction, both reading and creating. This is admittedly a bit of an oddball opinion since amongst non-aficionados fan fiction is barely a step above furries on the scorn scale. There is good reason for that since 99.99% of the output in the realm of fan fiction is terrible. However, just because most of the output is terrible doesn’t mean all of it is terrible. In the interest of defending a form I’ve enjoyed, I’m going to start doing spotlight pieces on stories that I feel rise above the drek. To that end, for the inaugural entry in Fan Fiction Corner I’ll be looking at a small novel from the risible genre of Harry Potter/Ginny Weasley romance entitled Ghost of You.
The snippet I published here back in August? I went and finished it. Sadly I now have an even more terrible idea worming around in my head begging to be written. In all seriousness I really like how this one turned out, even if it does mark me as an extreme nerd.
I was talking about some point of Harry Potter errata with people in one of my usual haunts when somebody mentioned how much they’d like to see Ginny Weasley and Amy Pond be ginger and awesome together. Naturally this got me thinking and while it’s no where close to being complete, and I doubt I will bother to flesh it out, I wrote the following snippet at work today.
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I was listening to an interview with a novelist/critic on Fresh Air over lunch and Terry naturally asked the person what it was like, as someone who gets reviewed to rip apart another author’s work. Her reply was that unless the book spouts some truly noxious ideology she only writes reviews for books she enjoys. Her logic for this was authors put so much hard work into their novels, an somebody is bound to enjoy it even if she doesn’t.
This struck me as incredibly lazy thinking. Just because a writer spends a long time writing a book doesn’t mean the book is good. Similarly just because a book is popular doesn’t mean a book is good. The purpose of literary criticism is to help guide people in their literary purchases. If people only review books they like then that bankrupts the entire endeavour. It’s subjecyivr reasoning like this, there are no bad ideas, that gave us eight years of the Bush Presidency. So to the author whose name I’ve already forgotten, suit up, do your job, and criticize.