Hi, I’m Nicola, and I used to write fanfic. I love good fanfic — it’s the modern version of folk tales about your favorite heroes. And yes, not all fanfic is good fanfic, but when you can find a superb writer (like the immensely talented Cincoflex), you just wallow happily in the product and thank God that they decided to write it all down.

So, yeah, fanfic. Now, the fun part about fanfic is that someone else has created the universe, so all you really have to do is write about the continuing adventures of Your Favorite Character, which takes a lot of the strain off of you as a writer. You don’t have to worry about world-building, exploring the background of various characters, or explaining what the hell your MC is doing in X location because most of that will already be known by the fans.

But. If you dust off one of your own favorite fanfics, notice that it’s already 10K words, and decide to see if you can’t file off the serial numbers and make it an original story, you wind up running into all kinds of issues like, well, who is your MC? What are their motivations? What’s their world like? How did they get into this particular pickle? How are they going to get out of it, in detail? And it’s all got to deviate from the borrowed universe so that it’s, you know, original.

Luckily, answering all these questions significantly expands the story. And this really is a fun story. So while I’m still working on Intersection, I may also have a short holiday story out in the two weeks or so. Whee!