Dear Jasper Fforde,
Why, sir? Why? I enjoyed your stories so much. I loved your snarky heroine. Someone described Thursday Next as a cross between Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Bridget Jones, and Supergirl, and they were absolutely right. Your books are full of humor, romance, adventure, mystery, and an overflow of quirky cleverness and wordplay. Which is why it absolutely kills me that I find myself unable to read your books any longer. Understand, this isn't so much a personal protest as an inability to get past my disgust at your rampant hypocrisy long enough to enjoy your books.
You disapprove of fanfiction. You disapprove of fanfiction. You. Disapprove. Of. Fanfiction. You, of all people, dare to mock and ridicule and put down fanfiction writers. Please excuse my language, but how dare you, you fucking hypocrite.
What is fanfiction? It's taking a world and characters created by a published (usually) writer and making up a story of your own, sometimes featuring original characters, set in the other writer's world, often inhabited by this other writer's characters. I'll say it again. You fucking hypocrite.
The Thursday Next series is nothing but a massive fanfiction. Excuse me, Mr. Fforde, but I missed the moment when you created Jane Eyre, Mycroft Holmes, Miss Havisham, Hamlet, Count Dracula, and Heathcliff. Oh wait, that's right. You didn't. You take those characters, created by other published authors, and feature your own character in other authors' worlds, often inhabited by the other authors' charact--Hmm. This is sounding strangely familiar.
As an author, you are perfectly within your right to not read fanfiction featuring your own characters. You're even within your right to find fanfiction about your characters horrifying and disgusting. (Although I would point out that if you didn't read it, you wouldn't find it disgusting or horrifying.) What you are not within your right to do is to condemn people for writing fanfiction.
These people are doing for free what you are paid to do. The only difference between you and them, aside from the lack of compensation, is that you write fanfiction about 'novels,' while the majority of fanfiction authors write about popular fiction. How dare you, sir? How dare you be so elitist and judgmental? Yours apparently doesn't count as fanfiction because you write about the works of dead famous people. That's the only logical conclusion I can draw. I cannot come up with a single other reason why you wouldn't see your own work as fanfiction. Incidentally, if that is the case (and I can't imagine how it isn't.) then you should spend ten seconds on any fanfiction site. You'll see that fanfiction exists for everything from the Bible to Homer to Shakespeare. So where do you get off drawing a line between yourself and every other writer who plays around in worlds they didn't create themselves?
I can understand you not wanting to expose yourself to fanfiction about your own characters. I cannot understand your dismissal and belittlement of what you yourself do for a living.
Mr. Fforde. You are bright and clever. Your command of the English language is phenomenal. I do not regret having read your books, because they gave me many hours of enjoyment. But no more. I cannot enjoy books written by someone who condemns others for doing exactly what he is paid to do.
Farewell, Mr. Fforde. I hope you get over yourself. I suspect you won't.
Sincerely,
Cates
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