Loaning Out Original Characters

[Bry_Sinclair]

Has any fanfic writer ever given others out there free use of their own original character? I'm not meaning a joint project or a tertiary character who made one appearance, but someone from your "core cast".

The thought came to me a couple weeks ago when I was organising a cupboard and came across one of the New Frontier books, where other authors used the Excalibur crew in their own short pre-NF stories. It would be interesting to see what others make of your own creation.

Part of me is half tempted to open up the Orion to others.

 

[CeJay]

This has happened quite frequently in United Trek where characters from one series pop up regularly in stories from other writers.

A good example of this is my vignette series Crossing Over in which each story features a major character from the UT-verse running into a Eagle character. I had pretty free reign with these characters but of course did run my ideas by the creators first and posted first draft stories for them to review before posting the stories publicly.

My feature length novel All the Sinners, Saints and its prequel Star Crossed heavily features TLR's Bluefin and her characters and TLR was incredibly gracious in giving me great discretion on how to use his characters, as well as answering any questions I had during the writing process.

I believe TLR has lend his characters to a number of writers including Gibraltar and David_Falkayn.

I can also think of a few UT writers who have used my characters in their stories to great effect such as David_Falkayn and DarKush.

 

[TheLoneRedshirt]

CeJay did a great job with the Bluefin crew. Obviously, trust is a factor - since I knew CeJay, Gibraltar and David_Falkayn were accomplished writers with which I had collaborated, it was an easy decision. One of my characters, T'Ser, is now in Gibraltar's hands as she was promoted and 'moved on.' My stipulation was that he not kill her off and if he ever wished to discontinue using the character she would return to my sphere of writing. I have used Gibraltar's Captain Sandhurst in a cameo appearance in one of my stories after securing G's permission and running a draft by him before posting.

Bry, I think it's a fine idea and a generous offer as long as you set parameters for the characters with which you are comfortable.

 

[SolarisOne]

I might be persuaded to allow it for all except a select few of my OC's (from a cast full of them), those being the ones I've crossed-over from my original, non-fanfic universe. I've worked over a decade, and I trust NO one with those.

 

[Mistral]

The Ad Astra bunch had a tag team project going and we had to write the scenes-with whatever characters were "there". It was fun.