Recommendation: On Fanfiction

Anyone who reads me regularly knows that I'm fond of quoting Lois McMaster Bujold's breakdown of the Fanfiction Bell Curve --

... brilliant; pretty good; mediocre; mediocre and interminable; dire; vile; dire and vile; and dire, vile, and interminable. Among the other things amateur writers tend not to have under control is pacing.

-- but I just rediscovered the original essay in which it appears, "Here's Looking At You, Kid". Rereading this has taken away the slightly sour taste left in my mouth by Robin McKinley's answer to the question "Why don't you want any fanfic written about anything or anyone in your books?", which begins by citing her agent's concern with the legal issues but ends with a pungent dismissal of the creative value of the enterprise:

I don't see why anyone would want to spend any more time in what is essentially someone else's work than they absolutely have to, to get on with their own. I don't get it -- and because of what my agent says about it, I don't need to get it.

Feh. And just when I thought I'd gotten over that particular anxiety, too. ("Hi, my name is nebroadwe and I write fanfic.") Sure, I'm learning a lot about technique from fanwriting and the concrit I receive from readers (I've never paragraphed in quite the same way since hieronymousb pointed out that the ones in "Country Matters" were too long) and there's no denying that aids my original writing. But the joy of composing a good yarn is exactly the same whether I'm playing in my own sandbox or someone else's. Non, je ne regrette rien.