Important notice to rights owners: I respect and enjoy these worlds. If you object to any of my work within a world you legally control, please contact me and I will remove it.
Avatar: Technique (flash fiction: 800 words)
Yes, we know what happened…but what was going through Jake’s head at the time? Short, fun, and touching.
Avatar: Seeds of Life, or, “the Avatar 2 that will never be filmed” (novelet: 10K words)
Ever wonder what it’s like to be Na’vi, to be part of Pandora, to experience Eywa the way the Na’vi do? Words can take you inside Jake’s head in a way movies can’t. This is powerful stuff, and I’m almost as proud of it as I am of The Gnoll Credo.
(Skip to Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6.)
Digger: After The Fall (short story: 4600 words)
I love Digger—but the ending doesn’t ring true for me. In my opinion, it leaves a lot of events and emotional tension unresolved. So I wrote one myself. Be warned: it’s emotionally intense.
(Skip to Part II, Part III.)
Being a writer—a real writer—is not easy.
I wouldn’t trade the gift for anything…but as any real writer knows, inspiration is not something you can command, or sometimes even control. The words and images come to you and you must write them down or they will be lost forever, and if you are writing the Truth, your characters will not always do what you expect or follow your plot outline, like dogs brought to heel.
Sometimes you don’t even get to choose your subject matter. You simply start writing, because you must—and you don’t stop until the inspiration leaves you, because there will be ample time to clean up the dirt and blood and bone fragments later.
Sometimes you find that the characters or places are part of someone else’s world, a world over which you have no claim or control. And sometimes what you’ve written is so strong and true and beautiful that you absolutely must share it with the world, even if you can’t do anything but give it away.
Live in freedom, live in beauty.
JS
Q: Why don’t you just post these to fanfiction.net or an online forum?
A: Readability. The formatting at fanfiction.net (all lines centered, full-width) is nearly impossible to read. Stories broken into arbitrary forum-post-sized chunks are also very difficult to read, and worse, most of the Avatar forums are dark gray text on black.
Q: You’re really admitting to writing fan fiction?
A: Yes. If you can’t write fan fiction, in which you are given an already-popular setting, plot, and characters, you certainly can’t write real fiction.
Q: Did Avatar inspire The Gnoll Credo at all?
A: No. I wrote The Gnoll Credo in the summer of 2009, long before I had even heard of Avatar, let alone seen it.
Q: Did Digger inspire The Gnoll Credo at all?
A: No. I discovered Digger in late 2010.
