I know many of you are working on your own stories, whether those be novels, poems, short stories, etc. But I find myself being drawn to fanfiction sometimes, more than my own stories. So, I'll ask the question...

Do you write fanfiction? If yes, then what characters are you drawn to the most? If no, have you ever considered it and what stops you from taking the plunge?

The characters I am drawn to are Henry and Jo from the TV series known as "Forever." Unfortunately, the series was canceled after one season. It would seem fanfiction is the only way their story is going to continue. In addition to those characters, I have written using Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy (from Pride and Prejudice). You can find my writings at FanFiction.net, at the username LovedLik3WildFire.

I work with a couple My Little Pony fanfictions (FIMfictions, as they call them). One is strictly original characters, and one is a digression from the story line of the show based on someone else's theory that was applied earlier on to make a season on fiction. Mine would be applied to season four. I've played around with doing a story line for my ponysona, but I doubt I'll ever get to that.

I also want to write a book that is based on the story of Dracula in style and characters. We'll see how that goes.

I also still haven't written the crossover between Star Trek (OS) and Starcraft that I've been meaning to for a decade.

Oh, and I wouldn't mind rewriting the rest of Shakespeare's plays as Lion King stories.

I love Star Trek TNG, but I would read a crossover fanfic using the original series.

OOoooo...I just had a brilliant idea: we should collaborate and do a Star Trek OS/TNG cross over. You focus on the OS and I on TNG.

Well, it's more so that I liked Starcraft and thought that Jim Raynor would get along well with Jim Kirk, and that Spock would enjoy studying the Protoss way of thinking. Plus the Zerg are a hard foe to conquer. Some infinitely improbably help would be welcome from another dimension.

I've sort of written fanfiction. A few years ago I wrote a massive choose-your-own-adventure story (called "Jonax and Bertha Go to an Amusement Park") for my sister focusing on original characters (the eponymous Jonax and Bertha), but with generous cameos from other works we liked, especially from the Mario universe. Now my sister is writing a sequel that she tells me has a lot of A Series of Unfortunate Events in it. We're also considering writing another sequel collaboratively that would basically be Jonax and Bertha having a crazy romp through our favorite Brandon Sanderson universes.

However, the Jonax and Bertha stories are pretty silly. I've never written serious fanfiction, though I find myself drawn to it sometimes. I'll often read a novel with a really interesting idea that just isn't developed fully, and then I'll itch to write something with that same idea. Sometimes I'll read a novel with an interesting magic system restricted to just a few users, and then I'll wonder what society would look like if everybody (or a much larger percentage of the population) had use of that magic. Or I'll look at a fantasy world and wonder how it would come off in a story with a much different tone. For instance, my sister and I started plotting out a story set in the world of Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn books that would be a comedic, small-scale story - not serious and epic like the original books. Or I'll wish that the philosophical implications of the world and magic were further explored, and start developing a story idea in spite of myself to investigate that.

But other than in the Jonax and Bertha books, I've never wanted to write another author's characters. World, sure; magic, sure. But not their characters. They're just not mine.

That being said, I do enjoy coming up with what TVTropes calls "epileptic trees" or I just call "crazy theories". I have a very nice writeup about why the narrator of A Series of Unfortunate Events is actually the villain, for instance, with a long discussion of evidence and of implications. I'm currently working on a theory positing that several of my favorite Brandon Sanderson universes are connected and that Brandon Sanderson himself is actually a worldhopper. But I would never write fiction based off my theories, since it would feel wrong to me to write another author's characters.

I like reading fanfic, but I haven't actually every written it. It's never really been something I've felt drawn to dabble in. If the characters are portrayed well though, I do like reading some.

I've probably read more fanfiction than other material over the last several years. (Like everything else, there's a lot of very-low-quality stuff, a fair but comparatively tiny quantity of pretty good stories, and a few absolute gems---in the Harry Potter fandom I've run across one or two that I think are better than the original except for needing readers to have read the original.) One primary reason is that the "get the characters sooner" category of fanfiction is better for "comfort reading" than the original (at least in the case of Pride & Prejudice fanfic), but also because I've accumulated a digital library of fanfic stories that at one point or another I saved or bookmarked, and even just sorting through them to see what's good and what's less so takes time and attention.

The world in which my stories are (to be) set began to be conceived (when I was eight or nine?) as the answer to a fan-fic-ish question ("what happens to the place where Father Time had been sleeping when things are remade into New Narnia?"), but quickly far outgrew and basically cast off that beginning. Since then, while I've occasionally had ideas that I wish someone would write fanfic about, I've never felt an impulse to write it myself ... except maybe for Aubrey Hansen's as-yet-unwritten Erde (Alternate history settings, on the other hand ... )

I wrote a Star Trek TOS and a Road to Avonlea fanfic years ago. Won a contest with the Star Trek one. They're on fanfiction.net under username ladysaotome. There's one I've contimplated writing as a sequel for a Korean drama, too, but that one would be quite epic so it's on the back burner.

I've read quite a bit of Rama 1/2 (anime/manga) fanfiction and I still enjoy Harry Potter fanfiction on occasion though it can be a challenge to find quality fanfics that are also complete. I tend to like fanfiction for those worlds I just want more of. My most recent obsession is Avatar: the Last Airbender, I should look for some fanfiction for it!

That's certainly true! It's also sad that the fanfiction author I might have nominated as the best in the Harry Potter fandom seems to have dropped off the face of the Internet five years or so ago, leaving only one story complete. (Plus two stories in the Pride and Prejudice fandom by his wife that he was posting on his account.)