I think perhaps I should clear the air before the internet explodes.
In 1999, a young college writer calling herself River began posting a series of fan fictions that would eventually become a massive…epic? known as the Signet Series. (I hesitate to use the word “epic” given its recent devolution into slang, but really, the thing spanned centuries and continents, so I think perhaps the word is appropriate) The series, which was very loosely based on the Source Material (a series of young adult novels that River had read as a teen), grew quite a following in the fandom from whence it came, and River gained some notariety in that fandom. River was well known to the moderator of the fic archive site, Twilight Tales, who supported River’s work for years. We are still friends to this day, and in fact I guest posted over at Vampire-Diaries.net last week with my enthusiasm for the brilliant show’s second season.
Back in the early 00′s a great many people urged River to one day take her series, strip the associations it had with the Source Material, and recreate it purely as original fiction: her own world, her own characters, her own story.
As the years passed, River grew away from writing fan fiction and took a turn as a nonfiction writer in the NeoPagan religion genre, under her new pseudonym, Dianne Sylvan. Still, those old stories haunted her. She loved that world she had created, and loved the journey her characters took that was so divergent from the Source Material.
Finally, River decided the time had come. Vampires were growing in popularity, the urban fantasy genre was expanding, and she felt her writing had matured in those ten years…perhaps enough for her to tell the darker, more complex, more adult story she had always wanted to tell.
So, she left off her old name and, at the same time, stripped that story down to its bare bones and began to recreate it. Some themes, snatches of conversation, bits of the journey stayed; most went into the scrap pile, as did anything that connected it with the Source Material. By the time she…I…was done, I had finally created something new and purely my own, and I wanted to share it with a larger audience. I loved that world I’d created: the Primes and Queens, Miranda’s journey, the mystical themes that lay beneath the story. I hated to think that my world, along with the Source world, would be confused, because they both deserved their own spheres, their own audience. My work was not the Source’s, and hers wasn’t mine, and it was about time I got out of her universe and made room for the other fic writers who were more devoted to her world.
I wanted to tell the story of a broken-down woman who comes into her own power, who becomes a hero, a legend, not as Rapunzel in her tower, but as Persephone choosing the pomegranate seeds over six months of eternal Spring. That myth of Persephone and Hades, more than anything else, influenced Queen of Shadows. If it’s a retelling of anything, it is that myth.
It would be impossible, in my opinion, to place QoS and the Source Material side by side and find any true similarities aside from the fact that the main character is a redhead and…well, there are vampires in it, and since there are vampires in everything nowadays that’s hardly a trademark. All vampire stories by their very nature overlap at the edges, assuming the author has stuck remotely to the old school vampire mythology (which not all do). In fact, after the first novel, the Shadow World novels will bear precious little resemblance even to my Signet Series they were born from. I was 22 when I wrote the first version of QoS. I like to think that I’ve evolved since then and that it shows in my writing.
But because fandom is full of bright, passionate people, I’ve already had someone accuse me of plagiarizing…well, myself. So I thought it best to step forward and say, flat out: I did not steal QoS from anyone. It’s always been my story. Its first draft was piggybacked on another universe a decade ago, but that story no longer exists. The novel that I hope you will hold in your hands at some point in the near future is not in any way, shape, or form a copy of – or fan fiction of – anyone else’s work. Love it or hate it, the Shadow World is my own creation.
