'What's with these ones?' said Nathan.
'Hm?' said Camilla, without looking up.
It had been a long time since they'd been in a book store – a real book store; the kind that only exist in stories, full of previously-loved dog-eared broken-spined dirty copies of anything obscure and everything marginalised. The fun of it was the cramped aisles and high shelves, forcing you to bend while you scoured, to stretch while you let through a fellow scavenger.
Camilla's attention was taken up with the best section of all. She leant over the low table and picked up book after book, below each finding another, and then another, all unsorted, all miscellaneous. Each tower of books was like an Easter egg hunt. Mmm...chocolate and books, the perfect combination, she thought.
'And how long are we gonna be here?' said Nathan, browsing away on the other side of the aisle. 'I've got a guild raid planned for tonight.'
'As long as it takes,' said Camilla, running her fingers over a rough velvet cover.
'Seriously, all these have inspired by John R R Marston on the front,' said Nathan. 'Is that some dead guy?'
'I'm surprised you don't know,' said Camilla, still sorting through the unsorted column of treasures. 'You're the one into fantasy.'
'Oh,' said Nathan. 'So he's some fantasy writer? Any good?'
'You really don't know the story?'
'Stories are boring.' He stopped dead. The words seemed to bounce against the edge of every soft cover in the store. The general murmur of the room died to nothing. Even the constant engine hum from the busy city street outside subsided.
'I mean, real stories,' he said, louder, hoping the books around the back would hear him. 'I'm a fiction person – what can I say?'
The atmosphere relaxed. The dust settled. The murmur of voices picked up. Beyond the windows a car honked its horn. Even Nathan felt brave enough to talk again, saying: 'Is it about some dead guy?'
'Don't rush me, let me tell it,' said Camilla. 'Around...what, ten years ago?, this guy Marston was in his forties at that point and living alone. He was working at a petrol station during the night-'
She stopped and looked pointedly at Nathan. 'Note that,' she continued, 'he was actually working a day job.'
'Yeah, yeah,' said Nathan. 'But that's for guys living alone. Not guys hitched up. Not guys like me.'
She sighed and continued: 'So he'd work all night, then spend all day planning out his fantasy novel. He'd been doing it for years and years, mostly adding back story and coming up with an extremely detailed fictional world, with different races and languages, kind of like Tolkien.'
'Who?'
'Hrm,' she growled, not feeding the troll. 'Anyway. After a few false starts, he finally gets to the point where he can write the actual novel - working title Redemption Island - and he's about three quarters through when he dies.'
'I knew it!' said Nathan.
'Apparently from a ruptured aneurysm or something but they still don't know for sure. Or they do but some people think it was suicide. He'd only updated his will a few weeks before and all his affairs seemed to have been settled, as they say. The will was changed to include a clause where everything he had written, including all the notes on this fictional world he'd created, would be released as public domain. I guess he wanted some small chance at living on past his death.'
'Like a zombie writer,' said Nathan. 'Worrrrrrds. I need worrrrrds.'
Immune to Nathan's poor attempts at humour, Camilla continued: 'But his family – well, a mother was all he really had, apart from an estranged sister working somewhere abroad as a journalist – the mother didn't like the idea of giving his stuff away. So she used some of the money from the sale of his furniture and paid for this rip-off book deal with a greedy publisher.'
'That's a tautology, that is,' said Nathan.
'Well done,' said Camilla, in the tone she'd use on her grade two class. 'You're learning big words now.'
Nathan beamed. Either he didn't catch the condescension or didn't care. 'So now heaps of people are writing books based off what he wrote?' he said.
'No. No, no, no. Oh no. It quickly shot into the dizzying heights of relative obscurity. In fact, quite specific obscurity. No one bought it. No one heard about it. No one cared.'
'That strikes a chord,' said Nathan, dejectedly.
'Some time later this guy's sister comes back from overseas. Her and the mum had had a huge fight years before and so the mum hadn't even told her about his death. So she checks out his will properly and realises that what the mum did was against his wishes. Not just with the book stuff, but he'd also left his house to this local charity, which would use it for some kind of halfway house, and the mum had started renting it out.'
'You seem to know a lot of detail about this thing,' said Nathan.
'I read about it,' said Camilla. 'There's a biography around here somewhere. They never put it with the inspired by section, though.'
Nathan yawned. 'So, his sister...'
'Yeah, his sister is quite annoyed at the whole thing. The dead have no rights, and all that. She goes about putting the book on some website, along with all the notes she can rustle up. She happens to know some journalists from a few newspapers and gets them to write a story about the whole thing.'
'Typical,' said Nathan. 'It's not what you know...'
'The main teaser that the articles go with are more about how the book was supposed to end, since it's got a bit of a murder mystery element to it.'
'Ooh!' exclaimed Nathan. 'It wasn't a dragon detective book was it? I love those! Especially the ones with a teenage vampire as the side-kick, like Brknjeiojl and the Missing Emerald Enderbal-'
'How can you get through that junk?'
'Or The Cases of the three-winged Fionn, or the Morganna Byron series.'
'And you say you don't read.'
'Ooh, and The Quest for the Legendary Last Chronicles Trilogy! Probably the best dragon detective books I've ever read.'
'No dragons in Marston's unfinished work,' said Camilla. 'Or Vampires. Thank god. But a real mystery about the mystery. Anyway, this teaser inspired all sorts of people and soon there were web sites devoted to working out who the killer was. Some people even started to write their own endings. Unfortunately.'
'Unfortunately?'
'Ever read much fanfic?'
'It's free, so it can't be any good,' said Nathan.
'Not quite what I was going for. Plenty of good free stuff, just like there's plenty of crap pricey stuff.' Like that lime green top you've got on, she thought. 'But when it comes to fanfic, it's more like wading through a lake of flesh-burning lava to find that one tiny pool of water. So the early attempts at writing endings didn't turn out well. That is, until a woman called Lucy Wilson came onto the scene and completely nailed it. She'd even done such a good job of following John R R Marston's style that you couldn't tell where his left off and where hers began.'
'Ah. So all these things are just endings to the first book, really. Bit boring when you think about it. I don't like to put you down for an anti-climactic ending, but that story of yours just petered out into nothing. Probably like these books.'
'Hang on, I haven't finished yet. Marston's mother started sending all these cease and desist letters to anything remotely related to her late son's work. She had no leg to stand on legally since it was pretty clearly public domain. But that doesn't mean it won't cost money to defend it. The scare campaign worked for a while, it made people think twice about publishing their derived works. One of the authors who fought back and actually went to trial was Lucy Wilson.'
'Oh goodie, a court room drama,' said Nathan.
'It did get interesting, since a number of major publishing houses filed friend-of-the-court briefs on the mother's side, trying to make things more expensive for Wilson. It's in their own interests to have all-rights-reserved style copyrights with the longest duration possible – not to allow people to freely create stuff based off the public domain. And it stinks that they can just-'
'You know I have mucho affection for you Cam, but I don't think the book store can take a full-on Camilla rant.'
His following smile subdued her building anger.
'Yeah, well,' she said. 'Thankfully, the community fought back and put together a fund to take the case to completion. And Lucy Wilson won!'
'Good for her. Still, if it's just about writing an ending to a novel I think-'
'No, it isn't just that,' said Camilla. 'What happened next was much more interesting. Remember how I said Marston kept notes about his entire fictional world and all that back story? Well Lucy Wilson ran with that too and was inspired to write her own stories, but set in this world. She started with the main characters, the ones with more depth to them, then slowly started incorporating the lesser ones. Pretty soon other writers were doing the same, and a whole series was being written by disparate authors. Some of the stories overlapped, some contradicted others, but the fictional world was gaining more depth and was being influenced by a diverse set of people. There's even talk of movies and TV shows in the pipeline. It's like anyone can now find an inspired by John R R Marston story they'd enjoy.'
'Even dragon detective stories?'
Camilla ran her finger over the cover of The Dragon Detective Sled And His Sexy Apprentice Faith Bloodraine In Redemption Island – Inspired by John R R Marston. 'Let's get out of here,' she said, hurriedly. 'You've got a raid to prepare for.'
© 2012 Ben Safta
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Australia License
