Skywalker's Lady
| Fanfiction | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Skywalker's Lady |
| Author(s): | Ellen Randolph |
| Date(s): | 1988 |
| Length: | |
| Genre(s): | |
| Fandom(s): | Star Wars |
| Relationship(s): | |
| External Links: | |
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Skywalker's Lady is a short story that was published in the Sanctuary Star Wars anthology. It is part of Ellen Randolph's Star Wars trilogy. The story appeared briefly online in 1999.
In Nov 16. 1999, a fan posted to to a professionally published writer's Usenet group:
"Hi there! I am a strict newbie who promises to slink away as soon as one of you hopefully answers my question. :)It's a bit of a meandering trail, but I'll try to get to it eventually: I am a major Star Wars fan (the original tril only, if you please!) and two of my absolute favorite fics are "A New Challenge" and "Skywalker's Lady," by Ellen Randolph. I'm aware that Ellen Randolph is actually Melanie [R.], although I've been told that she prefers to deny ever having written fanfic. I have no idea if that's true.
Now, one of those stories is readily available on the main Star Wars fanfic archive -- "Skywalker's Lady" -- while the first one, "A New Challenge," is not. Quite frankly, I have *no* idea where it can be found. I have it on my hard drive, but I downloaded it well over a year ago and don't remember where I got it from.
Recently, on the SW fanfic MB, we were discussing various aspects of fics and I plugged these two stories. Two seperate people have asked me where they could find "A New Challenge," as they very much would like to read it. I've tried to hunt for it a bit, but quite frankly I'm stumped. There's little point in reading "Skywalker's Lady" without reading "A New Challenge" first, so it's rather frustrating. (BTW -- from scanning a few Rawn pages in search of references to fanfic, I found a passage which mentions that many of her heroines tend to be green-eyed redheads. Interestingly enough, the heroine of this particular story fits that description quite nicely.)
So, after the looong introduction, it all boils down to the following two questions:
Do any of you know where the Star Wars fanfic "A New Challenge," by Ellen Randolph, can be found on the net?
Is there anything morally wrong with my e-mailing the story to the individuals who asked about it, since I haven't changed it in any way?"[1]
A few replied indicated that private fan to fan sharing would be OK. However a friend of the author chimed in by saying the author did not want the stories circulated online and raised the typical fears of interference from TPTB. Little effort was made to hide the identity of the writer and the poster even went so far as to warn that reading the fanfic could spoil some of the writers professionally published fiction.
"I have to say that Melanie is not very happy with this idea of these fanfics circling the net. I actually showed her the location of "A New Challenge" on the wed (an HTML version I had posted) and she was adamant about me taking it down. It could be a serious legal issue for her, since George Lucas is very intent on protecting his intellectual properties.There are two books that are online as far as I know.. "A New Challenge" and "Revenge of the Sith". "Revenge" is the sequel to "Challenge".
Now these are original Melanie [R.] storylines and concepts. Since she could not publish them as Star Wars fanfic, I think a lot of the plot twists in [one of her published novels] mirror that of those previous writings. Though many readers have found those parallels, Melanie assures us that [her published pro sequel] will have a completely different resolution from the original Star Wars fanfic.
So if you find these books, please note that you might be spoiling your....reading experience."[2]
This lead one reader to point out that by 1999 George Lucas was no longer objecting to Star Wars fanfic online (and in fact had never objected to PG rated fan fic):
"He's actually kept hands off fanfic on the net, although I know they did do some nasty stuff back in the 80's with zines (Mostly sexually explicit ones, I think.). But aside from a few web sites being shut down several years ago, they've been pretty lax. Nobody's making money (at least no fanfic sites) so it should be okay.Yes... There's really no describing exactly how miffed I was when I finished [her pro novel]. Maybe if the names hadn't been so similar... ah well."[3]
- So if you find these books, please note that you might be spoiling your... reading experience.