Writers strike finally ends, but we're all still scarred

I called my friends to tell them it looks as if the writers strike has come to an end. Let's have a party!

Without exception, they all thought I was really, really weird. It isn't like I'm one of the writers who will be getting more money for my work. I'm not the only viewer who has had to endure Meredith's gloom on endless reruns of "Grey's Anatomy" or allowed myself to watch an episode of "Janice Dickinson Modeling Agency" or "Rock of Love 2" with Bret Michaels.

We're all scarred. It's just that last week I found myself TiVo-ing the Colin Firth version of "Pride and Prejudice," which I already own on DVD. I then went to the PBS Masterpiece Web site and clicked on a series of links until I actually bought a Jane Austen action figure - with real money.

That has to be a bad sign. Even though little Jane comes with a writing desk with a removable quill pen, I'm taking her presence on my desk as a warning that I need to branch into something new. Something I haven't seen before. Something I haven't read before.

That's harder than it looks. Every time I go to Barnes & Noble I am one of those people caught by all things Jane. I swoop up novels of "Fitzwilliam Darcy, Gentleman" by Pamela Aidan. I indulge in smutty books like "Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife" that feature scenes virgin Jane never dreamed of. I am always on the lookout for Stephanie Barron's series that features Jane Austen herself as an amateur sleuth running around Regency England unearthing blackmailers and murderers.

Before the reruns of the writers strike, I didn't think this was much of a problem. Pastiche or fan fiction is a literary tradition. Fans of "Star Wars" have their non-Lucas generated fan fiction. Fans of "Gone With the Wind" got what they deserved this Christmas with Rhett Butler's "People." Even the characters of Shakespeare, the Bible, Sherlock Holmes and Harry Potter have lives of their own spun from the imagination of one writer or another.

Among Janeites, fiction derived from her characters is not new either. Fans of Austen in the 1920s and 1930s wrote stories based on her characters and published them in fanzines. Rudyard Kipling himself wrote a story about a group of World War I soldiers who coped with their war experiences by reading and rereading the works of Austen. "There's no one to touch Jane when you're in a tight place," asserts one character.

Especially if that tight place generates a lot of money. Lately there are so many literary spinoffs that the fun in them has worn off. Seeing "The Jane Austen Book Club" recently made me envision a meeting between movie moguls and publishing companies and agents and writers slapping the name on the books not as an homage to Jane, but as a blatant marketing ploy. Jane sells and sells and sells.

I understand it. According to Publisher's Weekly, 3,000 books are published in the United States every day. Who has time to look through all that? It's so much easier to go with the familiar and the beloved - until we have a market that is so saturated with the beloved that Bret Michaels starts to look good.

That's a problem for me. So I'm not looking for another writers' strike any time soon. Instead I think I'll be having my own little reader's strike. I'll swear off fan fiction for a while. Even my beloved Jane will have to wait while I spend a little more time hunting an original character. A neat turn of phrase. Another gifted student of the human spirit waiting to be discovered and enjoyed.

jacey87@mac.com