I must say that I agree with Couture. Slavenick's impatience with the author for not having finished the work is no excuse at all for submitting it under his/her own name, without the author's permission. ** (see below)

At some point I read that 'Thumb' was in poor health; if the author was known to have died, I might make an exception, with the proviso that the submitter state something like "The author of this fine story passed away earlier this year, having left it unfinished. Here is how I think he might have ended it, had he had the opportunity." ***

(That is a fairly common occurrence in classical music (the opera "Turandot" was completed by one Alfano after Puccini's death; Rimsky-Korsakov orchestrated a number of unfinished works by Mussorgsky etc), but much less so in literature -- no one ever finished Dickens unfinished "The Mystery of Edwin Drood" for instance -- because no one knows who he intended the murderer to be.)

Bottom line to aspiring writers -- if you have any doubt in your mind about using another author's title, characters, etc -- Don't. Some of us have spent years - I mean that literally - developing stories and characters. We do not appreciate it when someone comes along and appropriates them without permission.

On a related topic -- I am not even comfortable with the parodies that I've seen here and elsewhere -- of celebrities or comic book characters -- that are clearly done without the celebrity or creator's permission. (I'm not saying that the practice is illegal, just that I personally don't care for it).

Especially the sexual parody of celebrity minors -- I find that very distasteful. Many of us, no doubt, are parents; how many of us would like to run across a story in which our daughter (or son) was portrayed in the way we've seen some young women portrayed here (and elsewhere)?

I'm not trying to ban the practice or censor anyone -- just expressing my own personal opinion.

Comments welcomed

Boccaccio

** (That's not to say that slavenick can't 'finish' his own personal copy for his own enjoyment, of course.)


*** Even then, the appended chapters had better be up to the level of the original ones, or the submitter should be prepared for a great deal of criticism (I did not read slavenick's chapters, so cannot speak to their quality).