Fanfic gone so, so wrong

I listen to a lot of audio books. I download them from the library onto my MP3 player and listen to them while I am riding on the subway, washing dishes and most of all going to sleep. You know when you are tired and put your head down to go to sleep and then that part of the brain that holds the "To Do" lists pipes up "Hey! did you remember to edit student X's essay? That bathtub could use a scrubbing. Don't forget to write the rent cheque tomorrow... and so on. Well I have found that listening to an audio book shuts that voice up and makes my brain go to sleep. At some point I will reach over and turn the player off...or not. This is really effective for the 3 a.m. voice that whispers all sorts of nasty, worrisome things.

So, I downloaded Fifty Shades of Grey from the library last week, and I found myself in the twilight state thinking..."this writing is terrible!...really, really awful. I can't believe how bad this is. Who edited this? How on earth did this get published?" I finally had to shut it off because it was having the opposite of the desired effect.  I'm not a literature snob, I often listen to books that I couldn't get through actually reading (Patricia Cornwell I'm looking at you -although I now can't listen to them either because I no longer recognize the characters), and I listened to all the Twilight books (mostly to try and figure out what the attraction was), but this was the first one that I just deleted because the writing was so egregious that I couldn't even listen to it.

The book came to my attention because it was on the cover of Entertainment Weekly. Apparently the author started writing Twilight fanfic* and she then posted it online to a great response, so she altered the characters names, and it became even more popular. Its popularity caught the attention of the publishing industry and suddenly she has a book deal, and imagine my shock when I wandered into Indigo yesterday and there are 3 books...not 1 but 3!

I know these stories are essentially erotica and are in essence Bella and Edward do S&M, but come on. There is a long history of this type of literature and these stories are considered classics because they are well written ...not just because of the naughty bits.


*fanfic - Fans of a TV series, movie or books write their own stories using the characters.