As regular visitors to my website are probably aware, The Definitive Guide is home to the largest collection of MSW-themed fan fiction to be found anywhere on the internet. At the time of this writing there are forty-seven full-length fics on the Fan Fiction page and many more on the Writer's Workshop page thanks to entries to the "In Another Voice," "FanFic 100" and "Holiday" story challenges.
Since I'm always anxious to read new stories, every now and again I go Googling for more, but every time I do I reach the same sad conclusion: there isn't much to be found out there. There are really only three sites that have collections of stories: The Definitive Guide, the Lizz Ladies' Forever Angela fan website, and FanFiction.net, which banks stories related to a mind-boggling array of media.
Once in awhile I wander over to FanFiction.net to see if anything new has been posted under the MSW banner. This past weekend, out of idle curiosity I went back a link from the MSW page to TV shows in general, just to see which other series were represented and how many entries they had relative to MSW's 15 posts (13 in English, 1 in Spanish, 1 in German). The answer to the first question - which other series are represented - was a fairly simple one: apparently, all of them. There are over 600 television series listed, most of which I've never heard of. The answer to the second question was more complicated, but also more disappointing, at least on the surface of it: most of them have more than 15 entries.
It came as no surprise to me that the scifi series had huge numbers. Star Trek: TNG, for instance, has 1501 entries, and that's just only one of the Star Trek incarnations listed. Stargate: SG-1 had an impressive 17,253, and Firefly, despite lasting only one season, had 3433. And crime/drama was well represented: CSI (the original) has 19,129, and it's two spin-offs over 3000 entries each.
Yet MSW has only 15. That's paltry, even when compared to a similar show like Diagnosis Murder (496). Granted, that's better than not having any listings at all: despite the list's immensity, there are shows missing, including MSW's relatively close cousins, Matlock and Columbo. But given how popular the series was, and how long it was on the air, doesn't it seem strange that so few people write in its universe?
Not really. There are several reasons for this, I think, not the least of which is that there is a high degree of difficulty that goes along with writing the kind of mysteries MSW presented week after week for twelve years. Coming up with a decent mystery that doesn't reveal the murderer in the first few pages is tough! There is also the lack of prominent supporting cast, which means not much opportunity for non-mystery B-plots. And MSW fans have never been a particularly extroverted group; whether this has to do with the demographics of its viewers or other reasons I'm not entirely sure.
What I do know is that it would be great to add more stories to my website. So I'll keep surfing, and keep hoping for new authors to step forward, and in the meantime, keep writing MSW fan fiction for myself.
