I started writing when I was a kid. Typed out simple stories (my mom did the actual typing). I remember one where a Leprechaun built a car to go see a sick friend and one where a ghost family went on a picnic. That one I even illustrated. I was six or maybe seven?
When I got older, circa college, I started reading fanfiction. The internet was pretty dang new, and I’d never gotten into the whole bulletin board thing that was pre-internet. I don’t remember how I found the fanfiction – since it was X-Files, it was probably when I was looking for X-Files information in general. I did write one X-Files fanfic. I pulled it out recently…it’s cringy. I had it in the back of my head that I could tweak it to make the baseball player that Scully meets be fictional (yeah…I chose a real person.) Nope, that one will stay in the archives.
Then, over the years, I wrote (and got to various stages of completion) in all of the following fandoms: Star Trek Voyager, Rammstein (oh, boy, more real people), CSI (Las Vegas before there was a need to specify because there was just the one), Lord of the Rings, Lucifer (the one with Tom Ellis), iZombie, and most recently, BBC’s Musketeers.
And that’s where I stopped. I spent about a month working on a slash fic between Aramis and d’Artagnan. This was one of the only shows I’ve absolutely loved where I didn’t really have a quibble with anything that happened in the show. The only thing I might have tweaked was to have Athos kick Aramis’s butt early in Season two to get the dork to stay away from the prince. Athos tried…but then I don’t think he really knew where Aramis was spending so much of his time. Oh, Aramis. <shakes head>
Anyway…I was totally inspired to write fanfiction once I saw what wasn’t out there. Then as always happened to me when writing fanfiction, I realized I wanted to take the characters and story in a direction that didn’t fit with canon. And I was over forty (we won’t say exactly how much), and I had abandoned a novel several years before. I knew I wanted to write a novel that I could sell. Original fiction. So, I started thinking about how I could turn the beginnings of my Musketeers fanfiction into an original novel. And the Chess Series was born.
Then, I started worrying that using The Musketeers as inspiration was too close to copyright infringement. I’ve concluded it’s not. First, the original story is in the public domain, so there was no problem there. I don’t know how to spell d’Artagnan off the top of my head and always have to look it up. For my fanfic, I started writing “Dart,” and so that name stuck when I switched to original fiction. Then I needed original names for Aramis, Athos, Porthos, the queen, the king, and the “Constance” character. And so were born Anders, Alecks, Piers, Henrietta (Retta), Lucian, and Celeste (respectively).
I came up with the names from various places. I try to pick “normal” names and spell them slightly differently to make them fit more with a “fantasy” world.
Alecks was from the baby name book I keep just for the purpose of character names. Surprisingly, the baby name book included an alternate spelling of a nickname for Alexander of “Aleck.” I added the “S,” so now it’s pronounced the same as “Alex.”
Sedric (Retta’s best friend) is, of course, “Cedric” spelled with an “S” instead of a “C.” Although, after spelling it Sedric for over a year, Cedric just looks wrong to me.
Lucian was not a variation of “Louis,” but the first name of the bad guy from Season 3 of The Musketeers. Not that I liked the name in particular, but I was watching an episode at the time while flipping through my baby name book, and the name was said on the screen. Okay, Lucian, it is.
As I was going down the list of similarities between BBC’s The Musketeers and my Chess Series, I came up with the following:
Warning – mild spoilers for Queen.
| Element from Musketeers | Notes |
| They have guns, not just swords. | Well, guns were a thing in 1630, so that’s historical. |
| The look of the characters |
Okay, so in my head, Anders, Alecks, and Dart look like the actors from the show. Piers looks a little like Howard Charles (Porthos), but not as close. Retta does not look like Alexandra Dowling (Anne), and Celeste doesn’t look like Tamla Kari (Constance). Lucian doesn’t look like Matthew McNulty. He looks like Stephen Amell. However, when I give descriptions, although I use the image in my head as the basis, I don’t choose characteristics that are super-specific to the actors. For instance, Anders has a ton of scars, including one on his cheek. To the best of my knowledge, the only scar that was real on Aramis was the one Santiago Cabrera has on his forehead. Anders does not have a scar on his forehead. As for other scars, actors vs. characters are also different. Alecks doesn’t have any facial scars (Tom Burke does). Dart doesn’t have any facial scars either (Luca Pasqualino also does.) And, lots of men have curly, straight, or wavy hair. Brown eyes are the most common eye color, and there are tons of different shades. And beard style? Easy to change and did change between the episodes for the actors as well. |
| The uniforms (although the official uniform is a bit of a mashup of the season 3 uniforms) with the colors changed. | Okay, this one is the most tricky. I straight up took the idea of the single-arm pauldron made of leather and the cloak from the show. Although, on the show, everyone had a different uniform, in my series, all the uniforms are the same. The only uniform that is different is the captain’s uniform. And that one switches out a pauldron for a breastplate, and the cloak color is reversed of everyone else. |
| Captain Treville becomes the Minister of War. | The initial captain of the guard, Thomson, obviously has a different name. Although the captain in the original book was Treville. Public domain there. I don’t know if he becomes the Minister of War in the original series, but I know that being promoted from a branch of the service to a “ruling council” is historical. After all, that’s where the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the US come from. |
| Guard has an affair with the queen, and she has his son. | This is a common romance trope (forbidden couple gets together for some sexy time, and she gets pregnant). Can’t copyright an idea. Or adultery, or the fact that sex leads to babies. As for adultery with the queen being treason? Actual law in Great Britain. |
| The term “queen’s apartments/king’s apartments” | Turns out, this is historical. |
| The queen’s friend marries the Dart character. | Again, romance trope (friend of heroine ends up with friend of hero.) |
And the following is a list of things that are very different from The Musketeers.
Warning – tons of spoilers here.
1. The names of the characters are their actual names. First names, they dropped the last names.
2. The queen is personal friends with the guards to the point where they call her by her nickname.
3. The queen has a full relationship with one of the guards and eventually marries him.
4. The fantasy setting, obviously. This also includes the magic and actual goddesses.
5. Alecks is gay. (Although I don’t use this term.)
6. Anders is bi. (Don’t use this term either.)
7. The queen becomes head of her own line, not just queen regent.
8. Piers had an affair with the previous queen.
9. There were 2 previous queens, for that matter.
10. Lucian is sterile and knows it.
11. The king is deposed through a deliberate plan between the king and the queen.
Sprinkled throughout the books are lines or scenes that call back to Musketeers. For instance, when Retta remarks that she can’t gut a fish and if they don’t want it burned, someone else should cook. Definite Musketeers call back. If you’ve seen the show (and know it well), you’ll catch them. Otherwise, it’s something that makes me chuckle when I reread and shows how much of a dork I am.
That is all.
"Fanfiction to original fiction…," Copyright © August 19, 2022 by Cathy Draig.