Not a problem, old boy. As I mentioned to QW, I re-worked my entry to the
No Gas! series of stories (
Road Serviced) by taking out original HHF characters & replacing them with OC's. This means that I can now use those OCs as friends for Tom in
Legion of Lawndale Heroes, but with the obvious changes that make them my own. This helps because now, I can use Fielding as a setting for Tom to hang out, where I couldn't before specifically because I didn't want to use those
HHOF characters (in that I didn't want to dilute them from the original source, and because I'd already asked to use them once before. Didn't want to be greedy
).
I can't wait to introduce 'Hambone' Chilton.
I don't think I used HHOF characters in any other stories. If you see any that I missed, please let me know and I'll make the appropriate changes. I'll also look at my fics on the archive sites to see if they needed to be taken down, reworked and re-submitted. That shouldn't be difficult for anybody to do, or at least make an honest attempt to do.
I was also thinking about something else - how I'd feel if I was trying to get something published or produced and they were in the position Roentgen's in - which is the same E.L James and Cassandra Claire were in, when they decided to stop doing fanfic and turn their materials into original works. Both of them were accused of plagarizing their own works, because they couldn't completely scrub the Internet (or more to the point, make it difficult to try and locate their original works). I'll also remind everyone of what happened to the guy who wrote the amazing work
The Salvation War, and got his dreams of getting it published as an original work smashed in because his work was spread about after he tried to pull it.
As writers, we all should try to help a fellow who's trying to make it into the big pool. God knows I owe Roentgen all the help he ever wants, because well over half the stuff I've done over the past decade (probably around three-quarters, to be truthful) has been around or inspired by
LLH, which he allowed me to take over after he decided to step away in early 2007. That's right - I've been writing in that playbox for
a decade come next September, and if he asked me to stop writing
LLH, I'd do it, thank him, and take my original characters, settings and such into some new things. Hell, I'm taking a re-worked version of my LLH 'Mini'
How To Avoid A Trap to my writer's group on Thursday, I've come up with an entirely new setting based on some of the characters from my
Daylight LLH works into a YA book with a present-day setting called
Ferals, and I'm seriously looking at how to generate a novel either out of
The Alliance and USAES (the federal metahuman academy; you should see the notes I have
) or out of
Tales of the Ringbearers (where
How To Avoid A Trap is set). (It helps that I created most of that setting, including the Rings; I have enough to start fresh, because I look at that setting in the same manner that the
Cthulu Mythos was worked on, with lots of short stories.)
In any event, Roentgen was kind enough to let me use his settings and characters for a long time - longer than anyone on the boards, I'd bet - so I'm not about to make things tougher for him by not pulling my things, reworking them, and then putting them back up. It's really not that difficult, if we try.
Enough of my flapping lips. Take my money and send me a book, Roentgen!