Everyone, at some point, has finished reading a story or watching a movie and wondered what happens to those characters next. Or what happened in the scenes we didn't get to see. Or what happened before the story started. Or what would happen if the characters had done something completely different, possibly involving leather restraints.

Welcome to the world of fan fiction.

It's a lot larger than you might think. There are literally thousands of stories available online using people and settings from every fictional universe imaginable, especially ones with multi-layered characters and rich backgrounds that just beg for more tales to be told. Harry Potter is a huge target for re-imagining, of course, and Xena and Buffy and Star Trek, but even "Picket Fences" has its group of dedicated rewriters.

Want to write about Dumbledore's student days, or Jayne and Inara's wild affair, or what would happen if Catherine lived and married Heathcliff and they went off to fight crime? Go for it, you'll find a ready audience waiting for you. Some fan fiction is incredibly good, rivaling (and occasionally bettering) the original source. With some exceptions, the original creators generally let these copyright infringements slide as long as no one does anything stupid.

Which brings us to Lori Jareo, and "Another Hope."

Some time ago Lori Jareo decided to rewrite "A New Hope" (the first in the Star Wars movie series, the fourth in chronological order) to include information added since the creation of the three prequels. She also took the opportunity to jazz things up a bit; she kills off Luke, Ben, and the droids on page 115 and the Death Star is destroyed in a remarkably undramatic manner by Biggs, Princess Leia, and her gutsy cousin Ryoo who works in the Death Star, has Anakin's light saber, and is an all-around wonderful person. So far, well within fan fiction parameters.

And it's physically painful to read, like a 20-lb technical manual dipped in bad dialogue. There are so many long, descriptive passages of tedious technological minutiae I kept expecting a warranty card for the Death Star to fall out. This is also well within the umbrella of fan fiction, where cheesy writing is more or less the base state. But that just makes it a bad book.

What made it noteworthy for the masses of delighted, horrified people following along last weekend like spectators at a scheduled train wreck was that she published it. And priced it at $20. And it showed up on Amazon, among other places. And it includes big chunks of dialogue taken verbatim from the movie. And Ms. Jareo has a degree in journalism. And she is herself a co-founder and editor of the company that published the book. And her author interview made it clear that she didn't think anything was wrong with that:

"Q: Having set Another Hope in an already existing universe, I find myself wondering if there was any concern on your part regarding copyrights?

"No, because I wrote this book for myself. This is a self-published story and is not a commercial book. Yes, it is for sale on Amazon, but only my family, friends and acquaintances know it's there."

After it was pointed out by writer Lee Goldberg and spread around by a growing network of bloggers it became very obvious that Ms. Jareo's intimate circle of friends, family, and acquaintances was about to include the entire LucasArts legal team. Reading the assorted posts this weekend was like standing amongst a crowd of people watching a swimmer cheerfully strap on raw meat before diving into the shark tank.

Bets were taken as to precisely which geological era she'd be sued back to. Reviews were posted to the Amazon page concerning her mental capacity and how long the book would remain for sale. Star Wars novel writer Karen Traviss immortalized Ms. Jareo by creating a new word in an alien language: jareor, meaning "risk your own life senselessly by p—ing off a dangerous and heavily armed adversary, e.g. Boba Fett, Lucasfilm legal team."

But the group most outraged by this, probably even more so than Lucas' legal staff, was the fan fiction community. When you know that what you love doing is, at best, tolerated by creators you respect who can make you stop at any time, you get very annoyed when someone walks to those creators and slaps them with the literary equivalent of a wet fish. All it would take is for enough authors to start yelling: "That's it, everyone out of the pool," and the online world of fan fiction would fade away.

And that's why I'm writing this, as a message to fanfic writers everywhere: Relax. Fanfic will never die.

Fanfic will always be around. It's been around since people retold stories by campfires; it's been around since Shakespeare rewrote old legends and histories into new plays; it's been around since people wrote their own Sherlock Holmes stories. At worst, it'll go underground again and you'll have to mail them to each other like you did back in the '70s when fan fiction was the only thing keeping Star Trek alive.

And eventually your favorite movie or book will fall into public domain and you can rewrite it all you want into a smash-hit Broadway musical (Gregory Maguire's "Wicked," a reworked "Wizard of Oz") or a Pulitzer-prize-winning book (Geraldine Brooks' "March," about a minor character from Louisa May Alcott's classic 'Little Women').

So far Ms. Lareo has been asked to pull her book, she has, and it may end there. But even if the lawyer ships come screaming out of Skywalker ranch and fly up her thermal exhaust port, you can still write your stories. You could even write about a clueless fanfic writer who came up behind Darth Vader and gave him a wedgie, and what happened next.

Just don't sell it.