The Nervous Part of Writing in Someone Else's IP

I've been working on a series of short stories recently.  More correctly, I've resumed writing on a series of short stories.  I wrote the first short story and half the second in 2009 as part of NaNoWriMo that year and set it aside when I got to a point where I didn't know where the plot went next.  It was a good writing experiment, starting with the characters and a setting and seeing where things went as I wrote, but around 32,000 words I lost plot focus and never came back to it.  In the intervening time, I wrote a full sci-fi novel [which needs a revision so it is a story and not a sequence of events] and I started writing this blog, which kept the writing juices flowing.

A friend of mine [who was also a reader on my sci-fi novel] reads a lot of material online that is sold through Amazon Prime Reading.  Last month, he asked when I was going to finish my novel as it was as good if not better than what he was reading there, even without revisions.  That was going to take some time [plus the source files died in a hard drive crash, so I'd have to rebuild it from a PDF], so I showed him the first chapter of my 2009 short story.  He liked it and had to share it with his wife who was curious what had him laughing so much.  Now he's clamoring for chapter 2, so I'm working on that because a series of short stories feels less daunting than a re-write of a full novel.

The tricksey part is that the short stories are set in someone else's IP [not Shadowrun, because I know someone will wonder].  Today I used their online system to ask "Hey, I'd like to do this cool thing that is set in your IP, how can I get this to happen without receiving a Cease and Desist or stripping out the cool background?"  Now I have to wait to see if they respond and if they respond with anything more than "No."  I'm hoping they'll at least ask to see a writing sample as I think I can make a case from that.  The writing is good, but some spots need to be tightened up/built out to smooth some plot points out.  We'll see.  In the mean time, I'm nervous.

The Shadowrun game is still running.  One of the players asked to take a crack at running and put together the current run.  She's piling on a ton of complications and we're pretty sure the Johnson lied to us about a few important things, but we are still a "Go!" for the mission.  I'm not certain how I'm going to write it up as there has been tons of planning, which is boring, but this is one of the toughest nuts we've had to crack.

Later!