Your legacy?

I was reading a column at Bookslut, The Spy Who Didn’t Suck, and thinking about series– specifically, ones spawned by a single creator who does the writing which then gets turned into movie versions by others, or not, and then the whole series goes down in history like the Narnia books or James Bond or Nancy Drew. Or V.C. Andrews, whose books haven’t been written by V.C. since s/he died but continue to run her name on the cover.

If you were writing a series that saw wild success, how would you feel about the notion that, on the event of your death, someone else would not only pick up where you left off, they were going to finish works in progress? It’s not precisely the same thing as fanfic, which some authors don’t mind and largely ignore while others go batshit insane lambasting ficcers with letters from attorneys. Fanfic is like looking at set characters through a kaliedescope, with hundreds of versions that may or may not be similar to the original; there’s no question really that the originals exist elsewhere. Characters would be reinvented by another person and that would be canon.

How attached to your original characters are you? Would you care if your son (like Christopher Tolkein) published all your drafts and notes? Or wrote more adventures of Mary Sue?