The top part of this page includes my non-fiction essays on fandom and fanfiction, and the bottom part includes some background on my stories, if you're inclined to read that sort of thing. Since I've gone crazy on the essay writing lately, I've opened a Live Journal page for mini-reviews and essays if you're interested in reading more ravings of a madwoman.
Thoughts on Beneath You and the search for love
I was as profoundly affected by Beneath You as I was repulsed by some episodes last season. Some thoughts on agape, sacrifice, and redemption in both Spike and Buffy.
How Seeing Red had me seeing red
Essentially a screed e-mail I sent to a friend on why I hated seeing a great bad guy wonderful character turned into a lowlife rapist scum as a plot device.
A ramble on how I finally came to understand het slash
What the hell is that? you may ask. Well, I did too for a long time. Straight, or het, slash is a term I've heard people use for a while, but I never understood it. This is as good a theory as I can muster.
A really big-ass rant against archive mania
In which I hold forth on people who think it's okay to take your stuff off your site and put it on theirs without asking, and the utterly bizarre notion some fans have that a link or a rec takes up bandwidth, and they haven't got a clue what that even means.
A rant about how fanfic wussifies Skinner
Is Skinner the most manly man on television? A lot of people think so. Then why do fanfic writers keep turning him into a closet snugglebunny?
Rating fanfic in the form of a five-star Thai menu
My friend Alexandra wrote this marvelous, semi-famous little piece that looks at fanfic angst in the form of a five-stars-for hotness menu. While it was written with Pros in mind, it's easy to extrapolate this to just about any fandom, and why I wanted to include it here.
A big sloppy wet kiss to all my editors over the years for the help they've given me. I am nothing without my editors, and I firmly believe that if you're not willing to take criticism and shape your story to its best, you shouldn't be writing.
Many salaams to: Tina, Alexandra, Sandy, Ali, Keiko, Merry, Olivia, Shoshanna, Agnes, Rachael, Lezlie, Christy, Jo, and Lynn for their input at various times over the years.
And greatest gratitude to my buddy Michael for listening to me whine, kicking around story ideas, and being Encyclopedia Brown.
Normally, sequels are not my game. Especially in fanfic, they seem all too often written because people want more feedback, and I didn't want to fall into that trap. But mostly they just never appealed to me because once I'm done, I generally want to move on to the next story; this tale has been told, and there are fresh challenges awaiting. This was one of the rare times I felt like there was more to say, though I worry that in some ways, I've put a limit now on the limitless future for Buffy and Spike that was created in Heliotrope. A lot of this story came to me in a dream -- the scene under the Underground, the moving around the disused stations, Buffy at a gallery talking to Giles, and the new council offices in Charing Cross, as well as Buffy's intro about writing the book of her life. Since I rarely remember my dreams, I thought it deserved to be written down, even if it does take a little bit away from the first story.
It took quite some time for me to come to grips with Chosen. Everyone on earth seemed to be writing post-Chosen stories, but I couldn't get there, and I can't even say for sure whether I have come to grips with it yet. I am still very hung up on the idea of Spike dying believing he wasn't loved, which hurts me a lot. People often brought up the fact that Spike might have said that to spare Buffy, and to get her to leave so she could be saved. I wanted to believe it, but couldn't. One day I'd been thinking about that again, and found the story in that, hiding somewhere inside. It came together really fast, faster than almost any other story I've written. This is the Buffy and Spike I wish that we'd always had -- not because of the soul, but because of Buffy's realization that she and Spike really are of a kind, and that there's goodness in that.
Not entirely sure where this came from, other than that I have always been fascinated by the implications of that phrase "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." Some days I like thinking about what it might have been like if Spike and Buffy had got together in a different time and place, and how their forced friendship, because of their mutual enemy in Angel, might have affected their feelings for each other. This sat in my mind for a long time because I couldn't figure out how to end it and bring it back to the canon of them hating each other; when the epiphany of the ending hit me, the rest of the story just wrote itself. I'd originally wanted to call this Enemy of My Enemy, but a great story came out with that title right when I started plotting it, so I stole a line of my own from another piece, pretentious as that may make me.
As big of a sap as I suppose it makes me, I'm all about the love. It doesn't matter what I write -- tragedy, angst, misery, happy, lengthy character pieces, comedy, it all comes down to the luuuuv. Slash, gen, smut... if it doesn't have love at the center of it, whether it's requited or unrequited, I don't care. That's probably why, while I love shows like Without a Trace, they do nothing to me emotionally, because there's no possibility of love stories in them like a character drama such as Buffy has. I really enjoyed framing a story in someone else's eyes after Valorous Vampire, and Willow's sense of loss hits close to home with me. Watching how Buffy and Spike made changes in their lives seemed like a really good stepping stone to how she might also see herself and the situation in season 7.
This was mostly just my wishes for what could have happened in between Get It Done and Storyteller. I see season 7 as a search for identity on everyone's part, but especially for Spike and Buffy, and I can see Spike thinking about it too. I'm fascinated by Spike's way of looking at things, both with a soul and without, and wondered how he might react to Buffy changing the game on him. This is the fourth Spuffy story I've written where I've made some type of allusion to Romeo and Juliet. I don't know what that means, exactly, but it's interesting.
Lydia, the Watcher in Checkpoint, always amused me because she was so clearly smitten with Spike, and he so clearly knew it in the way he flirted with her. The fact that she wrote her thesis on him always intrigued me -- I wondered if CoW members ever became "specialists" in their vampires or demons, and wondered if, considering she had written a thesis, the CoW was part academic institution, part do-gooder group, part something else entirely. I loved the name valorous vampire, and thought it would be fun if that was the title on a paper about the new Spike with soul. It was hard work, though -- it needed to be a story, else no one would want to read the damn thing, so structurally I had to create an actual fictional narrative that went somewhere. I also had to develop a way to handle the citations, because normal cites wouldn't work in html, and would detract from the story. Then I had to make sure that the humor was actually working, because it needed to be so subtle that it was hard to see on the surface of Lydia's veddy English delivery. I don't know if I succeeded in any of those things, but I gave it the old college try.
One of the few things that's disappointing about season 7 for me is that Dawn and Spike's friendship has disappeared. Even as Buffy has grown closer to Spike, Dawn has stayed apart from him and has been on the "kill Spike" bandwagon just a little too eagerly. Their friendship nearly sustained the second half of season 6, when Dawn was utterly despicable and the writing was a mess -- it was the one truly beautiful thing in Seeing Red for me, their scene together, and I've always thought that James Marsters brings out things in Michelle Trachtenberg no one else does. In some ways I've always wondered just when Dawn really figured out that Spike was "totally into" Buffy, how she put all the pieces together when no one else did, and this was my way of creating that scene I'd always wished to see. It takes place about a day or so before Crush.
When As You Were first aired, I wasn't as disgusted with it as many people seemed to be. It was only after watching the aftermath of the episode on Buffy and on the other characters, especially Spike, and then watching it again, that I began to really look at it more closely and see just how... awful it really was. A lot of it has to do with huge personal issues around some of the themes, but overall, I really just disliked the utter lameness of the whole "Spike as The Doctor" thing and how degrading and thoughtless Riley was, yet we were clearly supposed to see him as still heroic and noble (the fact that he never expressed the slightest interest in Buffy's death and in her mother's death just apalled me). And I have huge humiliation squicks, and this was nothing but humiliation after humiliation. I don't mind darkness and bleakness in the relationship -- it's the so wrong it's right quality about Spike and Buffy that I'm attracted to, not simple pie in the sky romance -- but the episode hit a level of malicious cruelty that I didn't enjoy. I kept wondering if Buffy, given a better framework than the haphazard and inconsistent writing that marked the second half of S6, would ever have realized what she'd done, and if Spike would be able to understand just how much she's changed and how unrealistic his hopes were. And in the end, how deluded they both were. I also wondered if Buffy would ever really look past her vision of Riley and see just what an ass he was -- and this ended up being my wondering and contemplating.
The only kind of AUs I've ever liked were the what-if kind -- where you wonder, what if so and so hadn't done such and such? What would have happened? Since the first time I read Romeo and Juliet, and saw Zefferelli's film of it at a tender, impressionable age, I've been obsessed with ideas of what could happen in stories when someone actually made a different move that changed the path of the tale. The Gift was like that for me -- I could never watch it without wondering what could have happened if Spike really had saved Dawn. I used to think that way about Becoming, too, but the way the stories went in third season, I was never tempted to write it down. It was only when things went sour in sixth season Buffy, for me, that I thought it would be fun to revisit this different possible world. I like thinking of Spike as reluctant hero, and wondering how everyone would react to him that way. It was fun to write some of the parallels and figure out how to integrate the changes that took place in sixth season. Somehow this accidentally turned into a short novel, too. Never did figure out how that happened.
For some reason, stories in this fandom are just pouring out of me, and I can't quite figure out where from. In the midst of working on a very long piece, the image of Spike thinking of Buffy as "bitch, cunt, love of my life" while being harangued in a demon bar flitted through my head, only it didn't fit in the story at all. The thing about gardening is that you're outside for hours with only your thoughts for company, and hours of thoughts about a concept inevitably lead to a story. I'm very, very dubious about Spike with a soul and I hate the removal of his free will, the idea of him struggling to do right by Buffy because he wanted to overcome the nature she despised, but now we're stuck with it. This was to explore it from my own point of view, and see how they could move on after the horrid Seeing Red and Grave.
I hadn't been reading any fanfic in this fandom, so I didn't know at the time that thinking about toying with William is pretty much what everyone thinks about and wants to toy with. But I hated the way the season went after Smashed, and after Wrecked, I was itching to write something that made things go a little in the direction I wanted them to. To me, it was fun thinking of Buffy having to deal with the realization that Spike, for all his faults, does offer her what she wants and needs. William making an appearance felt like a good way for her to make that realization. I was working on a Spike songvid and most of the idea of this came from that, and Alex, my co-vidder, wrote me the wonderful poem because she is my friend and because she is wonderful.
This was really a wank in some ways -- I'd never, in all my years of Buffy fandom, been tempted to write anything and I felt like this was so inconsequential and pointless it wasn't worth posting, but ended up putting it up anyway because I'm a glutton for punishment. I just was so affected by everything in the musical, it made me feel like there was such a possibility for them to get together, and I wanted to see how that could take form.
There seems to be a weird pattern for me where I write a bunch of stories in a... well, bunch, and then don't have any more ideas, so move along to something else where I have ideas. I kind of burned the candle out on Mag 7 after Lucifer Match, and had nothing else to say. Plus I can't write PWPs, so I was pretty much stuck. Then someone asked me if I'd participate in a benefit zine, and it made me feel so verklemmt and Sally Fieldy that I said yes, because no one had ever asked me for anything before, and it was actually very inspiring (the story will appear in the zine in Feb., and then one year later we can put them on our web sites if we want to). We were writing to a piece of art, so in a way it forced me to come up with an idea based around something else, not, for once, come up with the idea myself. After finishing it, I kept thinking of other things about Chris and Vin, and some disparate thoughts finally came together for me that had been scattershot and piecemeal for quite some time -- the aftereffects of Wagon Train, what would happen if the town were really changing enough to drive them out, and how Chris and Vin could work together if that easy communication between them went missing.
If I'd had half a brain, I would never have written this thing. At least, I would have written some short stories with the disparate plot elements, rather than a novel with all of them together. It took way too many months of my life. The thing was, I was really fascinated by Obsession, my favorite M7 ep, and had long wished there'd been another story about the aftermath of it, one where we got to see Chris exact his revenge. The dark direction the show was taking towards the end appealed to me tremendously. So the dark plot elements started to coalesce and I realized it was a very lengthy piece, and moron that I am, I set out to write a novel with all of them. Serendipitously, fire was becoming a constant thing in my life at just the time I first began editing this, so all the terrible, sad things about fires filtered into this story during the process. I really love researching things about the Old West, and in many ways, this story is a result of that information gathering, because even though I began with a clear idea of where I wanted to go, the research for the other M7 stories provided the impetus for nearly all the smaller details and plot devices.
Over the years, I've developed a fondness for what I've come to call "winter of our lives" type stories -- where the heroes are reunited in some way after years of separation, older and a bit wiser, to have one last chance, or heal old wounds. I hardly ever see these in fanfic, fewer still that are done well, but there have been some exquisite ones on occasion. Strange things inspire me or bring on story ideas -- I was telling someone that it was cold enough to snow, and within hours of our discussion, I had this whole idea, this sense of what would happen if Chris and Vin had been separated, and now had a chance to redeem themselves and recognize that while it might be later in their lives, it's never too late.
I've never had a situation where I found myself being driven farther and farther away from my own fandom. But between the morbid train wreck that was XF and the increasing nastiness of its fans, I turned to other shows that I loved, most notably Now and Again (die, CBS, die for cancelling that show. May the network chiefs spend eternity having their eyes pecked out). Which led me to Mag7 in search of more with the delectable Eric Close, and I was a happy camper when we finally got episodes. While I have good friends in the fandom, this is without doubt the worst fanfic fandom I've ever encountered, and one day I started doodling around coming up with scenarios for them so they'd have something to read. Eventually it became a full-fledged story.
I grew up in the West, grew up watching Western movies and tv shows, and spent a lot of my life around horses -- and it appalls me how little people in this fandom seem to appreciate and understand the American West and the environment here. What I really wanted to do in this story was a) make my pals happy; b) write about the West the way I know it, with its unfathomable long distances and strength and beauty and, yes, harshness; and c) keep Vin and Chris the way I saw them on that wonderful show -- tough, smart, capable, real Western men.
This is one of those rare times I've ever written outside my fandom or pairing -- it seems like everyone in Mag 7 fandom fell for Ezra, so I certainly didn't think he needed my help. But Killa did some really wonderful things for my friend and I, and the one thing I knew I could offer was a reasonably well-written story with her preferred pairing as a thank-you. I love writing Ezra, but Buck I don't get the attraction for -- he seems very unidimensional to me, so in a lot of ways, this was a chance for me to play with two characters I see mostly in relation to others, and to find things about them that I hadn't seen before. To create characters, in a way, out of whole cloth while still having a canon base to fall back on.
Pure and simple, I missed Mulder and Skinner. Hadn't picked up pen and paper for nearly two years for anything X-Files, because everyone seemed to have moved on, and part of why I write fanfic when I should be working on my commercial fiction is that I want to have dialogs with people, I want to communicate with other fans who are into the same thing. I can't say there were any people left who wanted to read this (man, people come and go so quickly in fandom these days!), but I definitely wanted to write it, to wrap up some of the slashiest interactions on the show with those two that just got left hanging at the end of the two-parter. It was a fun challenge to see if I could still get the voices of the characters, to make Skinner sound like Skinner and Mulder like Mulder.
My best guess is that most people are going to be asking what the hell I'm smoking, after they read this. The only simple answer is: nothing. I was entirely lucid in the months I jotted down bits and bobs for this. I believe it first came to me when I was thinking of how the five main characters were linked by death -- that all of them had "died" at some point, yet no one ever really dies on the X-Files. Of course Krycek hasn't, but he's so heavily entwined in the deaths of others that he's inseperable from it. And then of course the way to link their interior musings seemed to be as a collection, hence the title. I also thought they should all have their own distinct voices, and I'd really wanted to experiment with narrative styles I haven't yet -- especially second person. By the way, Skinner's section, Meditatio, is not a typo. Meditatio refers to the way monks, before written texts became widely used, read; where every word was "masticated and digested for memorization by being uttered out loud" (Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art). So you could call this my grand, bizarre experiment.
I've always wanted to write a Mulder/Scully story. I'm a shipper at heart, as much as I'm a slash fan, too. And as I've said before, XF is the only place I've ever believed in multiple pairings, which is why I see Scully and Skinner, too. But as much as I love the tension and love between Mulder and Scully, I couldn't write anything. The show always did a good enough job of the thwarted love I seek, and I felt I had nothing to add. I'm not sure if this is something to add, but it had been on my mind for awhile. Biogenesis was a wretched episode, and there's no excuse for what they left out. I especially don't believe that Scully just hared off to Africa without seeing Mulder. So this is me, righting the wrongs I think the idiots behind the series are committing. And writing about how I see Mulder and Scully's love for one another.
People often razz me about how little fanfic I read, considering that I'm such a fan. But the truth is, little of it is written about what I want to see: adult men, behaving like adults, sometimes acting immature but still like men, stories where there's more going on than just whether or not someone's going to sleep with someone else. People who have stakes in the emotional poker game of life. I think this story came out of that need, although it's no fun, really, to write what you want to read! I've always wondered what the story was with Sharon Skinner, and I hate that they never resolved that. What if she'd died? It seemed like Skinner would have had a tough time with that. And I'd also been talking about SR 819, as well as whether Mulder and Skinner might have known each other before Tooms, with some fellow fans. All these things kind of coalesced in my head.
I'd been working on a different story that I almost called Twilight, but chose not to use the title there. Still, the word stuck in my head, and gradually began to take on more angsty, slightly darker overtones. It seemed perfect for how Skinner might feel about growing older, and what it's like to be loved by Mulder. I wrote this over a long period of time, during which I had major upheaval in my life and then broke my arm, so it feels a little mixed up. I was shooting for elegaic; in the long run, I'm not sure what others think it came out as.
Definitely a trifle. I'm not even sure where this came from, other than that I was making a songvid (if you'd like to know more about songvids, click on the Media Cannibals address in my links page) where I was using clips from The End. It got me thinking that we see Skinner talking to the firefighters, but we never see what happens after that. Or what it would be like if Skinner had more of an investment in what happens to Mulder.
Since it's pretty trifling and not much of a story, there's not much to say about this, I suppose. I think I was ruminating about death and second chances after watching Tithonus, and it reminded me how much I have always wished the show would have tackled Scully's reaction to Skinner's deal. I've concocted dozens of scenarios in my head; this is one of them. I was also thinking about what Scully was thinking about -- how much someone's feelings for us affect how we feel about them. It seems like knowing that could change their relationship.
Somewhere I read something where a character was trying to figure out what stars were for. For the life of me I can't remember where I saw that, but it stayed in my mind for a long time, and at some point, my thoughts turned to Mulder. I could see him blathering on about something like that. Eventually that morphed into a story idea, and this popped out. In spite of my thing for thwarted love, I do have a big romantic streak (it's just that, well, I also think having to kill someone you love is romantic, too), but I simply do not see Skinner being all lovey-dovey and sappy. So I had to find a way to make this romantic without making Skinner a sensitive new age guy or something.
Thanks to my Fortean-event friend Seiko for helping me develop the mud monster; and Jo for the Montana scenery. The quote at the beginning is from Linda Hogan's novel Solar Storms, a profound, moving, and exquisitely written book I cannot recommend highly enough.
This kind of came out of nowhere, just as a goof. I'd been trapped in a car with a friend once, and after we got over the initial fear, we had a great time in conversation. I love dialog, real dialog that sounds like the characters, that has snap, and that tells a story. So it was fun to experiment with it this way. And for those who want to ask -- no, this wasn't inspired by Hurricane Mitch. I actually wrote this before Mitch wreaked its havoc.
I started this story about three years ago, after watching Piper Maru and Apocrypha, and thinking, they act like they love each other! But it wasn't working, and I dropped it. Recently, a conversation with a friend made me want to resurrect it. I also wanted to get back to writing in third-person omniscient narrator; for some reason fan readers have a hard time with this venerable narrative style, and I'd let myself get steered away from it.
I've always seen Skinner and Scully as very similar types of people, and I love how they both seem to feel so much (on screen) and yet can't seem to say it. I never expected this to be so long; it started out as almost a PWP. But I found myself very emotionally drawn to their fearful love for each other, and it just kept going and going. This turned out to be an intensely personal story for me. I know the pairing makes a lot of people hostile, which makes me a little sad, but XF is one of the few shows where I've been able to see multiple pairings.
This was inspired largely by my greediness. After I finished Strange Weather, I just couldn't bear to let the characters go. I have always hated sequels, and don't like the sequelitis rampant in netfic, but I've also learned to never say never. Redux and Redux II got me to thinking a lot about how people can rebuild trust after it's been shattered. I was especially interested in how Skinner and Scully could ever overcome what happened between them.
I wanted to do something with the train bridge/Mormon Temple thing for some time, but it never fit in either Grace or Strange Weather. And I had also had an e-mail epistolary idea many moons ago. But one day, I suddenly realized that Surrender Dorothy didn't have to be in the story, it could be the story. This is the fastest thing I ever wrote and edited. It was all done within a few days, and it was a blast. A lot of folks who've never been to D.C. ask if I made it up, or if the bridge really exists. It sure does, exactly as Skinner describes it in the story. Apparently it was a regular high-school graduation prank.
This is probably my favorite story that I've ever written, even among my commercial fiction; I also consider it the best thing I've ever done. I read about the night maneuvers and thought, Mulder. And the phrase mango-blossom rain had been attaching itself to images of Skinner in my fevered brain. The rest of the story seemed to flow from that, like water. It almost wrote itself; I began it, put it away, then went back to it at what felt like the lowest point in my life, and it just poured out of me in some cathartic creative rush. Skinner's isolation and repressed qualities fascinate me, and I couldn't help wonder whether Mulder would find them fascinating too -- and find them something worth fighting against.
This was my first Mulder/Skinner story, written almost solely as a lark for Sandy because of her "I'm sick of daddy/son & SMBD stories" pleas. But the lark turned more serious, and I became hooked. This was the most graphic sex scene I had ever written up till then, and I loved writing the banter between them. Paper Hearts is my favorite episode of the X-Files to date; what little fanfic I've read around it seems to have utterly missed the point of the episode, and that had bothered me for a long time. I used to think I was terribly fond of this story; however, having to reread it in order to get it cleaned up for posting, made me realize how weak it was. What seemed fresh and new nearly three years ago is now hackneyed and overused, and I'm seeing all the same cliches and trite descriptions I see in other fanfic. Bleh! I haven't really changed anything, but my fingers were itching to!
I wanted to see what would happen if Doyle and Bodie got together, and in doing so, they nearly lost everything. A lot of this was kind of over the top, but I was having such fun I didn't care. I have always hated talking killers, so Malone's killing of Cowley was a great chance to just dispense with the time-wasting and do it. I like the bittersweet ending and the uncertainty of the future. I have my own ideas of what happened.
This was a total goof. I'd been listening to Nils Lofgren's "Valentine," and I kept thinking of my recent ex-boyfriend and how much misery he caused me over his hatred of Valentine's Day. I started thinking of Bodie being like that, and the story just flowed from there. Some people were mad at me because they thought it made Bodie look stupid. I just saw him as blinded by his prejudices.
This was another comic piece that popped into my head unexpectedly. I was watching the movie "The Ref," and I wondered what would happen if Bodie and Doyle were tied together the same way. Thinking of the insults was actually hard work, although some, like the "poisonous little dwarf" and "five-letter word for fop. B-O-D-I-E" comments were the kinds of things my friend Michael and I said to each other all the time -- very fun.
I had an idea for a death story early on when I found Pros fandom, but then I read the classic circuit story Endgame, and I realized that my idea was too similar. I shelved it, but after encouragement from friends, decided to try it. The idea only partly came out of my own experiences -- I'm not a sentimental person generally, but items belonging to a loved one can carry an enormous, unusual power to the person left behind. That's what inspired some of this; the other part was simply my adoration of thwarted love, and what could be more thwarted than death? I don't believe in an afterlife, except in love stories. Bodie and Doyle enjoying the good life, together, on a lovely fluffy cloud somewhere...
Years ago, when I was a Pros fan in the dark ages ('78-'80) and no one in the U.S. had heard of it, my friend and I concocted story lines we thought should be on the show. Sixteen years later, when I found out there were other Pros fans, and fell into slash fandom, I still had this story idea in my head. So I started to write it, and despite the dire warning of Mary Sueness and the sour looks from fans I described it to, it was finished eventually. The publisher, Alexandra, had to literally tear the manuscript out of my hands. I hadn't written or published in over seven years, and I felt so rusty you could get tetanus from me, so I panicked. But fortunately she liked it, and it jump-started my writing. Everyone wonders why I want to wish it into the cornfield. Well, it's the same reason -- I was rusty when I wrote it, and I feel it's still too purple and overdone in spots. I like it, basically, but wish some of the nuts and bolts were different.