YOUR CRUISE DIRECTOR'S SURVEYS
"Right of Statement" (c) DRush, 2000.
YOUR CRUISE DIRECTOR'S SURVEYS
How long have you been a writer?
Since I learned to hold a pencil.
How long have you been a Trek fan?
Since birth -- I was raised by Trek fans. I'm worse than them though.
How long have you been writing fan fiction?
Since I was about 13.
How long have you been publishing or posting?
My first zine publication was in 1994.
Why do you write fan fiction? What keeps you writing?
Community. A common playground. A subversive desire to rewrite mainstream entertainment from a different perspective.
How did you get started writing fanfic?
Accidentally -- I thought I had invented K/S along with my best friend in junior high school. Imagine our shock (and relief) when we discovered other people had beaten us to it a decade earlier. I wrote some terrible fan fiction in high school, then none for years until I was dared to write a Kira/Odo story by a friend. Then when Voyager came on the air, someone posted a dare to get Janeway in bed with someone before the end of "Caretaker" -- how could I resist such a challenge?
Why do you write Star Trek fanfic in particular? Do you also write in other fandoms?
I've dabbled in other fandoms but the bulk of my writing has been Star Trek, mostly because the fan community is so large and diverse and the feedback is therefore extensive and complex. With other fandoms I've been involved in (Space: 1999 for example), the online fandom is less diverse and more rigid in the types of stories people will read or consider for "their" characters. I've written more Voyager than anything else; my interest at first stemmed from the novelty of having a woman captain, though I also enjoyed most of the other characters at the time.
What is your favorite series to watch? To write for?
To watch, it's a toss-up between Classic Trek and Deep Space Nine depending on my mood. I think DS9 is in many ways the superior series, but the idealism and sense of fun of the original series is unmatched, so I never get tired of it. Most of my writing has been for Voyager, yet I now find the show nearly unwatchable and have no desire to write about it.
What is your favorite episode?
I think the best episode Trek ever did was DS9's "Duet." The ones which made the greatest lasting impression on me in my youth were "City on the Edge of Forever," "Amok Time" and "The Enterprise Incident." But if I have to pick a favorite, an episode which made me smile for days after watching it, it was probably Voyager's "Elogium," or Voyfic's single most influential episode ever: "Resolutions."
What type of fanfic do you like to write?
Drippy, sappy romance...oh wait, you asked what I LIKE to write, not what I end up writing. I guess I prefer relationship stories set within the bounds of canon that elaborate and build on the plots and devices already present in the shows - I don't tend to concoct major science fiction stories or new characters for fan fiction. I wrote my Kai Winn stories because we never saw enough of her and I missed her.
If you were writing/publishing before the advent of the Internet, has the Net changed your audience, the reception of your work, or other aspects of fanfic writing? How has it changed?
The audience is literally hundreds of times bigger than it was when I was publishing in zines. I get much, much more feedback, and since anonymous feedback is possible, I get more negative feedback (I don't think I ever received any serious criticism while I was publishing in zines). Many, many more people are involved in fan fiction as a result of the internet -- certainly more people are circulating their work instead of only showing it to their best friends, and I suspect writers are more experimental because it's much easier to find experimental stories and to realize that there's a wide audience for such material.
In general I think slash is much more accepted now than it once was, partly because of the numbers of fans involved, partly because of academic work like Constance Penley's and Henry Jenkins' which conferred a kind of legitimacy that was important to some writers, and partly because social mores about same-sex relationships have changed.
What forms of Internet community are you involved with as a result of or in support of your writing of fic?
I was very involved in several internet writing communities -- JetC, a.s.c., some Yahoogroups and the circle of writers involved with Kate Mulgrew's fan club, KMAS. I have stayed in touch with people from all those communities, though my interest in Voyager has waned. I post on fanfiction.net and am listed in several directories, so I meet people from there too. And I've been a member of several web rings.
Could you comment on the effectiveness of these forums? What do you find the most positive or negative about each of them?
Because anyone can post anything on a.s.c., there is a great deal of spam, a lot of gratuitous negativity and some cliquishness. There can be cliquishness in the smaller online communities, but within the groups themselves it doesn't tend to be so intimidating; there's also much less flaming, and criticism tends to be couched in constructive terms.
What is your favorite fanfic?
I am a great fan of early, optimistic J/C like L.R. Bowen's "Cardassian Mask," Laura Williams' stories, Melissa's stories, Lilith Sedai's stories, Claire Gabriel's alternate second season (which are posted on my web site), the operatic romance of my erstwhile writing partner Becca O, irreverent stuff like Sr. Mary Kathryn's, and a very long list of people I know from JetC and alt.startrek.creative.
I'm also a longtime reader of K/S, some of which is divine and some of which is godawful. I think many fans did better by Kira and Odo than did the series, and Dukat fic is occasionally a guilty pleasure, though some of it I find quite disturbing. In general I enjoy slash that tends toward smarm and stories with strong women (though the two rarely go together).
Slash is seemingly a more controversial sub-genre of fanfiction than Het fiction. Could you comment on your experience as a slash writer?
Since I write a lot of erotic fiction and most of it has been heterosexual in its pairings, I have actually gotten a lot more negative comments about describing Janeway naked than anything in my slash. There have been a few homophobic comments lobbed my way, and some general heterosexist "Why would you want to write THAT?" But I've heard that from slash writers about my het fiction too. For the most part I think slash is becoming much less controversial, though there are still some people who find it not to their taste (if one is reading erotic fanfic primarily for the erotica and one is not aroused by m/m pairings, that's inevitable). Then again, in fandoms besides Star Trek -- particularly older fandoms like Mission: Impossible -- slash is still considered quite scandalous and written only for shock or humor value.
The community where I first posted on the net, alt.sex.fetish.startrek, was quite welcoming to slash writers and actively sought them out. So I found the community extremely welcoming. I had a lot more fans thank me as a primarily het writer for "Killing Time" than I had anyone condemn me for writing it.
Have you done any other type of writing?
I'm a published poet, have a couple of short stories out in ancient anthologies, and have written news features, interviews, and film, book, and television reviews for a wide variety of publications.
Do you see your experience on the Net as different (better/worse/same) as in real life?
Oh, I think that in real life, slash is looked upon as far quirkier, but in general discussions of porn on the net seem far more acceptable than in real life; I don't think it has to do with the gay content of slash so much as the sexual content overall. I don't generally get into conversations in the grocery store about whether Kirk and Spock were in love or whether Janeway would use a vibrator, though certainly I've gotten into conversations about what happened on a television show that week.
I've overheard public conversations that I would describe as "Real-People Slash" ("Do you think John Lennon and Paul McCartney ever did it?") so I don't think the impulse to slash itself is any more controversial than any other celebrity-pairing sort of impulse. I do think that people are generally more polite and more careful with what they say in person than on the net, so the experience is just different -- more open and more confrontational at the same time.
How would you describe your sexuality?
I avoid terms like "straight," "gay," "bi," etc. I find those categories serve only to isolate people and emphasize differences, which doesn't really serve any purpose. I'm married to a man, and monogamous, but on surveys where it's an option I often call myself queer because that term identifies someone who rejects the mainstream construction of sexual identity (rather than someone with any specific set of sexual practices). It's not an accurate reflection of my sexuality any more than "straight" is a real reflection of the sexual fantasies and ideologies of many people who primarily have heterosexual sex.
Is there someone who inspires your writing, be it a famous person, one of the actors or another fic writer?
Just about all the fan writers named above, plus the people published in Marshak and Culbreath's New Voyages and several of the older professional Trek novelists, have inspired my fan fiction. I have occasionally written non-genre fiction borrowing the faces of actors for the starring roles. My fantasy is to write as well as Nancy Kress or Octavia Butler, in which case I would probably remove myself entirely from the Trek universe because they touch upon a lot of the same themes in extremely skillful fashion.
What is your favorite book? Why?
I don't know whether I can choose between The Tempest and Hamlet, though I prefer to see them staged so I guess those really don't count as books despite the beauty of the language. Being a rabid poetry fan, the books I come back to over and over again are poetry - Paradise Lost, Idylls of the King, certain books of the King James Bible (for language, not necessarily spiritual enlightenment), Pattiann Rogers' poems. My favorite childhood book was A Wrinkle In Time.
Tell us a little bit about yourself.
I'm a journalist, a refugee from a literature Ph.D. program, and have published legit fiction in between bouts of fanfic and slash. My husband and I met in college. We have two sons.
Do you have any advice for other fanfic authors?
Write what you enjoy writing, when the muse strikes. Don't worry about fitting the constraints of any Pocket Books contest of anonymous fan review page or the demands of your readers. Don't get too hung up on people telling you that fan fiction can or should be a learning ground for other forms of fiction; if you want it to use it for that, fine, but there's nothing wrong with writing PWPs or ten-line episode additions or rambling alternate universe epics if that's the direction in which you feel compelled to go. The more you write, the more your writing will improve and the more ideas you'll have whether or not you're putting conscious effort into it. I've always thought fanfiction should be for fun and to create a sense of shared community; if you're not getting either of those things out of it, you're probably not really going to grow as a writer from it.