Ever Wonder?

[lit_gal]

Okay, I need a bit of a break from writing, so we're doing something different. A lot of writers have been doing these wonderful little "DVD extra" type commentaries. Um, yeah, I know I'm not that interesting when writing about writing, so I figured I'd do it a little different. If you have a question about any of my stories, why I included certain points or how I write, ask here. I'll give an honest answer.

Comments

[luna-61.livejournal.com]

Your Buffy universe is so intimate at times. You have a real flair for writing the character lines.
1. Did you just jump right in?
2. Do you do a lot of research on the characters?
Thank you!

[lit-gal.livejournal.com]

I started with Second Verse after reading a story called "A Bargain at Any Price" where Dracula is Xander's father, and Spike takes sire's rights. I adored the idea of the sire/childe relationship between Xander and Spike. AT the time I had only watched Buffy sporatically (I have since bought the DVD's), but I created a totally AU universe to avoid making a fool out of myself.

I took just the basics (Xander being a trouble magnet and self-sacrificing and Spike being both dangerous and weirdly motherly with Dru) and I worked at creating characters who turned to each other to fill needs they had in themselves.

Should I have admitted that I was more fandom than canon when I started??

[lit-gal.livejournal.com]

Do I research the characters: OH HELL YES! I tend to research EVERYTHING. I research the S&M stuff, I research the geography, I research the canon demons, I research the sets by studying screencaps, I research which ingredient Wicca use. And if you think I'm obsessive there, you should see me with Sentinel where I will research everything from crime scene analysis to orchid colors. My great fear is to get caught saying something insanely stupid. Hell, I even researched the fireplay I used in Janus' Shadow. I just hope if I do get something wrong, someone will stop be rather than let me run around with metaphorical toilet paper on my shoe. With Caught in the Act, I had someone who is very into BDSM check it for realism and to make sure that Ryan wouldn't have hurt Jeremy using the type of bondage he used. Yep, call me Willow because I am research girl.

[amarysso.livejournal.com]

This is a more general slash author question, but still I would like to hear your thoughts about it. I have often wondered what makes a woman want to write slash? Sorry if you find this a stupid question! *grins* Also how do you write your sex scenes between male characters? As a woman we don't always see sex the same as men do, so I'm wondering

[lit-gal.livejournal.com]

It's worse than you think. I would call my orientation about 90% lesbian. A few men catch my eye, but not that many if the truth be told. I started writing slash because of the personalities. Spike and Xander seem right to me. Spike wants to be the top dog, but he has this soft underbelly that Angelus would so often torture. Xander is the perfect sidekick, but he wants someone else to make the calls. If you read Second Verse, you can almost feel me hesitate to get it too physical with the sex. Then I started reading gay stories (http://www.duskpeterson.com/ and http://home.comcast.net/~shadow_lands/). I think part of the appeal is the fact that I really enjoy power exchange D/s games, and these stories do that without getting all tangled in gender politics. The personalities matter here, and I can throw two guys together without readers coming to the story with preconceived ideas about dominant women or het relationships.

[sasha-anu.livejournal.com]

What made you start the Guidelines storyline?

What made you think of doing a crossover of La Femme Nikita and Sentinel.

What possessed you to do your whole fanfic100 challenge around one storyline? Was it drugs? It had to be drugs because that couldn't have been easy.

[lit-gal.livejournal.com]

God... Guidelines. I think I started that after I started reading and then gave up on Susan Foster's GDP. I appreciated that she wanted to do a real angst-fest, but the series hit my "unrealistic" button. I thought people would be more likely to fear Sentinels than Guides, and fear leads to discrimination. But at the same time, the type of open sytematic segregation and discrimination seemed unlikely without really creating a world significantly different from our own. So, that sort of floated around in my brain. Then I was watching the news when they had some guy arrested for proving that he could get a knife though airport security, even after 9-11. I remember thinking that, man... the government really is more interested in trying to make us *feel* safe than trying to *make* us safe. Suddenly, those two ideas came together. In Guidelines, there is the subtle, dismissive discrimination where a Sentinel is seen as unstable for being more instinctive, but even more, the government hides the evidence they've done wrong rather than try to make things right.

[sasha-anu.livejournal.com]

Susan Foster. Is she the one who wrote that long GEN Sentinel/Guide story?

Name sounds vaguely familiar for some reason.

[lit-gal.livejournal.com]

She writes a Gen series in a world where empathic guides have been stripped of all citizenship rights and are property for sentinels. Blair is a rogue who escaped guide training, and once caught, he was essentially tortured into accepting his inferior status. Jim, hating the system, has always avoided taking a guide, but as he senses spiral out of control, he finally bonds with Blair. I love the emotional honesty between the two characters... the way they make their own rules... the real need between them. I just couldn't buy the world. As I saw someone else point out, where is the ACLU?

[sasha-anu.livejournal.com]

Okay. I think that's the same story.

I liked a couple of them but because of some of the things I didn't like about it *and* the fact that there was no hope of a J/B hook-up anywhere along the lines (and believe me I've suffered through many a story just to see how they got together, sex or no), I jumped ship without finishing it.

[lit-gal.livejournal.com]

I have no problem with her brand of Gen (snuggling, holding, groping, and bonding), but the world was just too out there.

[sasha-anu.livejournal.com]

I liked her brand of Gen too, *but* it was just too much like holding a glass of water just out of my reach when I'm really thirsty.

That and I've been ruined for most Gen by being converted over to the dark side (ie Slash).

Still not sure how that happened...but I like it here.

[lit-gal.livejournal.com]

Hehe.

Well, since I've written a few Gen pieces (including Shadows of the Past), I'll leave that with a *no comment*

[sasha-anu.livejournal.com]

You know how some people will read the fortune from their fortune cookie and end it in the words 'in bed'?

Same principle here.

No matter what you write, gen or slash with no sex, I always walk away thinking they're having sex, or going to be.

lol

[lit-gal.livejournal.com]

LOL

Well, the show certainly left a person with that feeling, so I do try to leave that option open with my gen stories.

[lit-gal.livejournal.com]

The crossover with La Femme Nikita came after reading one more "The government finds out" fic. I can't even tell you which one. It occured to me that if Jim went up against a serious covert op (like SG-1 or Section), there would be no way he could win with all the resources the government could bring to bear... not without reaching the jungle where he would have the advantage. Then I got a weird little bunny where I imagined Jim being cut on, convinced that he was about to die and that he had caused Blair's death. It damn near made me cry, the pain Jim would suffer under those circumstances. Of course, I couldn't leave it like that, so then I came up with the idea that the surgery was a psych to try and manipulate them. Of course, SG-1 would never do that, and I didn't want to invent a totally new bad guy (because I was afraid of it sounding too much like the USSP), so I picked Section to be the bad guy. Then I just had to figure out how to create the plot that led up to the flash of inspiration.

[sasha-anu.livejournal.com]

I guess you could have used Brackett but I have to say that I much preferred having Michael show up.

[lit-gal.livejournal.com]

Brackett... hmmmm. I'm saving him for the future.

*insert evil laugh*

[lit-gal.livejournal.com]

The fanfic 100 thing happened just by accident. I had just finished writing "Survival," which is the short version of Recovery Epic. Then someone posted a link and complained that we weren't as obsessed as other fans because very few Sentinel topics were taken. I went over there to get Jim/Blair (but someone else had it), so I took Blair. When I looked at the prompts, it struck me that Sunrise/Too Much/Too Little fit Survival, and that I could edit to make Sunset and Sixth Sense fit too. So, knowing that the original story would fall 1/3 of the way through, I backed up to the beginning and started writing. I have to tell you it was the most nerve wracking of all my stories because I never knew from one chapter to another where the hell I was going. I still could live without parts (like the Sanchez cycle), but other parts still hit me in my gut (the Color Crucible). I swear, I don't know where half those words came from because I just rode the wave.

[lusciousxander.livejournal.com]

Is it hard to write Xander and Spike and keeping them in character? Do you find Xander easier to write because most of your stories are written from Xander's POV or are you just writing from Xander's POV because as human beings we relate to Xander more than Spike?

[lit-gal.livejournal.com]

It's not hard to keep the guys in character (or at least my interpretation of their characters), as long as I keep the core motivations in mind. For Spike, I see that as belonging. He doesn't want to be alone, so he will adapt to keep people in his life. That's one reason why I see him as the ultimate switch in terms of power play. But even if he takes a dom position, I don't see him doing anything to threaten that ability to belong. For Xander I see this need for respect and to do the right thing. He wants people around him to need him, and it's easy to move Spike into that position.

I guess I write more from Xander's point of view because that is the "everyman" who's watching all this incredible stuff, and so it makes it easier for me to image the surprise, the horror, the fear and then put it into words. The longer I write, the more comfortable I'm getting with POV, but it's easier to make people believe my universe when I'm describing the knee-shaking terror than it is to describe something as alien as the joy of killing or the taste of blood.

[shadow-in-eden.livejournal.com]

This is an author-aimed question(s) than one for your stories, but I'm just so damn curious.

How long have you been writing from a man's POV? When you wrote your first guy character, did you feel uncomfortable or unsure?

I'm asking as a RP writer, because I have recently been press-ganged into playing several male characters, but I'm finding all but one are slowly morphing into the same person, only with different faces. I don't have this problem with my girl characters, and it confuses me. Did it ever happen to you when you first writing guys?

[lit-gal.livejournal.com]

When I started, I stuck with just writing Xander, so it really was all one person. No problem. Now that I write from more men's point of view (Xander, Jim, Blair, TricksterXander, Spike), I guess part of the way I keep them separate is keeping one core motivation clear. For Jim, it's maintaining control--defending himself; for Blair, it's making a difference in the world; for Spike it's belonging. Knowing what motivates them helps me to sort of leave them alone to react to situations without me having to plot and outline it all out ahead of time. In fact, outlining gives me writers block faster than anything else. I keep the end in mind, and let the characters react the way they would react. I'm also a little obsessive in that I have elaborate backstories and universes in my mind. Someone in some comment said that she didn't like how my Xander in Learning Curve had resorted to his 10th grade vocabulary. Well, the truth is that I have this whole backstory where Xander suffered a great trauma in Africa and when he came back to England, he truly was suicidal, which is why Buffy couldn't trust him on his own. But I never wrote that backstory, so the characterization felt "off" to the reader. So, sometimes my big backstories help, and sometimes they hurt.

So, the short answer is that my characters don't blend and I don't have any more trouble writing a man than a woman. I hope this made some sense.

[kungfunurse.livejournal.com]

Hola! Hope I'm not too late to the party. Okay, when you were taking that creative writing class, I noticed that you seemed to be suffering a lot more doubt about your writing ability and your story ideas. At that same time you were writing "Shadows" which eventually turned into a gen piece. My question is, did you intend all along to write a gen piece? Did you feel pressured/influenced by your creative writing teacher to write something of substance, ie. not slash? And do you feel, as some authors of my acquaintance do, that in order to write a serious or a "good" story that it must be gen?

[lit-gal.livejournal.com]

The writing class and some other things recently have given me major writerly bruising. You read my original story Slave King... right? The publisher said it was predictable, just another retelling of Brer Rabbit, and that she didn't "buy" the world. Ow. I got major flames when I put "Caught in the Act" up at literotic, and the two writing teachers had me pretty well convinced I couldn't write my way out of a paper bag. Okay, they weren't that bad, but they were definitely uninterested. The poetry professor liked one poem I did, and the short story teacher just seem so blah about everythihng I wrote.

However, that didn't have anything to do with my decision to go Gen. I think Brokeback Mountain has proven that homosexual/slash relationships can be very serious. While most of my stories are more on the fantasy side, I do consider Recovery Epic a serious work. I don't think that the status as either slash or gen affects the seriousness of the work but rather the realism of the emotions presented. Despite the fact that Recovery has received less attention than most of my stories, I still maintain that it is, hands down, the best piece of writing I've done.

And if you read Dean Peterson, whose link I put higher up, you see gay stories that have a lot to say about conformity, society, and being honest with yourself. Okay, and you have some flat out smut too.

[kungfunurse.livejournal.com]

You read my original story Slave King... right? The publisher said it was predictable, just another retelling of Brer Rabbit, and that she didn't "buy" the world.

Now that you've talked about "Slave King" out in public, I feel free to beg for a sequel. Your story has been on my mind lately, but I didn't want to mention it until I knew the publishing status. If you like, we can make it a last minute Moonridge deal - you set what you consider to be a fair price and write me a slashy sequel! *G* (I'm quite serious about this - I really want more of that story. I'm fascinated by the world building and character creation you've done)

Now then, on to the Publisher's comments. Firstly you should know that I've never tried to publish anything. However I've got a lot of life experience with people putting me down, and this is what I've learned. The publisher is not there to publish the good stories. S/he is there to make the company money. The two don't always go together like they should. Also, as I understand it a LOT of political bull-shit starts coming into play in the publishing world. The people they're going to publish likely have ties in the writing world already, or are family members, or have something else going for them that has nothing to do with their stories.

Secondly, even if the review on your story made sense (which to my mind, it doesn't, because your story is about a lot more than a man tricking his attacker into throwing him into the brier patch), even if it made sense, So What?? What in the world would be wrong with a retelling of Brer Rabbit? That was a masterpiece of subtle humor and crafty intellectualism in defeating a bullying antagonist. There's a reason Aesop's fables are classics. If you'd chosen to rewrite Romeo and Juliet (for the 1,000,000,000,000th time) or some other more popular classic I bet they wouldn't have thought twice about it. Even if you HAD chosen to create an homage to Brier Rabbit, there wouldn't have been anything wrong with it. Again, I think that the publisher's rejection was based on a thousand issues that had nothing to do with the quality of your work.

And about your creative writing professors. (And I know that you're a teacher of some kind and I hope you know that none of the below comments are in any way directed to you) I've dated an English master's in the past, and I must say that he really opened my eyes about the type of folks who generally chose to become English professors. He was obsessed with James Joyce, and spent our entire relationship looking for me to inspire him into writing. He had a thousand excuses why his work never went anywhere, but he never actually sat down to write! My father was a Speech Therapist so I've grown up around teachers and am very supportive of the profession. But from the people I met through Leaf, I learned that the old adage of "Those who can't, teach" is more true about the English community than about any other.

Leaf, and his contemporaries, got off on feeling superior to people around them. They spent their time trash talking their students and slavishly worshiping the few classics they respected. They were close-minded, frightened men and women who were so bound by the "rules" that they were strangling the stories inside themselves. Now if you know English teaching folks who are nothing like this, again my apologies. This is just my experience - that you should never take to heart criticism like the kind you got from your teachers. It's their job to tell you the rules, and your job to learn them and then break them as you see fit. Oddly enough, that's called "creation".

And I agree that Recovery is a wonderful story. My guess as to why you've received fewer comments on it are that 1) it was your first story in a new fandom, so people didn't know yet how wonderful you are, and 2) that Jim and Blair spend a loooong time not having nookie, which is what a lot of folks who read slash fic are looking for. *G* Trust me, it's an incredible story and something to be very proud of, even if you weren't inundated with compliments.

So finally, I'm going to be a pest and point out that you never answered the underlying question... why DID you decide to write that piece as gen?

[lit-gal.livejournal.com]

Thank you for all the kind words, and I really will try to keep them in mind. Truly. Part of me knows that rejection and flames are just part of the creative process, and then there's this other part of me that just wants to curl up in a corner, and I won't deny that it hurts.

I do know teachers who are like that, and so I won't deny that sort of attitude that the "greats" said everything there was to say and we have to follow their footsteps, or, ironically enough, "the greats" said their stuff perfectly so we can't do anything to replicate or imitate their voices. Whatever.

I do still think Slave King is a good story, so I won't be putting it on the web yet. It makes me sad when I go back and read Cindershadow's complaint that it gave her pain to not download that story because she had all my others saved. I'll miss her support and encouragement. However, I may play with it more, and if so, I'll give the group that read the original a link to any further chapters.

Okay, sorry about missing the core question there. I guess I divide all my stories into internal and external conflicts. If I'm writing about an external conflict (like with the first two episodes of Guidelines where the guys battled the USSP or Shadows of the Past where they battled Section or Unfortunately Right where Spike is the antagonist), I tend to write Gen. If I want to focus the conflict on a physical conflict, I don't want to "muddy" the waters with the emotional conflicts that inevitably come with a relationship (het or slash). This is one of the reasons why I struggle to write Guidelines chapters- this universe has developed into one where I have both external and internal conflicts (breaking my own rule), and that's just a bitch to handle. So I never meant Shadows of the Past to have slash because that would have distracted from the basic conflict of the piece and it would have taken me twice as long to get to the end. I suppose I could have just said "hey, they're in a relationship" and then had the same story, but I didn't think that was really needed.

Now on Second Verse or Beautiful Broken or Recovery Epic, the internal conflict IS the point. These stories focus on the internal stresses on the character's personalities, and since I'm doing introspection anyway, the sexual dynamic is more interesting. Heck, in Second Verse, the huge antagonist (Cassidy) get all of about five lines. Seriously! But it's not a matter of slash/no slash, it's really more "do I want to deal with a sexual relationship here". Mangled Spells (my one het, and it's still Spander), is one where the point is internal, so there's sex.