monkeys and ponies

Day 14 - Ratings – how high are you comfortable with going? Have you ever written higher? If you're comfortable with NC-17, have you ever been shocked by finding that the story you're writing is G-rated instead?

I find this question unexpectedly hilarious, since the very first piece of fanfic I wrote was explicit, mildly kinky porn, and porn consists of at least fifty percent of my total fic output. So, "how high am I comfortable with going"? How high do the ratings go?

Mind you, I didn't start writing fanfic with the intent of writing so much porn. I just wrote the characters and stories that interested me, and if those stories happened to include sex, fine. The ridiculous number of kinkmeme stories I've written is as much due to my interest in problem-solving as my interest in writing pairings I like -- for example, how could I make a pairing like Miss Evangelista/Luke Rattigan work in a way I found believable? Writing a sex scene is easy compared to that.

Because sex isn't always the reason I write a story, I have definitely found myself writing something I expected to include a lot of porn and then been surprised when the final product had virtually nothing at all. In fact, this happened in my most recent story, Conversations With the Flesh, which initially began as an excuse to write Eleven/Flesh!Eleven; but the more I focused on Cleaves, the less the Eleven pairing became important to me, to the point that now it's a couple of non-explicit lines in an otherwise entirely gen fic. If I want to go back to Eleven/Flesh!Eleven later to ... uh, flesh things out, there's nothing stopping me, but it wasn't the right choice for that story. Lord knows if someone wants more porn from me anyway, they've got plenty to choose from.

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Day 12 - Have you ever attempted an "adaptation" fic of a favorite book or movie but set in a different fandom?

Not deliberately, although The Less Than Perfect Daughter was loosely inspired by the classic Christmas Carol/It's a Wonderful Life plot of showing someone how badly their life will turn out if they don't fix something. Since I'm not generally a fan of "adaptation" fics, this is as close as I'm likely to get.

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Day 10 - Pairings – Have you ever gone outside your comfort zone and written a pairing you liked, but found you couldn't write, or a pairing you didn't like, and found you could?

I can't think of any pairings I've liked but couldn't write (yet), but I've found pairings I don't like and wrote anyway, simply because they captured my attention even if I wouldn't normally go out of my way to read or write them.

The most obvious example is my Six/Donna story, The Right Doctor, written for a kinkmeme prompt. Six is my least favorite Doctor, and I don't find Colin Baker sexy at all. (Not even 70's Porn Colin. Sorry.) But the idea of blowhard Six meeting equally blowhard Donna struck me as hilarious, so I wrote it anyway. To this day I don't fully understand the appeal of this story, but the people who like it really like it, so I'm not going to complain.

The only other pairing I've written that doesn't appeal to me is Nine/Jenny -- incest squicks the hell out of me -- but it was a very brief segment written purely as a joke in a longer, Jenny-centric kinkmeme story. It's a very wrong joke, but it's a joke nevertheless, which is the only reason I was able to write it at all.

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Day 8 - Do you write OCs? And if so, what do you do to make certain they're not Mary Sues, and if not, explain your thoughts on OCs.

I don't write OCs very often simply because OCs aren't the reason I want to write fic. They're occasionally useful, but I'd rather explore the canon characters and leave the OCs for original fiction, not fic. Similarly, I don't read OCs very often because they're not why I want to read fic, but there are authors I trust to do them well, and who I know won't be writing a self-insert with changeable eye colors who's actually the love child of Theta and Koschei raised by the Dursleys and who secretly grew wings and acquired psychic powers at age thirteen.

I don't think it's all that hard to avoid writing a Mary Sue -- don't give your character wild powers unless the story absolutely demands it; don't make them closely related to one of the main canon characters; and above all, remember your character, like virtually everyone else, is going to have flaws. What's hard is avoiding people calling your character a Mary Sue even when she isn't, or simply assuming that an OC = Mary Sue and never reading your story in the first place. And those problems seem inevitable, at least in the fanfic community.

Anyway, the OC I paid the most attention to is Sarah, the young grocery store clerk in Clean-Up on Aisle Three ... . (I have OCs in some other stories, but they're generally in and out of the narrative so quickly I don't need to do much characterization.) Sarah worked because she was a normal person with a normal job, normal problems, and a willingness to help the Doctor, but not the kind of inner strength that would allow her to travel with him. I could have written that story with a Mary Sue, but that would have been much less interesting to me. My only regret about her is that I wish I'd had an extra 250-500 words to flesh her out a tiny bit more, but alas, Big Finish's word count limitations were pretty strict.

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Day 6 - When you write, do you prefer writing male or female characters?

I'm supposed to have a preference here? Really? A preference other than "I write whatever the hell interests me about whatever the hell characters interest me"?

Admittedly, I do try to write plenty of female characters in my fic, not just because I think having female-centric stories or at least stories with strong female characters is important, but also because DW has so many fascinating women to write about -- and not just the companions. But in general, a character's gender isn't what draws me to them; it's their traits, their behaviors, the way they think and feel that make me want to explore their stories further.

The only circumstance where I do have a slight preference for writing female characters to male is in pornography, simply because I'm female, and it makes writing certain descriptions much easier. But I'm also perfectly capable of talking to male friends and doing research in the home library or online to get information I need, so the preference for females here really is pretty minor.

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Day 5 - If you have ever had a character try to push their way into a fic, whether your "muse" or not, what did you do about it?

This hasn't really happened to me, largely because I can't generally write a story at all unless I know how it's going to go; I always have at least a rough idea of which characters I'll be including and what roles they play. So the closest I've come to this is in Cross Connections, when I had about fifty percent of it written in Handy's POV before I realized that in order to be funny at all, it had to be from the Master's POV.

Sorry, not a terribly exciting answer, but hey, it's not like anyone can get onto LJ or Dreamwidth to read this in the first place.

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Day 4 - Do you have a "muse" character, that speaks to you more than others, or that tries to push their way in, even when the fic isn't about them? Who are they, and why did that character became your muse?

Thankfully, this question is not actually about authorial "muses," because if it were, this post would be a rant rather than an answer. (Sneak preview of Days 18-20: expect lengthy bitching about the phrase "plot bunnies" and its equally annoying variations.)

No, instead it's about characters as muses, and that's one I can answer easily: it's the Doctor. This should surprise no one, what with him being the main character of the show. But I do sometimes have to keep him from turning up in or becoming the focus of stories that aren't really about him, and I try to be especially mindful of this in femslash, where the relationship should be about two women, not women involved with each other because they can't have the Doctor.

As to why he's become that "muse" character: well, it's probably because he's the one I've been watching for years and years, and I've absorbed his characterization and patterns of speech better than any other person on the show. It's why I usually write from his POV as well instead of the companion, the so-called "audience identification character"; it always takes me longer to get in a companion's head than it does for me to get in the Doctor's, so I suppose you could call this laziness on my part. I'm sure I'm supposed to be finding him alien and hard to relate to sometimes, but he's so familiar to me now that doesn't happen. Whether that's good or bad is debatable, but at least it means I think I can write him reasonably well.

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Day 3 - For each of the fandoms from day two, what were your favorite characters to write?

For DW, it's the Doctor, obviously, no matter what incarnation. (This includes Handy, even if he's technically something other than an incarnation.) One exception: I've written Six, but he's never been a favorite of mine, and I have no plans to write him again.

I'm also really enjoying writing River, and Romana II and Donna are always fun, too. Basically, I'm a sucker for any companion who gives the Doctor a hard time and who'll allow me to write snarky dialogue. After all, dialogue is way easier than plot.

For the other fandoms, I can't really pick favorites, simply because I've only written one or two characters in each. As it happens, though, the characters I wrote for those fandom are among my favorites: Belle from SDoaCG, Gaius Baltar from the new BSG, Chloe from 24, and Death from the Sandman series. (I've also written Delirium, but she was damned hard to write, so it's hard to call her a favorite.)

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Day 2 - Name the fandoms you've written in, and how much you've written in that fandom, and if you still write in it.

Are we counting crossovers? Because if not, the answer is "zero other fandoms, zero other fics."

If we do count crossovers, then here's the list; I have one story for each crossover fandom. (Crossovers with works that have essentially no fandom are excluded.)

• Sandman


• BSG (new series)


• 24


• QI


• Secret Diary of a Call Girl

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