Chronicle X Interview with Vehemently

Interviews by Fans
Title:	Chronicle X Interview with Vehemently
Interviewer:	uncredited
Interviewee:	Vehemently
Date(s):	September 2000
Medium:	online
Fandom(s):	X-Files
External Links:	interview online here; copy
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Chronicle X Interview with Vehemently was conducted by the Chronicle X archive.

Some Excerpts

There are two answers. The first and simplest answer is that I saw The Red and The Black, and thought its lack of follow-up squandered a great many opportunities. I had a few ideas, and started writing them down.

The more complicated answer is that I moved to a new city right after college and had a hard time getting along. Fanfic and the fandom provided the emotional continuity I needed from college to the outside world. I got heavily involved in the fandom -- rather than just reading off Gossamer -- at about that time. I started corresponding with writers. I hadn't finished an original story of my own in years -- years, man -- and I saw what others were writing and realized that I could do that. I Could Do That --and do it not in a vacuum, as had been the case heretofore, but amongst a college of writers who are all interested in writing about similar topics. And so my correspondence with authors went from writing about fic to writing fic myself.

Writing fanfic is an artistic effort for me, but it's also a social one. Always has been.

Oh, writing dark, angsty fanfic is the poor woman's form of psychotherapy. "Navel Gazing" was a pure reactive hateful sneer at the cheeriness of Christmas season, and people didn't seem to mind reading that. I certainly got a nasty charge from writing it. That's one thing feedback is good for -- I found out I'm not the only one who occasionally hates the culturally sanctioned family holidays. So. I am not the most popular writer in the world, with all that vitriol kicking around my unconscious. But writing it, in equal measure with hearing from people who read it, reassure me that even if I am a weirdo, I'm one among many.

I have discovered that the hard-boiled, hard-headed style to which I am accustomed is not the be-all and end-all of literary achievement. I realized that while there are some universally invariable elements to defining 'quality' fiction, there are several messily subjective elements as well. I found out -- in a go-there, do-that sense, rather than just the theoretical supposition -- that you don't actually have to have intimate knowledge of Algerian smuggling rings to put a character into one. And you know? I've learned that even if I'm not in the mood, I can still drag acceptable prose out of my brain if I kick myself hard enough in the behind.

I've also made a passel of friends all over the country -- the world --, some of whom I've even met in person. And some of the best bizarre conversations since 4am college bull sessions. Hilarious in-jokes. Sitting sideline to some of the biggest, most absurd catfights outside of national politics. It's just a blast.

I have trouble mediating between what I find dramatically interesting and the direction canon is trying to go. I was devoted to the understated tension of late Season 3 through the cancer arc: what I saw was a complex, multilayered, regretful, resentful, caring, thoughtful partnership. They are side by side through everything -- but they can't communicate their terrors to each other. Theirs is a close relationship, too close for them to really be honest with each other, or else they'd kill each other. They use their silences to establish safe zones of privacy.

Sexual tension is another element of the partnership, though 'romance' on the whole makes me ill. Mulder and Scully are cops, and they work cops' hours and wear guns and do paperwork. They don't exist in a universe of romance. And besides, even if they did fall into bed together -- and I've played with that in a few stories -- having sex doesn't magically make two people able to confide in each other. (Quite the opposite, a lot of the time.) So I envision them getting up, arguing over who gets the shower first, going back to work. Back to the same old unspoken tensions.

This all describes Season 3 through 5, for me. After that, the show has tended towards a playful approach that galls me. (Casefiles are gruesome and unjust, that's axiomatic. Whimsy and grue don't match.) So I don't have a lot to say about recent canon. Except that it seems like an emotionally arrested adolescent's vision of how people fall desperately in love and stare deep into each other's eyes, rather than sex and emotions as a part of daily life. You know, that's why there are lines at the dry cleaner's -- so you can think about your sex life while you're waiting and not get into car crashes thinking about it on the highway.

The plot [of the first XF fanfic I read] was this: a freak storm strands Mulder and Scully at a Pennsylvania farm, home of a clairvoyant and telekinetic multiple abductee. The space aliens are playing The Dating Game. Abductee and Mulder have sex for six chapters. The end. I have no idea what the title was; I do know I read it in college, probably early 1995. A friend emailed it to me (she's also the one who found and showed me a bestiality web site, just to notify me that such a thing existed), apparently having stumbled onto Gossamer. I wasn't terribly impressed by the story (I was embarrassed as hell, reading it in a public computer room), but the notion of fanfic intrigued me.

I love the ego-stroke of feedback; it says that other people think it's worth their time to pay attention to what I have to say. But in a lot of ways it's just an ego-stroke. I know the worth of my stories to myself, and all the compliments in the world won't convince me that there isn't a structural flaw in "Navel Gazing". (The one feedbacker who was willing to say as much became a lifelong friend and an excellent beta to later work.)

I am, however, more enthusiastic about feedbacking other authors. I don't do it as much as I'd like to -- who does? -- but I try to build relationships with authors, to be specific about what I liked, to interpret their subtexts and ask if that's what they really meant. When I've done that more than once, I start to feel comfortable pointing out errors or asking about story structure, things like that. I try to give the constructive but critical feedback I prefer most. (There are people in this world who aren't interested in that kind of feedback, but I generally figure that out in time. I've never had an author jump down my throat for what I've said in feedback. Not yet, anyway.)

On a second read, I realize that I suffer from the classic Puritanical self-flagellation complex called Complete Inability to Take A Compliment. It's not that I don't love nice feedback; it's that I feel guilty for loving it so much. Make sense out of that one, folks.

RivkaT has a knack for a disturbing plot twist I envy desperately. MustangSally has a wonderful head for reference and associational imagery: her "Garbage at the Edge of Dawn" is a killer vignette at less that 4K. RivkaT and MustangSally together are a force of nature, both in the ripping up trees and throwing them everywhere sense, and in the breathtaking sunset sense. LoneGunGuy has a broad-ranging and eclectic intelligence; his "Diaspora" and "The Tiger Complex" are deeply humane, full-bodied, exciting investigations of the peculiar. Loch Ness' "Letters of Transit" plays with the concept of fanfic even as it puts together the absolute coolest post-colonization scenario in the world.

Jordan's "A Cold Angel Eye" and Nascent's "Pillar of Salt" I regard as novels in their own right, both elegant in emotion and imagery; both quick-moving casefiles; both examinations of the partnership from different thoughtful angles. If I were to recommend fanfic to someone who scoffs at it, these are the works I would force them to read.

torch's "Ghosts" is a complicated, weighty, sexy casefile/love story, and her short works are all revelations in verbal minimalism. Ladonna King's "Solidarity" makes sense of the mytharc and scares the most unflappable of characters, building plot and characterization from the same wicked idea. If Amanda Finch doesn't finish the next story in her "Out Of..." series I shall personally kill her.

Dreamerlea strikes oblique sparks off the XF universe in "Whistles in the Dark" and "On Lake Baikal"; JiM writes powerfully of tough emotionalism (the Houseboat Variations, for example); and Meredith displays quiet, humane persistence. Dawn Pares' "Misogyny" makes me shudder, and that's just the incisive end of her range. Jesemie's Evil Twin has shocking imagery, like a series of fractures that turn out to be a whole only when you look at all of them. Plausible Deniability goes from the sublime (the sad-sack longing of "The Layover") to the ridiculous (his Thurber parody "The Hit") in an eyeblink.

Jane St Clair's prose is lush and her limited-omniscient viewpoints both fascinating and crippling; Viv Wiley in all her guises plumbs fear and defeat with a certain unblinking power; and Halrloprillalar has mastered the art of semi-parodic carnal hilarity. Sabine continues to startle with her utter shameless evil on the one hand and her affectionate, concrete prose on the other; and Rachel Howard writes like a crying jag, and evokes neatly thereby.

I have already taken up at least a page. Quickly, now: Loa (Zara Hemla)'s Mercy Universe, which I get in so many ways that only she and I may ever understand; Jane Mortimer's "The Sin Eater", about which I can say nothing; the devastating reversals of "Theater of the Absurd" by Anna Otto and Ashlea Ensro are unparalleled; Justin Glasser's numinous "Kevin"; the silent awkward encounters in Jintian's "Lights Go Out"; Allison J's "Nihilism", in which Albert Camus is elevated to demi-godhood; Kipler's "Strangers and the Strange Dead" and "Waiting" ring all the bells in shivering harmony; and the collected works of Punk Maneuverability are keepers all.