An Interview with Websister
| Interviews by Fans | |
|---|---|
| Title: | An Interview with Websister |
| Interviewer: | |
| Interviewee: | Websister |
| Date(s): | Spetember 1999 |
| Medium: | online |
| Fandom(s): | Xena: Warrior Princess |
| External Links: | interview is here, Archived version |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
Websister was interviewed in 1999. Among other things, she discusses how being a fan affected her pro writing.
Some Excerpts
I'm a big fan of the TV show Xena: Warrior Princess (X:WP), and I've always loved cop and detective stories. X:WP inspired me to think about writing adventure/romance, and it occurred to me that if Xena and Gabrielle were alive in the 20th Century, they'd likely be cops. So I used that as a jumping off point and started thinking of two individual characters, somewhatlike Xena and Gabrielle, but updated and changed for the 90s. It didn't take too long before I found that they weren't really all that much like Xena and Gabrielle at all. In fall 1998 I started the novel, which I called "The Cop Novel" right up until MaryD posted it on The Bard's Corner, at which point I had to call it something, so I named it GUN SHY, after a line in themiddle of the book.
Originally Dez had blond hair and a stiff-upper-lip-Scandinavian background. Jaylynn had light brown hair and hazel eyes, and she wasn't quite as short as she turned out to be in the Net version. As I wrote most of the major scenes of GUN SHY, my friends and partner read them, and they told me they loved the story and characters. I decided I wanted other people to read it and enjoy it too-if only to ascertain whether everyone I knew was humoring me or not!
I was pretty certain that since my novel was a genre piece-and lesbian at that!-nobody would publish it, and GUN SHY would languish in some drawer here at my house. I had also become aware of the Fan Fiction network, and it occurred to me that perhaps there was a place that I could get feedback from a couple hundred people. So I combed through the manuscript and changed descriptors to make Dez and Jaylynn resemble Xena and Gabrielle more physically, though I didn't want them to look exactly like them. For the net version I added a few scenes that hearkened back to X & G and just tried to make the characters consistent.
Above all, I wanted to write a story that *I* wanted to read. It seemed like there was so little out in the mainstream that appealed to me, and the situations these characters find themselves in were interesting and engrossing for my partner and me. I just hoped that others would enjoy them, too.