Ask the Author: balefully

Interviews by Fans
Title:	Ask the Author: balefully
Interviewer:
Interviewee:	balefully
Date(s):	March 10, 2008
Medium:	online
Fandom(s):	Supernatural
External Links:	interview is here, Archived version
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balefully was interviewed for Supernatural Roundtable.

Some Excerpts

My first fandom was Harry Potter, which started in right after the third book came out in 1999. I was a wee thing back then, and wrote hilarious Mary Sue fic and posted it on ff.net. I stayed in HP fandom as a consumer rather than a producer for many years, gained a passion for slash, and finally began to write a little bit myself in the end. There was the occasional dive into Queer As Folk fandom and other minor loves, but HP was pretty much it for me.

Until Supernatural came along, that is. I was pretty certain I'd always be devoted first and foremost to HP, and that I'd get bored of Supernatural. But after watching up through Shadow during the mid-season one hiatus, I fell in love with the Winchester boys and their love for each other. I kept waiting for the honeymoon period to end, but over two years later, it still hasn't. So here I am, totally devoted to SPN and CWRPS. I originally started watching the show (with my flatmate at the time, who is amusingly called Sam) during its first season because I'd heard that there was substantial subtext between the brothers, and I'd always been interested in incest pairings in HP. Sure enough, there was, and it was more awesome that I could ever have imagined. I didn't become truly infatuated with it until Bugs though, and in retrospect, I have no idea what took me so long.

Speaking of not knowing what took me so long! I didn't start writing in SPN until over a year after I started watching it. My first fic in the fandom was just a Jared/Jensen/Sandy PWP. Little did I know that I'd start writing my first true SPN fic shortly afterward, and that it would end up being an enormous AU crossover: The Devil Really Does Wear Prada. It was the most fun I have EVER had. :D! That story and the rest of my SPN fic so far has been ultimately Sam/Dean, as I am stupidly OTP about them. I think my best fic is Fine Wonderful Things, which was a kind of extended coda to season two. I wanted to be a little bit experimental with my style (well, experimental for ME, anyway), and I liked the end product so much that I'll probably do that sort of thing more in future.

I also write RPS, mostly Jared/Jensen (though also Sandy/Jared/Jensen). I find Jsquared a LOT easier to write than SPN, though I end up being more proud of my work in SPN. I've also been part of the cowriting process on a Jsquared fic, which was a good experience to have! My favourite RPS fic that I've written is If At First You Don't Succeed, Suck Seed, because it's a little different than your usual hooker!AU. I'm kind of an AU fiend, actually, and I have a backlog of Jared/Jensen AU fics to finish. Though I've written a big Sam/Dean AU, I generally prefer canon-compliance in my SPN fic.

There was a healthy RPS faction of Queer As Folk fandom, and I'd read some LOTRPS and other kinds, too. I never really had a problem with it, but I was never passionate enough about the actors/actresses involved in my previous fandoms to exert the effort to write my own, ahaha. ;)! Jared and Jensen, though. OH MAN. Besides being about a million times hotter than the actors from my other media fandoms, they also had such a visibly good relationship, it grabbed me right away. I will never forget reading the Paley transcript back when I first ventured into SPN fandom and SQUEALING at the things they said about each other and how comfortable they seemed together. Then there's the whole surrounding net of the usual CWRPS characters, all of whom contribute to the world of the fics and make everything so much more interesting. I love Chad and Sandy, for instance, and I love fic than includes them. QAF RPS was pretty limited to the cast of QAF, though, and I think that limited my interest in the other characters, too.

ALL OF WHICH IS TO SAY. It was easy to take the step because I just felt SO STRONGLY about Jared and Jensen and their relationship (and interactions with their friends/girlfriends/coworkers) that I couldn't NOT. I've never cared this much about ANY of my other fandoms, so it's not surprising that SPN would be the one that got me to go so crazy for the actors I HAVE to write about them having mad-hot sex with each other.

I did beta first! Definitely in this fandom, anyway, and I'm sure it must have been the case in HP, too, although I'm not entirely certain. Betaing is the best possible way to become a better writer, in my opinion. I mean, reading in general is important, of course, but thinking about what you're reading, and what works and doesn't work and how it could be better...THAT is where the real learning comes in. Betaing has taught me how to plot, how keep my narrative and exposition tight, how to write dialogue, how to show instead of tell, how to use detailed imagery without getting weighed down with purple prose. I mean, obviously I am not perfect or even passable at all those things! But I have gotten SO much better at them since I started writing, and I think I'll probably only continue to improve as I do more and more betaing. It turns into a kind of feedback loop, too, because the betaing helps me to be a better writer, and then being a better writer helps me to beta. I can understand the writers I'm reading for more easily, and I can tell what they're trying to get at even if they can't quite get there, because I do the same sorts of things when I'M trying to tell a story. It also gives me more suggestions to offer if there's a problem of some sort, like. This happened to me once with [blah], and I fixed it by doing [blah] and it worked!