Ask the Author: paxlux

Interviews by Fans
Title:	Ask the Author: paxlux
Interviewer:
Interviewee:	paxlux
Date(s):	September 5, 2010
Medium:	online
Fandom(s):	Supernatural
External Links:	interview and comments are here, Archived version
Click here for related articles on Fanlore.

paxlux was interviewed for Supernatural Roundtable.

Some Excerpts

My first foray into fandom was over at Heroes where I jumped in head-first and didn't come up for air until I'd written for almost every pairing under the sun, stories full of questionable quality and content. After a while though, Heroes and I parted ways, mainly because I had found someone new, that smirking rough-and-tumble, torn-jeans cutie leaning against the jukebox, Supernatural, who told me it loved me with promises of guns, tall men in fantastic coats, endless highways, and epic amounts of codependency.

I couldn't say no, especially over the sound of all that kickass music.

I started watching Season 1 (and subsequently started writing, with only the barebones of spoilers) while everyone else was watching Season 4; I caught up just as S4 was coming back from its exotic beach vacation over winter break. So I'm a little late to the party, but ecstatic to be here because Thursday Friday I'm in love; this show feels like home -- if my home were chock-full of copious amounts of salt, things that go bump in the night, and gratuitous angst.

Funnily enough, I find sex and action both hard to write. And dialogue. To me, sex is hard to write simply because it's an odd act to describe anyway. Done wrong and it comes out all clinical or completely hysterically sloppy or the laws of physics and physicality are entirely broken. And since these aren't my characters made out of nothing but air and my brain synapses, these are someone else's fictional characters with the physical characteristics of real people, then it becomes much more difficult. And I want it to make sense. LOL Action to me is difficult only because I don't want it to become the GPS of the plot. "They did this. Dean threw a punch. The bad guy hit the ground. Sam tripped over a corpse. The poltergeist disappeared upstairs and reappeared downstairs." It has to be natural and it has to fit into everything else I've described, but if you put too much description into your actions, it becomes muddled and hard to understand, like watching a fight sequence in a movie with too many edits. It's all cut and choppy and after a while, you can't tell who's who or what's what or which way is up anymore. Action is made up of so many little movements, complicated moments and intricate physics/glances/twists, that I can see them in my head, but I worry I can't get every detail across by either boring the reader with the GPS version or bogging them in the mire after the GPS dumps them accidentally instead of delivering them to the closest Starbucks. Dialogue is tough because not only does it have to convey something about the character, but it also has to tell the reader about the person they're talking to and help move along the plot. Again, I can hear it in my head; it's the dumping it on paper and making sure it does something that's the difficult part. It has to be natural, in character, still convey personality, advance the plot but not give.