Hatstand Express Interview with Meg Lewtan

Interviews by Fans
Title:	Hatstand Interview with Meg Lewtan
Interviewer:	Metabolick
Interviewee:	Meg Lewtan
Date(s):	March 2011
Medium:	online
Fandom(s):	The Professionals
External Links:	"interview is here". Archived from the original on 2021-11-11.
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A 2011 interview with Meg Lewtan is at The Hatstand.

From the Introduction

Much of the content of this interview was previously published in a 1989 issue of The Hatstand Express.

Before I begin, I would like to advise readers that this is basically an update of an interview I did for The Hatstand Express #19. Some of the questions were in the original interview and many of my answers have not changed at all because I still believe in the philosophy of "to thine ownself, be true." So long time fans who read the original replies will find a great deal of repetition as I simply copied my previous answers and changed the tense to accommodate the passing of the years.

Some Excerpts

I'm Australian. I stumbled across Trek fandom in 1982, and having been a "Closet Trekker" since I fell in love with the series and James T. Kirk in 1966, I immediately felt at home. I discovered K/S all by myself, met and made a lot friends through fandom and was forcibly indoctrinated into B/D in 1983. Before that I wrote K/S and H/J and continued to write in those fandoms for a few more years before B/D took over... I wrote H/J [and a H/J, S/H cross over] as Meg Lewtan but the name I used for my K/S stories was Indra.

The first story I wrote was "Love is the Drug" and it was a Christmas present for Madam Ed. I've read it again and I still like it, despite it once being referred to as "the white flag of surrender" by the recipient.

I am the world's greatest fan of happy endings so I never did anything I really hated to a character. However, I did make the heroes suffer, pine, languish, sigh, yearn, etc, in my "hystericals" but that is part of the genre, or was, if one followed the style of Dame Barbara Cartland. But each of those stories had a happy ending [finally!] so I considered myself forgiven for what I made the the poor sods endure. Of course, other people disagreed then [and still might]. The endings of "Call It What You Like" and "Ritual Cleansing" caused a lot of angst and some hate mail.

Feedback was never important to me because I never intended to publish my stories. All of them were written for my personal enjoyment. That other fans and zine editors thought they were worth publishing was an ongoing mystery to me.

It was Madam Ed. who insisted the B/D stories be published and THE was begun partly for that reason. The publishing of the majority of the stories was entirely her work and I was, and still am, totally in agreement with what she did.

Because I never cared about feedback, I didn't solicit it and I didn't bother reading any. It simply wasn't important and it was never, ever part of the process. I wrote what I wanted to write, I collaborated in the editing and I listened to what Madam Ed. said. After Madam Ed. gave up THE, I learnt to touch type and printed stories. I only put them on the circuit and in zines published by friends who insisted they still wanted to read them.... I never wasted time reading or reacting to criticism or reviews. There was nothing serious about writing for me and lots of people refused to believe that I didn't take my writing seriously. I didn't, and still don't, and I retain the right to laugh at myself. As for criticism, I have always believed that what other people choose to do is their business. My view was always if you don't like someone's stories, don't bother to read them or waste your time criticising them.

And I would never presume to analyse or comment on someone else's work or their interest in something that I do for my own enjoyment. My writing is only a hobby so I don't have the right to criticise others.

I don't write on the internet. The only writing connection I have with it is through my stories being available in the Pros Lib CDs.... I don't have an online presence and I don't want one, given the horror stories of invasion of privacy and cyber bullying / persecution. I have no time for that kind of cruelty and I certainly don't want or need it directed at me. Also, I've never been into deep psychological, word by word analysis of my stories, looking for motives, character growth and spreading a message so I would be useless to, and frustrating for, editors and beta groups. As for lists and on line chat, I know what "flaming" means and I hate it. Writing and fandom was always fun for me and I don't want to change that. I'm happy as I am.

[Regarding someone else rewriting an ending or doing a sequel, unauthorized or with permission of one of my stories]: It never bothered me for the simple reason, I was already writing sequels to other peoples' work. As I said, I have two K/S stories that are sequels but I did ask the zine editors who published them if they thought the authors would mind. In both instances, I was told that those writers had no objections to my stories.

However, the foundation of the vast majority of fan writing is the series themselves. In writing fan stories, everyone who does it is writing sequels. In borrowing the characters, they are using other people's work constantly without their permission.

So given this statement, who am I to say what other people can and can't write? As I've borrowed plots and written sequels myself, I can't say what people can and can't write and refusing permission is useless, because it's physically impossible to stop them.