How Will It End? Interview with Amal Nahurriyeh

Interviews by Fans
Title:	How Will It End? Interview with Amal Nahurriyeh
Interviewer:	How Will It End?
Interviewee:	Amal Nahurriyeh
Date(s):	2008 (interviewed) March 2009 (published)
Medium:	online
Fandom(s):	X-Files
External Links:	Amal Nahurriyeh's Interviewed at invidiosa.com Amal Nahurriyeh's Interviewed at How Will It End?
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Amal Nahurriyeh was interviewed for the X-Files website How Will It End?.

It is part of a series. See how Will It End? Interview Series.

Some Excerpts

I started writing over the summer of 2008. I had a few ideas and wanted to try my hand at them. I had started a piece that I thought was going to be really interesting--had a structure, was jotting down scenes in my spare time--and then I went to see IWTB for the second time, and spent some time thinking about the Unremarkable House, which resulted in sitting down and writing White Board in about a day. I still haven't finished the piece I was working on when I got started. In fact, I haven't really written any of the first few things I've planned; nearly everything I've written has been because of a challenge, or because someone suggested something, or begged for a sequel.

I've been an LJ user for years, so I'm very familiar with the technology; when I got into fandom, I was really excited to learn that I could join the community by using a format I already understood. LJ makes feedback really easy (and it's part of an accepted community practice already); it makes publishing your work really easy, and formatting is a snap; you don't have to worry about hosting or any of that drama. At the same time, it puts you immediately in touch with a community. I literally spend most of my days that I'm working at home on LJ; I comment back and forth with friends, I laugh at whatever's on the caps files, I read fic from communities and squee about Battlestar Galactica and whatever. Because it's a social space as much as a place to post, it really draws me in, as a participant, and I feel more connected to the fannish community because of it. (For example, I'd read everything Dasha K had ever written, but I never said anything to her, because it was too weird to email someone out of the blue and say, hi, you write good. But we met on LJ, and not only have I told her how much I like her work, we've also become actually friendly. Something similar happened with Shannon K. See? LJ makes people talk to each other! MAGIC.) I love Gossamer a lot; honestly, I've spent days of my life on there. But I hate the idea of reformatting my work in plain text, and I also keep forgetting when to upload things. Ephemeral confuses me every time I try to read the posting guidelines, so I don't think I'd ever both to submit over there. At some point, I'll probably sit down and submit everything I've got to Gossamer, because I like the idea of a central archive. But I wish there were some way to submit formatted text, or to submit more simply, to make communication between those of us on LJ and the older archetecture we already have. I'd hate to lose Gossamer as an archive for future generations of Philes.